Daily Archives: November 7, 2021

In this daily series, Newsweek explores the steps that led to the January 6 Capitol Riot.

As the numbers moved towards Joe Biden on November 6, Donald Trump went on a Twitter rampage. His tweets, and those of this closest advisors, fed the belief that the election had been stolen and that Trump was truly the winner.

During the day, Trump met with campaign officials and lawyers whom he had charged with looking into election results. Trump brought in Rudy Giuliani on a call. "They stole this thing," the former NYC mayor told Trump. "If you just put me in charge" we could fix it, Giuliani said.

Sidney Powell, a lawyer for the campaign and the former attorney for Michael Flynn, claimed on Fox Business a "likelihood that 3 percent of the total vote was changed in the pre-election, voting ballots there were collected digitally."

At 9:00 a.m., Trump tweeted: "STOP THE COUNT!" following up an hour later with "ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED."

Donald Trump Jr. urged "total war" over the election results, tweeting: "The best thing for America's future is for Donald Trump to go to total war over this election to expose all of the fraud, cheating, dead/no longer in state voters, that has been going on for far too long."

Via Twitter, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) called on Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to "investigate the accuracy and reliability of the Dominion ballot software and its impact on our general election." That tweet helped spark a social media wildfire, drawing intense interest from accounts that regularly circulated QAnon-related content.

In Detroit, Michigan, more than 200 protesters, including militia movement members, gather to demonstrate. In Youngtown, Ohio, Trump supporters targeted a local news station for a protest. More protests took place in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Kelly O'Brien posted, "DO NOT GIVE UP THE GOOD FIGHT! Elections will not be stolen in this country. Not My Country. What it took to accomplish THE MIRACLE known as THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is amazing. Fight for this. Fight for your freedom. Fight for future generations. It's up to you. DO NOT GIVE UP! We will win this. Truth always prevails." The Pennsylvania woman would later go on to lead protests on January 6 and was arrested for entering the Capitol.

The COVID-19 pandemic made no concession to the political turmoil, and Washington D.C. was a district caught in the middle. Mayor Muriel Bowser issued Mayor's Order 2020-110, which modified the requirements for visitors coming into Washington DC and District residents returning to DC from any state or country that was not considered "low-risk." The new requirements required visitors and residents to use testing, in conjunction with other strategies for stopping the spread of COVID-19, to understand their potential exposure.

Meanwhile, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who had frequently appeared at public events without a mask, had been diagnosed with COVID-19, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters on November 6. It was not immediately clear when or how he had been infected.

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'Just Put Me In Charge,' Rudy Giuliani Told Donald Trump. 'They Stole This Thing' - Newsweek

Its a gray afternoon, promising rain and with temperatures in the 50s, people have taken their jackets out of the closet.

The streets of downtown Monroe, Georgia, a town of about 14,000 residents 45 miles due east of Atlanta, are quiet for a Saturday. Its the county seat of Walton county and a monument honoring Confederate veterans stands tall outside the county courthouse. The soldier carved from granite looks across Broad Street to the towns police station and is flanked to the south by the Walton Tribunes office and a district office for representative Jody Hice.

Hice, a Republican and former pastor and talkshow host, has announced his candidacy for Georgias next secretary of state and is one of three candidates for statewide offices in next years national elections who have received Donald Trumps endorsement. Unsurprisingly, 74% of Walton countys residents voted for Trump last November.

And, although Monroe had the opportunity on 2 November to vote for Democrat Emilio Kelly as the towns first Black mayor in its 200 years of history, residents three days before election day wanted to talk about what one man called the disastrous state of affairs they see in the US. (Kelly would go on to lose.)

A year on from an election Trump lost, they believe theyre living in a country where Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, the government is paying people not to work and the state is contaminating childrens minds in public schools, while violating the rights of parents by insisting on teaching about racism that happened a long time ago. Some are pretty sure Covid was created in a lab, that natural immunity works fine and that vaccines could make you sicker.

The situation is so dire that the current administration has possibly damaged our country permanently, said Patrick Graham, owner of the Tribune and author of a recent editorial titled, Yall Biden Folks Proud Yet?

None of the Trump supporters picking up pizza or visiting candle and antique stores downtown believed the presidential vote tallies announced a year ago were accurate. They pointed to the allegations made prominent in Trumps failed lawsuits across the country and in Georgia.

With everyone screaming, Lets Go Brandon, theres no way in the world he had 81m votes, said Mark Kramer, a 68-year-old retiree who moved from nearby Lawrenceville a year ago.

