Category: BigLie

John Eastman’s attorneys advised him not to testify in Georgia’s presidential election probe

Posted on by Rebekah Sager

The Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office is demanding that John Eastman answer questions for the special grand jury investigating election tampering in the state in 2020. The former attorney for Donald Trump is pleading the Fifth.

According to USA TODAY, Eastman’s lawyers issued a statement stating that they had advised him to “assert attorney-client privilege and the constitutional right to remain silent where appropriate.”

“By all indications, the District Attorney’s Office has set itself on an unprecedented path of criminalizing controversial or disfavored legal theories, possibly in hopes that the federal government will follow its lead,” the statement reads. “Criminalization of unpopular legal theories is against every American tradition and would have ended the careers of John Adams, Ruth Ginsburg, Thurgood Marshall and many other now-celebrated American lawyers."

RELATED STORY: Lindsey Graham believes he’s above the law, tells judge that Georgia DA must explain her questioning

The attorney, infamously known for creating the bogus falsehood that Joe Biden didn’t actually win the election, is among such MAGA notables as former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and whiny Trump lapdog Sen. Lindsey Graham. All were called to testify in front of the Georgia grand jury and all have put up a fight—mostly to no avail.  

Eastman was behind the idea of sending a group of fake electors out into swing states in hopes of blocking the congressional certification of the 2020 election.

The New York Times reports that Eastman continued looking for election irregularities long after Trump was out of office. In one of a slew of previously uncovered emails, Eastman wrote, “A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof… If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.”

Kemp’s attorneys tried everything to save the incumbent governor from giving a sworn statement. But according to reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Monday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney refused to allow the governor to skirt his testimony but did allow him to push it off until after the Nov. 8 midterm elections.

Giuliani tried to play the “too sick to testify” card but was staunchly shut down by McBurney and appeared in Atlanta on Aug. 17 to give testimony.

Graham is doing everything he can to avoid testifying to the special grand jury in Georgia, including filing a brief on Aug. 24 that reasons that the subpoena to testify is invalid based on a rarely used section of the U.S. Constitution.

“The Constitution guarantees that a Senator ‘shall not be questioned’ about his protected ‘Speech or Debate’—and yet the District Attorney insists that Senator Graham must submit to questioning to ascertain whether he can be questioned or is immune from questioning. That makes no sense,” Graham’s motion reads.

Eastman also pleaded the Fifth in refusing to answer questions from the House committee investigating the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, per USA TODAY.

2020 was an election theft dry run for Republicans. Next time, they could succeed

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Every election starting now and into the foreseeable future is going to be the most important election of our lifetime. Until the Republican Party as we currently know it is ground to dust, scorched, and the earth on which it stands is salted, the threat of white nationalistic fascism will remain. Right now, in 2022, Republicans are running explicitly on undermining representative democracy, from the smallest local positions up through the state legislatures and all the way to Congress. They are converging behind the Big Lie and promising that they are going to fix it so that they don’t lose any more elections. So that Donald Trump (or his stand-in) will take the 2024 election.

They’re not even trying to be subtle about it—it’s explicit in so many campaigns for governor, attorney general, and secretary of state in plenty of battlegrounds, including the states that Trump tried to contest in 2020.

“What we’re seeing right now is unprecedented,” Joanna Lydgate, co-founder and CEO of States United Action, told CNN’s Rod Brownstein. “To see candidates running on a platform of lies and conspiracy theories about our elections as a campaign position, to see a former President getting involved in endorsing in down-ballot races at the primary level, and certainly to see this kind of systemic attacks on our elections, this spreading of disinformation about our elections—we’ve never seen anything like this before as a country.”

RELATED STORY: Republican state legislators are laying the groundwork to overturn the next election

Brownstein reports on a study released last week—commissioned by the groups States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward—which determined that 13 states have already approved laws to make sure there will be partisan control over election administration, laws to intimidate election administrators, and laws requiring audits of the 2020 election, as if that is a thing. That’s beyond the orgy they’ve been having for the past decade with voter suppression laws, which hasn’t ended either. Thirty-three states have another 229 bills related to denying the results of the last election, and to limiting the electorate and predetermining the outcome of future elections.

“Taken separately, each of these bills would chip away at the system of free and fair elections that Americans have sustained, and worked to improve, for generations,” the groups concluded. “Taken together, they could lead to an election in which the voters’ choices are disregarded and the election sabotaged.”

