"Why are we letting the media..."
I wish we controlled the media, but we clearly don't - not even the non-right-wing part.
What would it take to have consistently truth-telling media ascend in popularity over the likes of the NYT, CNN, etc? I guess it would take a public that (1) wants truth and (2) is capable of discerning truth from falsehood. So, basically, flying pigs and unicorns.
As for the leniency of the plea deals, is this sufficiently explained by limited DOJ resources, large numbers of criminals who need to be prosecuted, and large quantities of evidence that has to be processed, while respecting defendants' right to a speedy trial? I have no inside knowledge, but I can imagine this being a big logistical challenge - one that the DOJ doesn't want to publicly admit for fear of inviting defense attorneys to further exploit the situation?
Throw the fucking book at them. Also, Garland is awful.
I think there's an overarching feeling among 'moderate' 'sensible' Democrats that it's politically fatal to be mean to rank and file Republicans, no matter how crazy they are. Sure, there are genuinely bad people lying to them, but the guy out there trying to kill a Capitol police officer with an axe handle is a poor deluded soul with 'very real concerns' and it would be unjust to test him harshly, no matter how dangerous he is when you get a mob of these poor deluded souls together.
To be clear, I think this is absolutely wrong, but I think it's driving the charging decisions.
I am actually not that exercised about the charging so far. We'll see where it goes. If you want more details on it follow emptywheel on Twitter.
What I find most hilarious/enraging is the new Republican concern for jail conditions.
6.2 also, but I don't want to say it aloud.
Somewhere in there I think there should be more political hay to be made over Trump basically throwing many of them under the bus (for now*). Some of the crazies have noted it, and it does come up in cases.
The fact that it turned out he was having a bad bone spur day and didn't walk with them is just soo stark..... I know JPS welcome to the world, where the whiniest liar in fucking history is revered by the salt of the earth.
And even if this were to become more of a thing it would only really impact Trump, not the overall fascist fever dream**
**Although the fact that there has been more RW grifter/establishment support for funds to support the poor subpoenaed folks like Bannon than the rioters themselves should be a thing.
*The sainted Ashlety Babbit excepted***.
***And have no doubt if Trump wins again any jailed rioter who so chooses will be accorded a special rank in whatever paramilitary organization that emerges. And there will be an Ashley Babbit Memorial Hallway in the Capitol.
Also, it's like heebie doesn't even care about the cost of milk for a family of eleven. Prioirities!
If the milk is free, nobody will buy cows.
These guys are provably ready, willing and able to storm government buildings and do their best to kill people inside. DOJ prosecutors work in government buildings.
What was the question again?
10 was truly one of the more grotesque examples of clueless MSM stupid salt-of-the-earth pandering in some time (like maybe the last week or so ...).
Other than getting the price of milk wrong at both the start and the end (but with a massively inflated delta) and ignoring the much greater help the family got from the Recovery act it painted a very fair picture of disingenuous RW rhetoric. So what's the beef libs? Huh. And the way they went to the mat to defend it was quite eye-opening although totally on brand.
I confess I hate children and milk and families and puppies and having someone on slave wages grovel for financial favors from me for bringing me my fucking hamburger so DO NOT LISTEN TO ME.
limited DOJ resources, large numbers of criminals who need to be prosecuted
They processed 17,000 drug cases in 2020. If the people working on 1/6 don't have enough resources to prosecute them, that's an institutional decision too.
The fact that it turned out he was having a bad bone spur day and didn't walk with them
Sorry, what would be the basis for thinking he ever planned to walk with them? Or that he would have stayed through the incursion even if he had?
For some reason 12 reminded me of the guy who flew the plane into the IRS building in Austin. The whole thing was taken as sort of a joke; who wouldn't want to kill the IRS? As if something like Oklahoma City hadn't happened.
(And did not some commenter's or FPP's work there at the time?)
I just checked the timeline. The incursion started nineteen minutes before Trump ended his speech. 10-15,000 people were reported marching to the Capitol around 12:30pm, midway through it. They didn't wait for him.
14.last: Yes, of course all of that; I was trying--badly I guess--to make light of all of that. Or to highlight his ongoing bad faith and lies. His physical cowardice.
Or more that I liked "having a bad bone spur day" when i thought it up a few months ago and try to use it whenever I can.
It's hard to blame them. I can't listen to Trump speak for more than a minute.
And, if they waited for him, it would be too late. As it was, they'd already started to lose in Congress before they disrupted the thing: they needed to shut everything down the minute Pence made it clear that he wasn't going to interfere with the counting. They also needed violent confrontations with antifa and BLM out in front of the capitol. Amazingly they just assumed these would happen, rather than making sufficient effort to create them.
30: Yes. Per the earlier thread, I thought the real vulnerability was Senators and Congresscritters getting into the building in the first place.
Yes, it was a mistake ever letting senators, particularly, into Congress.
Tells you everything you need to know about Trump that his coup failed, in part, because he was more focused on the adulation for his Catskills stand-up routine then in actually pulling off a coup.