A couple of blocks south, Mike, a 53-year-old, self-described good ol country boy who didnt want his last name known, had stopped at a gas station before heading home to watch the Atlanta Braves in the World Series. He believes the 2020 election was fixed.

Im not a conspiracy person but the more thought I put into it not in the state of Georgia, I dont believe it happened, he said, referring to Biden winning the popular vote.

I dont want to go so far as to say it was stolen, but ballots were trashed and a lot of things went wrong including here in Georgia, said Holland, a 54-year-old legal assistant at an Atlanta corporate law firm who was walking her dog Henry in the late afternoon drizzle.

About half the people the Guardian spoke to in Monroe had been vaccinated, a figure in line with Georgia as a whole, consistently in the bottom of national rankings for vaccination rates. Graham, the Tribune editor, expressed concern over the government forcing an experimental chemical into peoples bodies to keep them employed If we keep going in this direction, its going to erode our freedoms.

I dont care for masks or vaccines, said Jason Mealer, a 38-year-old McDonalds employee. We had Ebola here and that was deadly. Why do something about it now? I say, just live your life.

Retiree Mark Kramer said theres no ingredients you can read in Covid vaccines, and that they are poison theyll cause you more disease than anything else. No one in his family had been vaccinated, he added, pointing to a restaurant nearby where they were waiting for him. Kramer didnt want his picture taken; his son-in-law standing nearby explained their objections: You have BLM, antifa you have no idea what they might do if a photograph were to appear online.

The personal impacts of global or macroeconomic forces were also on peoples minds in downtown Monroe, without much interest in the global or macro sides of the equation. High gas prices, bottled supply chains, short staffing consensus was, they are all due to the current administration.

I went to Ihop and their schedule had changed to 7am to 4pm due to staff shortages, said Holland. People in my own town are staying at home instead of working, she said. Biden is paying people to stay home.

The notion that radical changes have taken place in how students from kindergarten through grade 12 are taught about race and racism in US history tagged as CRT or critical race theory is not absent among Trump supporters in Monroe, where most Black and white residents live in separate parts of town to this day. CRT is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. It is not taught in Georgia schools.

I dont agree with whats being taught in schools, said Holland. Parents should have a say, and teaching kids that white people are racist is the wrong thing. Its almost like they want to recreate history, she said.

Bringing in CRT is not what teaching is all about, she said. Preparing for college, for the real world, is what its about. Not about race, or anything else.

But race and racism is woven into Monroes history.

A few miles from where Holland spoke, in 1946, a mob of several dozen white people shot and lynched two Black couples, by Moores Ford Bridge, which crosses the Appalachee River.

The gruesome act of violence led a 17-year-old Martin Luther King Jr to write a letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and President Harry Truman ordered the FBI to investigate. No one was found guilty. In an ongoing lawsuit, the 11th circuit US court of appeals ruled in March of last year that grand jury records from the case must remain sealed, keeping all of us from potentially learning what happened that day, and who was responsible.

The Moores Ford lynching persists not just in the courts, and the memories of many; only two months ago, Monroes current mayor, John Howard, presented a statement to the towns city council publicly acknowledging it for the first time. One Black city council member refused to sign the statement, calling it a political stunt aimed at currying favor among the towns Black voters in Howards bid for re-election.

Should schools in Monroe teach children about the lynching at Moores Ford? If so, how? That sort of history though it was ghastly should be taught, said Jeff Blackstone, a 58-year-old who owns a company that installs hotel TV systems. But we have all learned from our mistakes. Although there are still some outliers who go back to the horrid ways of previous years, that should not be tolerated. And I dont agree with what the government is trying to do with our lives like CRT trying to teach us societal views.

I think we need to move beyond Black, white and brown, Blackstone said. I hire and fire people and dont judge by their color, but what they can do to help me.

James Trae Welborn III, associate professor of history at Georgia College & State University, says racism and its expression has changed over time.

Racism now takes seemingly benign forms talk of personal liberties, colorblindness The idea is that racism is people running around in white hoods, burning white crosses. So you say, I wouldnt do that, and anything that falls short of that isnt racism.

Welborn also pointed to the idea that racism happened a long time ago, the shared urgency among Trump supporters to deny and marginalize the issue of race and racism, in favor of the beacon of liberty and freedom narrative in American history. A civil war historian, Welborn sees parallels between the views and rhetoric of Trump supporters and those of the Confederacy. Theres even similar language the threats of violence: Come to the Capitol and give em what for, he said.