“In the leadup to the 2020 election, those who warned of a potential crisis were dismissed as alarmists by far too many Americans who should have seen the writing on the wall,” Jessica Marsden, counsel at Protect Democracy, told Brownstein in an email. “Almost two years later, after an attempted coup and a violent insurrection on our Capitol, election conspiracy theorists—including those who actually participated in January 6—are being nominated by the GOP to hold the most consequential offices for overseeing the 2024 election.”

“It’s all connected,” Lydgate said. “The playbook is to try to change the rules and change the referees, so you can change the results.”

They’ve got a very powerful referee on their side in the form of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

A casual observer might reasonably conclude that Ginni and Clarence Thomas are working in tandem to lay the groundwork for the next coup—with Ginni taking up the politics and Clarence handling the legal side. The symmetry between their work is remarkable. https://t.co/wUh5TiHk4q pic.twitter.com/tooRedMQJk

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) May 23, 2022

Thomas won’t recuse himself from any of these cases, and as of now, a Democratic Congress doesn’t seem particularly interested in trying to force him to via the threat of investigation and impeachment.

“What’s past is prologue, and what was done sloppily in 2020 is being mapped out by experts for 2024,” Slate’s Stern and Dahlia Lithwick write. “It didn’t work in 2020 because the legal and political structures to support it weren’t in place at the time. Those pieces are being put into place as we type this.” That’s the story Brownstein is also trying to get to Democrats and the rest of the traditional media—anyone who will listen and can do something about it.

There are answers. There are ways to fix this. They start with electing enough Democrats to state offices to make sure the damage the fascists can do is limited. We can also elect enough Democrats to the House and to the Senate to make the two Republican-friendly, obstructionist Democratic senators irrelevant.

Then it’ll be a matter of convincing that Democratic majority and a Democratic president that none of this is blogger hysteria, but a very real threat to our freedoms that has everybody else’s hair on fire. Saving our representative democracy means expanding and reforming the court.

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Trump’s cult of personality is like nothing else in our country’s history

Posted on by Ian Reifowitz

Donald Trump really likes Andrew Jackson. “I'm a fan. I'm a big fan,” he declared about the seventh president at a 2017 event commemorating Jackson’s 250th birthday. Trump added that Jackson’s portrait “hangs proudly” up on the wall in the Oval Office—a place it had not been seen for quite some time until he put it there. Two weeks after Election Day in 2016, Trump’s campaign manager and out-and-out white nationalist Steve Bannon likened his boss’s politics to “Jackson’s populism.” After President Obama had set in motion a plan to have Jackson replaced by Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, The Man Who Lost An Election And Tried To Steal It nixed the effort, although President Biden has since revived it.

The tumultuous events surrounding Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney’s recent removal from the House Republican leadership provide an opportunity to compare and contrast Trump and Jackson in a very specific way—namely their influence on our system of political parties.

For better or worse—okay, in Trump’s case, there’s no question which one—both have had an overall impact on American politics exceeded by a very small number of presidents. Jackson cleaved his party in two on the basis of both ideology and support for his candidacy, while his latter-day counterpart turned his into a body defined by little other than personal loyalty to the leader—in other words, just another Trump Organization.

There are certainly strong parallels between the two—and that’s without even going into each one’s racism. (In addition to Jackson’s well-known and despicable anti-American Indian policies, he was also a virulent supporter of slavery who, as per historian Daniel Walker Howe, “expressed his loathing for the abolitionists vehemently, both in public and in private.”) In big picture terms, both were incredibly divisive personalities who defined an era—Jackson starting with his unsuccessful campaign of 1824 through 1837 when he left the White House after two terms, and Trump certainly since 2016—and who fundamentally transformed the party through which he became a national political figure.

In the 1824 presidential election, Jackson came in first in the Electoral College (and won the popular vote by about 10%), but could not garner an electoral majority as four different candidates won states. John Quincy Adams came in second, but won the support of the fourth place candidate, Henry Clay, and ultimately triumphed in the contingent election held in the House of Representatives. Adams, after being inaugurated, appointed Clay as his secretary of state—each of the last four presidents, including Adams, had served in that position. Jackson accused Adams and Clay of having conspired in a “corrupt bargain,” and slammed Clay in biblical terms: “The Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same.”

Trump, on the other hand, claimed even before the 2016 election that put him in the White House despite losing the popular vote that it would be “rigged.” More recently, he has been promulgating The Big Lie about the 2020 election ever since last November. However, although both men challenged their defeats, Trump’s claims differ from those of Jackson, in that the former and his supporters literally made up wild and crazy events relating to a supposedly fraudulent voting process. One other difference: only one of them incited an insurrection to prevent the actual winner from becoming president.