22 is correct, although I've always liked the access to senators that living in a small state affords. At this point, the only realistic solution is annexing Canada (as 11 states) and that's pretty damn unrealistic.
Mexico has better beaches anyhow.
I know I'm not supposed to, but I do kinda wish they'd caught and killed a few of the real old senators. Hell, they can have mine. There would be less ambiguity now.
The white lady who got sent to jail after tweeting that her white-ladyness would keep her out jail has been a wonderful storyline. I must tell that to my kid weekly: when things are going your way, keep quiet about it.
Fucker only got sixty days. She still won.
Will she lose her real estate license at least?
I thought being an entitled white person was a prerequisite for that. Maybe that's just here.
5 is an interesting theory. Alternate theory: Actual fear of lighting off some bigger rightwing freakout or some level of refusal among the police forces that would have to deal with these people.
"I'm not locked up in here with you; you're locked up in here with MEEEEE!"
LB has it right: too many elected pols are afraid they'll touch off something worse; they're trying to "Nasruddin gambit" ["who knows? maybe the horse will sing!"] On the merits, and by comparison with the "justice" meted out to Black (and poor white) defendants in other cases, all these people belong in prison. Every last one of them. Just as the getaway driver is guilty of felony murder when one of the bank-robbers kills a guard. But hey, we might touch off a civil war.
I get it, but this is just another sign of the parlous state of our society.
IANAL but it seems to me the prosecutors are playing it tight and only going for the charges they are 99% sure they can make stick. The last thing you want to do is overreach and have a grandstanding defendant get acquitted, reinforcing the idea this was all no big deal and the prosecutions were political.
Everyone gets a single charge because it's prosecut-OR not prosecutor-AND.
The definition of "overreach" somehow is so much more .... expansive when it's a buncha white RWNJs trying to overthrow our government, when it's a getaway driver or a kid slinging a de minimis amount of coke.
I suppose it's true that white privilege is not just implemented in charging decisions but also in judge and jury decisions, and media scrutiny, that prosecutors have to account for.
I think the trick is to give people the right incentives. Let them send convicted insurrectionists to private prisons.
Let Devos run the prison so she can make back what she lost to the Thanos (sp?) thing.
There's like the one that tried to kill half of everyone and the one with the colorful glove.
And did not some commenter's or FPP's work there at the time?
M/tch works for the IRS in Austin but not in that building, though the news didn't make it super clear at the start which building it was.
One of the coup participants has fled to Belarus, which pretty much gives the game away.
42: yeah, he's not quite there to flee to *Russia*
This guy is no Ed Snowden.
Is anyone else enjoying Tom Wambsgam's thoughts about going to jail in Succession?
when garland was announced as biden's ag pick i was not enthused, noting that he was in charge of the prosecution of mcveigh as a "lone wolf" when mcveigh very clearly was nothing of the sort. this was at least consistent with, if not the opening move in, our subsequent failure to come to grips with organized white supremacy in this country as *organized*.
this decades long disaster has coincided with a steady stream of overseas military involvements that have produced an ongoing stream of returning ex soldiers, which has historically been accompanied by an uptick in domestic right wing violence.
Garland instead of Jones for AG is the biggest mistake the Biden administration has made. Doug Jones is a fucking mensch, and Garland is a worthless beltway careerist.
November 9th is a sobering day to look at your "memories" at the other place.
"steady stream of overseas military involvements that have produced an ongoing stream of returning ex soldiers, which has historically been accompanied by an uptick in domestic right wing violence."
Really not sure this is true, to be honest.
Who can forget the raging domestic terrorism that made the Fifties a byword for terror after the end of the Korean war?
In Weimar America, though, things may be different.
50-51 strongly encourage you both to check out the work of kathleen belew, cynthia miller idriss & other scholars.
The late 50s had a lot of terror if you were black and trying to go to school or vote. I don't think the veterans are too blame for that though, but I haven't looked into it.
I don't know about the 50s either, but Belew's book specifically takes the end of the Vietnam War as a jumping-off point.
Does she discuss the successes of the civil rights movement as another potential cause?
I ordered Belew's book after the last time we talked about this, but I haven't read it yet. The general thesis seems plausible to me. There was also a brief spate of violent crime in the late '40s that was popularly associated with returning veterans; Bill Mauldin talks about it in one of his books.
It's really hard to just stop shooting at Germans once you start.
My uncle had to quit cold turkey because I guess you can't freelance a B-17.
The Second Amendment is in chains.
Alice is in chains. Which is why the army calls its backpacks 'ALICE'.
The Air Force is more racist, so they prefer White Alice.
Yeah. I worry about them recruiting a force that is in favor of Armageddon.
"If the world isn't supposed to end, why do I have a button than launches nuclear missiles?"
55 - kathleen blee (different scholar) has done work on white supremacist violence during the civil rights era, here's an interview with her with a brief mention https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/12/08/671999530/what-the-ebbs-and-flows-of-the-kkk-can-tell-us-about-white-supremacy-today her work on women in the klan in the 1920's is v informative.
Hey, she must be just down the street.