Meanwhile, in the present, many Trump supporters in Georgia are following Garland Favorito and his organization, VoterGA, which has two lawsuits in state courts tied to last years elections. Favoritos organization is 15 years old and works on election integrity a term which was then used in public discourse in reference to issues such as how to employ audit methods that could truly verify elections results, and now is mostly used to underline any supposed evidence that Trump won. Until last year, VoterGA was primarily supported by progressive Democrats. Now, Favorito receives social media followers, and donations, from thousands of Trump supporters, in Georgia and elsewhere.

As for last years election, he said, the truth is, nobody knows who won. The secretary of state [in Georgia] can tell you he knows, but he has no idea. This is because, he said, allegations of ballot stuffing have not been satisfactorily investigated by the state and a forensic analysis of election system servers in the states 159 counties has not been performed. The problem is that nobody wants to get to the truth.

Asked about the process followed in Arizona, where a group called Cyber Ninjas took months to review election materials from the states largest county and still concluded that Joe Biden won Favorito said that the groups work was never really completed, because the state didnt supply them with everything they sought to examine. This means we will never know who won in Arizona, he said.

Asked if it concerns him that many of the Trump supporters supporting his work in Georgia are the same people who hold positions such as the vaccine being poison, he said, No, it doesnt concern me to speak truth Trump supporters have just as much a right to say Trump won as the secretary of state says Biden won, because we dont know the truth.

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In Trumpland parallel reality, election was stolen and racism was long ago - The Guardian

Former President Donald Trump baselessly claimed that actor Alec Baldwin could have purposefully shot crew members Brandon Bell/Reuters (L), Mark Sagliocco/Getty Images (R)

Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun on a movie set, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchin and injuring another.

Trump said that he thought Baldwin was a "troubled guy" and a "nutjob."

Trump said; "Who would take a gun and point it at a cinematographer and pull the trigger and she's dead?"

Former President Donald Trump baselessly claimed that Alec Baldwin might have purposefully shot crew members on the set of the movie "Rust."

The firing of a prop gun by Baldwin on set led to the death of the director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, and injured the director, Joel Souza.

"He's a troubled guy. There's something wrong with him. I've watched him for years. He gets into fistfights with reporters," Donald Trump told conservative radio host Chris Stigall in a podcast on Thursday.

"He's a cuckoo-bird, he's a nutjob. And usually, when there's somebody like that, you know, in my opinion, he had something to do with it."

Alec Baldwin has described the event as a "tragic accident." In the police affidavit, Baldwin said that he was told that the gun was not loaded.

Trump added that he thought Baldwin had behaved irresponsibly by pointing the gun at a crewmember, whether it was loaded or not.

"But if nothing else, how do you take a gun and just, whether it's loaded or not loaded, how do you take a gun, point it at somebody that's not even in the movie and just point it at this person and pull the trigger and now she's dead?" he said.

Trump said on the podcast that if he had been handed a gun, he would first discharge it into the air to make sure it wasn't loaded.

He added that Hutchins was a crewmember and not an actress, which he said made it odd that the gun was aimed at her.

"It's weird," Trump said. "Who would take a gun and point it at a cinematographer and pull the trigger, and she's dead?"

Investigators have been looking into how live ammunition ended up in the gun, and Trump suggested that Baldwin might have loaded the gun that killed Hutchins.

Story continues

"As bad as it may have been kept, meaning you know the people that take care of the equipment and the guns and everything else But even if it was loaded, and that's a weird thing- maybe he loaded it," he said.

Alec Baldwin portrayed President Donald Trump on "SNL." NBC / Getty Images

The former president went on to say that he thought Baldwin's impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live over the years was "terrible."

"There's something wrong with him. He's a sick guy. I mean, I've seen him for years because he did. I thought a poor job of imitating me," Trump said.

Donald Trump Jr. has also mocked the actor over the incident, selling shirts that say "guns don't kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people."

The investigation into Hutchins' death is ongoing. No one has been charged.

Read the original article on Insider

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Donald Trump baselessly suggests 'nutjob' Alec Baldwin may have had 'something to do with' the shooting of 'Rust' crew members - Yahoo News

Although the United States was born of a revolution, one common view maintains that the Constitution tamed our rebellious impulse and launched a distinctly nonrevolutionary political experiment. But throughout American history, an important strand of conservatism has repeatedly championed rebellionsor what are better understood as counterrevolutions.