The election of 1824, and Jackson’s reaction afterward, led to a fundamental shift in our country’s partisan alignment. By 1820, the so-called First Party System—in which the Democratic-Republicans and Federalists competed for power—had basically come to an end with the demise of the latter. President James Monroe ran unopposed in 1820, as the Federalists failed to put up a candidate, and these years were known as The Era of Good Feelings. All four of the major candidates in 1824 were Democratic-Republicans. After that year’s controversial election, Andrew Jackson led his followers into a new organization, which became known as the Democratic Party.

Although Jackson’s personality mattered greatly in this endeavor, there were also ideological grounds on which the old Democratic-Republicans split. He embraced the basic approach held by traditionalists within the older party, namely the Jeffersonian concept of small government that favored agrarian interests. Given the whole Liz Cheney debacle—which we’ll get to, don’t you worry—a real ideological difference seems sort of quaint, no?

The Adams-Clay alliance organized itself not just in opposition to Jackson as a person, but around their shared vision of a more active government—especially at the federal level—that aided the growth of industry and trade. They supported federal tariffs to protect domestic industries, as well as the aggressive building of canals and roads along with the continuation of the National Bank and other measures to promote economic growth—all of which Jacksonian Democrats opposed. The opponents of Jackson were briefly known as the National Republicans and then, after 1832, the Whigs, and their plan was embodied in Clay’s “American System.”

The point here is that the pro-Jackson and anti-Jackson factions developed into different parties built around real policy differences—separate from Old Hickory himself—that defined the Second Party System. Likewise, the next major realignment in the U.S. occurred when the Whigs broke apart in the years after 1850, which created the Third Party System. That shift was motivated by ideology and policy as well. It occurred largely because anti-slavery Whigs refused to stay together with pro-slavery Southern Whigs in a single party, and left in large numbers after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The anti-slavery forces came together in the new Republican Party.

We don’t yet know what the long-term impact of Donald Trump will be on our political parties and our democracy. Right now, however, there is clearly a divide—as seen in what happened with Liz Cheney. Whatever the final results of that divide turn out to be, recent events bear little resemblance to the divides either of the 1820s or the 1850s.

Rep. Cheney was drummed out of the Republican leadership for one reason, and one reason only: she continued to publicly rebuke Trump’s Big Lie—a lie that has now become a purity test for members of what can realistically be called the Trump Republican Party. There are no ideological or policy grounds that define or separate the pro- and anti-Trump factions among Republicans.

The fact that Cheney has been replaced as the House Republican Conference Chair by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik—whose voting record is significantly less supportive of Trump’s legislative agenda than Cheney’s—makes clear that this is in no way about policy. Cheney remains a hard-right conservative, as her remarks just before the vote on May 12 to remove her make clear: “After today, I will be leading the fight to restore our party and our nation to conservative principles, to defeating socialism.” Cheney may be toeing the fictitious party line about Joe Biden and socialism, but what matters here is that Stefanik supports The Big Lie, and that’s all that matters to the Party of Trump.

Elise Stefanik had a chance to avoid Four Pinocchios. All she had to do was admit she was wrong. instead she doubled down, even after we showed her false claim -- 140,000 suspect votes in Fulton County -- was based on a misreading of a Trump lawsuit. https://t.co/Ghu1XTBN7U

— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) May 7, 2021

Even when, at the last minute, Texas Rep. Chip Roy threw his ten-gallon hat into the ring to challenge Stefanik, it didn’t matter that he had voted for all the right conservative legislation and she hadn’t. Stefanik trounced him anyway: 134 votes to 46. Again, policy and ideology mattered not one iota. Only one issue did.

Key: Chip Roy, with a wildly conservative voting record, can't beat Elise Stefanik, with her comparatively moderate voting record because of one wrong vote. He didn't vote to overturn the 2020 election. IOW, core GOP ideology is The Big Lie. https://t.co/LvsDKsQ61W via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 14, 2021

The twice-impeached former president made clear after Jan. 6 that he was going to demand absolute obedience not to any particular set of policies but instead to him as an individual. Republicans made their choice. They could either give it to him or he was going to take his ball and go home. Their decision was purely about what conservatives thought would help them win, nothing else.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham—one of the most notorious flip-floppers on Trump’s fitness to serve—did tell the truth when he admitted why his party continues to bend the knee to the Orange Julius Caesar: “If you tried to run him out of the party, you'd take half the party with him." Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, one of the most prominent anti-Trump Republicans, summed up his feelings by comparing Trump to a North Korean dictator: "It just bothers me that you have to swear fealty to the Dear Leader or you get kicked out of the party."