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So this is right, isn't it? (You may consult here.) I don't know, there is actually something unsettling about the conservatives finally deciding to try to build out their own (semi-)secular higher ed infrastructure. I can't quite bring myself to sit back and enjoy the dunks.
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Obviously it's a dumb project, but starting new universities is good relative to donating to old universities. I'd much rather people try this Austin nonsense than do this nonsense. It'd be amazing if people with different priorities started a new university (imagine a math department where half the faculty are women, it's only possible if you're starting from scratch).
I always fantasize about working in a math department where I'm at like the 35th percentile in terms of general competency instead of the 80th percentile. I just want to work in a university department that had a culture like the summer program I worked at, and not the way actual departments work. Or like a department with no technophobes, so like if you wanted to have a departmental wiki of collected knowledge people could actually use it.
I think it would be good if conservatives tried to build something instead of just shitting all over everything. Working toward a goal is good for the mind, the morals, and the mood. They could use the exercise.
Being only against things leads to madness.
The lefty lawyer folk that tried to torch a cop car in Philly, iirc, are looking at decades. This is not even a little bit unusual for leftist direct actors that get pinched.
Why aren't the 1/6 folk getting the same treatment? The question answers itself. I guess I'm confused why anyone thought even for a second it might be otherwise.
McVeigh was heavily involved with some white supremacist Christian Dominionist groups. The idea that he worked alone, that there weren't folk that should have enjoyed some RICO scrutiny at the very least is as contemptible as it was inevitable.
Who will you root for when the University of Substack at Austin (chant: USA, USA!) goes up against Trump University in basketball?
I guess they won't compete in basketball, but somehow in boat parades.
74: au contraire!
(Firefox reader view got me around the paywall.)
In principle, Moby, I agree that constructive engagement is good. However, sometimes the things conservatives build end up being the Federalist Society. I don't think I actually want explicitly right-wing universities willing to launder fascism. The isolated academics who have done that over the past few decades make it look pretty effortless to scale up. But I am beginning to worry, my own beliefs aside, whether the "broad dissatisfaction with 'woke' education" thing is a bigger deal than I had thought and is going to have bigger consequences than this culture-war stuff usually has.
I have no idea about overall consequences, but I figure if Martin Heidegger couldn't launder fascism with any notable success, Caitlin Flanagan isn't likely to either.
Heidegger probably says he wasn't trying to do that, but that's exactly the kind of thing a fucking Nazi would lie about.
As for calling individual people fascists, I don't really feel like going down the list of Harper's-Letter U appointees and assigning them a type from "Who Goes Nazi?", but don't let me stop anyone else.
(To be clear, "right-wing universities laundering fascism" is IMO something of a worst-case scenario, not hyperbole about the present. I have no idea what's going to happen to this thing, although I'm pretty sure there was a similar experiment in the UK within the last 15 years, with a lot of marquee names and some portentous moniker, and I think it just withered and died like every basil plant I buy at Trader Joe's wtf.)
Oh wait no, it did survive! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_the_Humanities_at_Northeastern
51: 8 strongly encourage you to summarise them because from my point of view the peaks in right wing violence in the US do not in any sense correlate with flows of soldiers returning from overseas wars. The largest single such flow was in the late 40s. Was this the highest peak of right wing violence in the last century? Right wing violence was high in the early 60s. What war were they returning from?
The US has had a lot of foreign wars in the last 100 years so that for any spike in violence you can point to a war within the last decade or two, but that's a bullshit analysis.
The UK thing was a pure grift, though, without any principles. It was a joke from the beginning; an attempt to get in on the money tree that higher education seemed, briefly, to be. Gray\ling was, and remains, an empty bullshitter. If he managed some exit strategy that left him richer that was the point.
I don't think you can say that about everyone involved in the Austin thing. On the other hand, I'm disinclined to take it seriously enough to do any proper research. On the one hand, we have advertorial; on the other, twitter dunking. At the moment, I think the only sane position is "wait and see".
Gray\ling was, and remains, an empty bullshitter.
This is absolutely true. The sad thing is that his book on Berkeley--which is the only piece of his serious academic writing I've read and which I read years before he adopted his media bullshitter persona and when I had no idea who the fuck he was--is actually quite good.
72: McVeigh was heavily involved with some white supremacist Christian Dominionist groups.
I am not very familiar with the evidence for and against McVeigh's actual involvement with those groups, but I found one aftermath of his arrest to be particularly chilling.
McVeigh also wore a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, shouted in Ford's Theater: "Sic semper tyrannis." ("Thus always to tyrants.") On the back was a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The t-shirt was sold by Southern Partisan magazine. Some months after the bombing they released the following:
Southern Partisan General Store sends out form letter stating: "Due to a surprising demand for our anti-Lincoln T-shirt, our stock has been reduced to odd sizes. If the enclosed shirt will not suffice, we will be glad to refund your money or immediately ship you another equally militant shirt from our catalog."
"You must be this treasonous to enter the store without a guardian. "
There's a sign hanging from a local overpass that says "Revolutions, not elections." I want to get someone to put next to it "¿Porque no los dos?" Is that like a Task Rabbit thing?