They emerge like clockwork: Each time political minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo.

The term counterrevolution is significant not only because conservatives have regularly employed it, but also because it highlights their own agency, something they often seek to conceal. In order to portray their actions as defensive rather than aggressive, conservatives tend to depict themselves as acted upon and besieged. As William F. Buckley wrote in the National Reviews mission statement in 1955, conservatism stands athwart history, yelling Stop. Here the agent is history; conservatives are merely making a reply. But such rhetorical gestures discount what any close look at these movements makes clear: Conservatives have done much more than yell. They have fought against equality vigorously, often violently.

David Frum: The conservative cult of victimhood

Three historical momentsthe revolt against postCivil War Reconstruction, the mid-century fight against civil rights, and the modern Tea Party and Trump movementsstand out as perfect examples of the counterrevolutionary dynamic. They share certain broad themes: a hostility to racial equality, the invocation of apocalyptic rhetoricthat America is under siege, as President Donald Trump told the crowd on January 6 prior to the Capitol insurrectionand a deep distrust of democracy.

During Reconstruction, conservatives denounced its proponents as dangerous revolutionaries, often comparing them to notorious figures from the French Revolution. We do not know of two men who have come up prominently before the world in revolutionary times more alike than Marat and Thaddeus Stevens, The New York Herald said in 1866. One Nashville newspaper contended in 1868 that the Radical Republicans in Congress aim to abolish the constitution, to destroy public liberty, and to concentrate the power of the country in the hands of usurpers embodying the very essence of despotism that shocked the world and subjected France to the reign of terror under Jacobin rule.

The reign of terror that the Nashville newspaper decried was in fact the emergence of multiracial democracy. Many conservatives were entirely frank about this, such as the one featured in Mississippis The Meriden Daily Republican who wrote, The two races cannot and will not rule jointly and coequally One or the other must become subordinate. This is the history of all such experiments everywhere.

Outlawing racial discrimination, in this view, was grounds for regime change, even violence. Take, for example, an editorial statement of Missouris aptly named The Lexington Weekly Caucasian from 1872. It began with two demands, State Sovereignty! White Supremacy! and threatened ANOTHER REBELLION if they were not acceded to. Revolution must be met by CounterRevolutionForce by ForceViolence by Violenceand Usurpation should be Overthrown, if needs be, by the Bayonet! Calling white supremacy a counterrevolution could justify nearly anything, bloodshed included.

The counterrevolutionary politics of this era proved to be extremely effective, as much of the racial progress achieved during Reconstruction was wiped out or even reversed in subsequent decades. By the mid-20th century, the conservative backlash had reinforced white supremacy through Jim Crow laws and intense voter suppression. W. E. B. Du Bois famously called this the counter-revolution of property. Black citizens in Indianola, Mississippi, for example, constituted a majority of the local countys population but only 0.03 percent of its registered voters. Du Bois reflected on this state of affairs, writing, The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.

When the civil-rights movement mobilized against this oppression and inequality, conservatives began to fear that what some were calling the Second Reconstruction might be as dangerous for them as the first. Barry Goldwater, in many ways the prototypical modern conservative, was among them. In a letter he wrote while running for president in 1963, Goldwater called the civil-rights movement a revolution and said that he was very apprehensive about how far it will go.

So conservatives responded with yet another counterrevolution, one intended to maintain carefully constructed racial, economic, and social hierarchies. As the Black historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote in Ebony magazine in 1966, the counter-revolutionary campaign of terror against Reconstruction was merely the first white backlash; the United States was living through the second.

The guiding principles of this backlash had been laid out 10 years earlier in the Southern Manifesto of 1956. Signed by more than 100 congressmen, the manifesto responded to the Brown v. Board decision mandating school desegregation by issuing a bold defense of the Jim Crow status quo and pledging to fight the revolutionary changes in our public school systems. As schools became battlegrounds, conservatives, especially those in the South, dug in their heels.

From the October 2020 issue: The new Reconstruction

For many right-wingers, the historical memory of Reconstruction-era radicalism combined with Cold War anxieties. To them, civil-rights activism was the work not only of revolutionaries but of communists. As the Oklahoma minister Billy James Hargis warned in one newspaper column, The communists have been urging their followers to bring pressure upon the federal government, to force Reconstruction days upon the Southern states again. In a 1965 essay titled Two Revolutions at Once, Robert Welch, the leader of the far-right John Birch Society, derided the push for civil rights as a Negro Revolutionary Movement driven by communist saboteurs rather than oppressed Black citizens.