To demonstrate the ideological hypocrisy of Cheney’s replacing even further, we now know that the House Republicans—whose conservatism supposedly requires them to reject such concepts as representation—mandated that a woman replace Cheney. As Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post commented, they are doing so “because the party—though it supposedly abhors identity politics—needs a skirt to hide behind as it jettisons a strong, independent-minded female colleague.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put out a satirical ad from the House GOP leadership under the heading: “Help Wanted – Non-Threatening Female”

A few right-wing ideologues raised objections regarding this many-layered hypocrisy, but to no avail.

Word is, congressional Republicans are pushing amnesty-shill Elise Stefanik because they want a WOMAN in leadership. Sh!t-for-brains Republicans: NO GOP WOMAN CARES ABOUT IDENTITY POLITICS!

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) May 12, 2021

Although Cheney has by far received the harshest punishment, the other nine House Republicans who voted to impeach the Insurrectionist-in-Chief for his crimes against our Constitution relating to the attempted coup of Jan. 6 have also been targeted by Trump partisans. They have faced censure votes and, in some cases, will likely draw primary opponents specifically running as more loyal to Trump.

Is the Republican Party going to split in two the way the Democratic-Republicans did after 1824 or the Whigs did after 1854? That’s not happening right now, although in the wake of the Cheney vote 150 prominent Republicans signed on to a “manifesto” titled “A call for American renewal.” The signatories include four former governors—ranging in ideology from tea party favorite Mark Sanford of South Carolina to centrist Bill Weld of Massachusetts—along with a former senator, 27 former House members, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as well as some relatively high-ranking members of the Trump administration. Daily Kos’ Kerry Eleveld analyzed the statement in some depth here.

This group does not plan to form a new party yet, but rather, in the words of prominent Never Trumper George Conway, sees itself as “a coalition. …There is a need for people who have a conservative to moderate point-of-view and want to believe in the rule of law and … need a place to go and a place where they can organize and support candidates that are consistent with that." In other words, they are looking to create an organized anti-Trump faction within the Republican Party that can, eventually, take control of it. Good luck with that.

On a related note, a very recent study found that learning that Republicans were fighting amongst themselves over the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory had a significant impact among those who identify with the Republican Party, but not strongly. The favorability rating of the party expressed by such so-called “weak Republicans” fell by approximately 6% compared to that of a control group who were not given information about intra-Republican squabbling, as well as compared to another group that had been told of strife between Republicans and Democrats. Those weak Republicans’ impression of the Democratic Party improved by about the same amount. That’s even better than if they had become interested in a third party, in terms of improving Democrats’ chances of winning elections.

Republican President Ulysses S. Grant, after the disputed 1876 election that would elect his successor, proclaimed: “No man worthy of the office of President should be willing to hold it … placed there by fraud. Either party can afford to be disappointed by the result, but the country cannot afford to have the result tainted by suspicion of illegal or false returns.” Today’s head of the Republican Party clearly disagrees.

Trump is creating more of a naked cult of personality even than Jackson did. This is not to suggest that Jackson is "better" in some way than Trump. Rather, the contrast is that Jackson's cult of personality was connected to policy differences and a substantive disagreement over a vision for the country, while Trump's is essentially divorced from ideology, and based at this point on little other than fealty to The Big Lie. Likewise, Anti-Trumpists range from true moderates like Hogan and Weld to archconservatives like Cheney and Sanford, and harbor significant political disagreements. 

What Trump has wrought since the election, and especially since Jan. 6, bears little resemblance to previous political realignments or really anything that’s happened before. This kind of purely personality-driven divide is unprecedented in our country’s history.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

Rep. Clyde said ‘tourists’ invaded the Capitol, but pics show he had a different reaction that day

Posted on (Updated by Walter Einenkel

The pathology involved in conservatives around the country collectively trying to gaslight Americans into believing they didn’t see what they saw and didn’t hear with heard on Jan. 6, 2021, is pretty frightening. But here we are. During “The Capitol Insurrection: Unexplained Delays and Unanswered Questions” hearings held by the House of Representatives, Republicans tried to repaint the history of the Jan. 6 attempt by MAGA types and many Republican officials to forcefully overturn millions of Americans democratically cast votes as not a big deal. In fact, if you looked at it another way, the insurrection was like a big family gathering.

One of the most egregious remembrances of that day came from Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. During his written statement, he said of the many trespassers and zip-tie carrying insurrections that day in the Capitol building, “You know, if you didn't know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.” It’s the kind of statement that’s so breathtaking in its denial of all evidence that it seemed to take away Clyde’s breath after he said it. The AP released a new set of images from that distressing and disappointing day that show Clyde very close to the barricaded door to the House chambers. He does not look like a man who is taking it easy as a rambunctious tourist group passes through.

Another shot of what Rep. Clyde would later call tourism.

One of the images appears at the top of this story (and down below for good measure). The second image shows the scene from inside, the one that Clyde said was a nothing burger. In the midst of a pandemic where the American public chose to change the executive branch and the legislative branch of the government in the hopes of getting the things they want out of their government legislated, Clyde’s record so far during the new year has been to vote against every single popular bill put forth by the Biden administration. Clyde, like many GOP officials in our country, is a proponent of the Big Lie. He and his colleagues do not simply promote it and misinform the public about it—they are it.

Clyde voted against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, saying: “No evidence was presented, no witness testified, no cross-examination was conducted, no due process was afforded. And that sets an extremely dangerous precedence for the future." The last quote is a reminder that Clyde is no stranger to lying about the facts. Clyde isn’t unique here. He’s following the party line, and the end game of this political party is minority rule in the form of an oligarchy made to look like a republic.

Below you can watch Clyde make his declaration. He takes a big breath break after saying it before moving on to the next section of his fascist tome to discuss, in a way that implies the whiff of de state conspiracy, the shooting death of Ashli Babbit by Capitol police. As an important reminder, 35-year-old Babbit was jumping through a recently smashed glass partition to gain entrance to a hallway where any number of representatives, senators, and their staff were holed up. The hallway had been barricaded by Capitol police and possibly Secret Service. When Babbit and the insurrectionists forced their way into the building, it was possibile that the next three Americans in the line of succession to the president of the United States were in the Capitol building.

Also important to note: Clyde has lamented Babbit’s death as an “unarmed protester,” but has seemingly forgotten to make similar statements about the shooting deaths in his own state of Ahmaud Arbery or Rayshard Brooks.

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These Trump-loving false prophets spread dangerous lies, but social media companies won’t act

Posted on by Darrell Lucus

Donald Trump left office as one of the most unpopular presidents in the history of American opinion polling. His average approval rating at FiveThirtyEight never topped 45%. And yet, he was able to remain standing in part because the religious right remained firmly in his corner.

From the time Trump locked up the Republican nomination in 2016, the nation’s so-called moral guardians peddled a false narrative to their flocks. Most of the nation saw a candidate who plastered a news anchor’s private cell phone number on social media, mocked the disabled, condoned violence at his rallies and against the media, and reveled in degrading women. They also saw a president who knowingly spewed racial slurs at lawmakers of color, forced taxpayers to foot the bill for his golf outings, lied over 30,500 times, and utterly mishandled the worst peacetime crisis in our nation’s history.

But the religious right portrayed Trump as a guy whom God himself chose to not only make America great again, but make America Christian again. After all, pro-Trump ministers and evangelists insisted, what really mattered was that Trump opposed abortion and marriage equality, and intended to stack the courts with line-drawing conservatives.

They also saw a guy who openly promised that under him, “Christianity will have power,” while choosing to ignore that in the same breath he claimed he could turn Fifth Avenue into a bloodbath and still keep his support. For good measure, those who opposed him were branded as opposing the Almighty himself.

This all-out bullying campaign is a big reason why 76% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020. That’s pretty sobering—until you consider that 81% of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016. Given that Trump made virtually no effort to reach out to those who didn’t vote for him, any downtick in his base, no matter how small, would have been lethal. Indeed, one can argue that when Trump lost 5% of his white evangelical support from 2016, it was enough to pull Joe Biden out of the danger zone where he could have won the popular vote and still lost the Electoral College.

Unfortunately, recent months have seen elements of the religious right ramp up a false narrative that may be even more insidious and dangerous than the one they peddled for five-plus years. As Politico noted in February, these elements have taken the Big Lie to a very logical extreme. Supposedly, God himself knows that Trump really won, and is so determined to right that wrong that he is going to pull out all the stops to restore his Chosen One to power.