As was the case during Reconstruction, this counterrevolutionary rhetoric enabled violenceviolence against leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., violence against activists like the Freedom Riders, violence on college campuses, violence at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, violence at the hands of the police. But conservatives frequently accused activists of inciting it. Following the Selma march, a piece in American Opinion, the Birch Societys flagship magazine, claimed, The violence in Selma doesnt have to do with voting rights at all it has to do with Communist Revolution, with Communists intentionally setting the stage for race war. A menacing enemy within justified a violent illiberalism.

As politicians debated the proposed Civil Rights Act, the fury of white southerners increased. If dictatorial planners insist upon ignoring and trampling majority rights in efforts to favor minority groups, they may in time provoke a White Revolution, Tom Ethridge wrote in The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. This so-called white revolution was, in fact, a counterrevolution designed to shore up the racial caste system.

When that caste system showed signs of decay some four decades later, a similar backlash came about. Shortly after the election of Americas first Black president, the Tea Party exploded into the public consciousness. Its members adopted the iconography and language of the American Revolution, styling themselves patriots and attending rallies clad in knee breeches and tricornered hats. Despite this getup, the Tea Party was not a revolution but a counterrevolutiona defense of privilege and hierarchy rather than a call for egalitarianism.

Racial resentment played a crucial role in Tea Party ideology. Birther conspiracies flourished within the movement, whose adherents viewed President Barack Obama more as a fifth-column threat than a legitimate political opponent. Tea Partiers claimed that some people were getting too many handouts or werent working hard enough to earn their keep; typically those people were illegal immigrants or other minority groups that were referred to using coded language. As recounted by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson in The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, one Virginia Tea Partier asserted that a plantation mentality prevented some people from getting off the dole, a racist argument that reflected the counterrevolutions Reconstruction-era origins. The solution, according to the movement, was to dramatically reduce the governmentat least the parts of it that benefited the wrong people. This had the added advantage of divesting power from leaders who couldnt be trusted. As one Tea Partier put it to Skocpol and Williamson, The people I was looking for back when I was a cop are now running the government.

Despite the fact that the Tea Party received heavy funding from right-wing plutocrats, the movement had a populist panache. The counterrevolution had gone mainstream, and all of the aggrievement, mistrust, and racial resentments that had festered within conservatism for generations laid the foundation for the rise of Donald Trump.

Although Trump is often described as unprecedented or norm-breaking, his rhetoric has deep roots in the conservative movements counterrevolutionary tradition. He warned us that America was beset by enemies, an often-racialized group of others who were amassing power too quickly and using it to threaten the American way of life. Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim imposing radical views on the United States. Immigrants were invading and taking our jobs. The media were the enemy of the people, and Democrats were treasonous and un-American. Washington, the home of illegitimate majorities, was a swamp that needed draining.

Beyond adopting the rhetoric of counterrevolution, Trump also embraced its most dangerous element: a call for political violence. On January 6, he stood before thousands of supporters and proclaimed, We fight like hell. And if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country anymore. Just a few beats later, Trump declared, Were going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue And were going to the Capitol, and were going to try and give. He stopped short of issuing a direct instruction, but his assembled supporters understood the assignment, storming the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the election. That the Capitol siege failedas did subsequent efforts to overturn the election through courts and auditsdoes not diminish the dangers presented by the counterrevolutionary impulse in todays conservatism.

Adam Serwer: The Capitol riot was an attack on multiracial democracy

It was not long before the GOP followed Trumps lead. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, promoted the white supremacist great replacement theory on Laura Ingrahams show. The revolution has begun, Patrick said, arguing that, by allowing more migrants into the U.S., the Democrats were trying to take over our country without firing a shot. And now, at Trumps behest, the state of Texas is auditing the 2020 votes in the states four largest counties, all of which are Democratic strongholds. The audit ploy may have failed in Arizona, but the counterrevolution continues.

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, David Frum, a Never Trump conservative, wrote in The Atlantic. They will reject democracy. But Frums warning about the dead end of Trumpism ignored the illiberalism and minoritarian inclinations baked into the conservative pie. The reality is that the counterrevolutionary mindset is a feature, not a glitch, of modern conservatism, one that offers authoritarian solutions to democracys right-wing discontents.

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The Conservative Backlash to Progress - The Atlantic