The main promoter of this narrative is Elijah List, a website that distributes “words from the Lord” from some of the charismatic Christian world’s most prominent “prophets.” Its founder and publisher, Steve Shultz, sees his task as “delivering fresh prophetic ‘manna’ from the Lord, regarding the days in which we live.” Much of this manna comes from “those with whom we have a relationship, who are most likely to be speaking the true and current heart of the Father in this hour.”

Among those with whom Shultz has a “relationship” is Johnny Enlow, a so-called prophet from Franklin, Tennessee—a suburb of Nashville—who figured very prominently in Politico’s deep dive into these rabidly pro-Trump prophets. Back in January, Enlow sat down with Shultz and claimed that Biden’s inauguration “doesn’t really mean anything,” since any discovery of fraud voids the entire election even after a new president is sworn in. For that reason, Enlow said, he believed we were on the verge of “great celebration, great joy” when Biden would be dumped from his position of “pretend power.”

What extraordinary evidence did Enlow offer for this extraordinary claim? None whatsoever. And Shultz didn’t demand any. Actual journalists have a name for this—malpractice.

A month after that interview, Enlow hit the ceiling when the Supreme Court rejected a raft of 11th-hour challenges to five states narrowly carried by Biden. He took to Facebook to call for a military coup, arguing that the Supreme Court’s “failure” to recognize that Trump had won gave the military a “green light for defense of the constitution, electoral integrity, and the nation’s very foundations.” Earlier, Enlow had told his Facebook followers that with so many elements of the government failing to recognize that Trump had a second term stolen from him, there were only three forces that could potentially right this terrible wrong—“the Supreme Court, the Military, and We the People.”

This sent a chill down my spine. Remember, we were only two months removed from the Jan. 6 insurrection, which was sparked by this very kind of talk. But apparently Shultz didn’t mind. On March 11, he invited Enlow back. What ensued was more seditious wingnuttery. 

Vimeo Video

Enlow claimed that Trump was still president. How’s that, you ask? Well, in Enlow’s telling, this country was secretly and illegally converted into a corporation in 1871—and Biden actually presides over this corporation. Trump, on the other hand, restored the “republic” when he took office in 2017, and still presides over that republic—and hence still controls “the essential machinery of the economy and the military.”

Is your head spinning yet? Well, it turns out that Enlow is a full-on QAnon kook. In September 2020, he told fellow “prophets” Allen and Francine Fosdick that he believed QAnon dovetailed perfectly with his long-standing promotion of the “Seven Mountains Mandate:”

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Enlow and others are of the mind that if Christians take over the seven forces, or “mountains,” that influence our culture—business, education, entertainment, media, family, religion, and especially government—they can bring about the Second Coming. Enlow told the Fosdicks, who also drink the Q-Aid by the barrelfull, that by focusing solely on the “mountain” of religion, the church hasn’t applied “salt and light to the other sectors of society.” As a result, it’s allowed “multi-generational deep darkness” to take hold—including the nest of pedophiles that Trump was supposedly out to expose.

Now, let’s move back to March 2021. Enlow was peddling a line that was very popular among those who were still “trusting the plan” even with Biden in the White House. Supposedly, on March 4, Trump was slated to return to the White House as the 19th president—the first lawful occupant of the office since Ulysses S. Grant. In the meantime, Enlow said, Trump was “ruling and reigning” in a way that would not be possible if he were still in the White House.

Did Shultz shut Enlow down? Did he demand extraordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim? No! He simply referenced an earlier “word” from late “prophet” Kim Clement about people complaining that Trump wasn’t talking enough.

This would be enough by itself to prove that Shultz has no qualms about condoning outright sedition on his platform. But there’s more. Another so-called prophet who continues to peddle this dangerous and seditious corollary of the Big Lie is Jeff Jansen, a pastor from another Nashville suburb, Murfreesboro. Back in February, Jansen told Shultz that even though Biden may think he’s president, Heaven still recognizes Trump as president—and that’s the only vote that really counts.

Vimeo Video

In Jansen’s telling, the military—“the last line of defense in our Constitution”—knows it too, and was preparing to throw Biden out and restore “power and order back to the people” by putting Trump back in the White House.

Later in March, Jansen put a precise date on Trump’s return—by the end of April.

Vimeo Video

It looks like Shultz has deleted those videos from all of Elijah List’s platforms—but not before one of my earliest online friends “loved” Jansen’s call for a coup on Facebook. Fortunately, Right Wing Watch got receipts.

But why is he still promoting Enlow? And why did he see fit to blast out a “word” from central Florida-based “prophetess” Donna Rigney declaring that Trump was a “righteous leader” who had been “misrepresented and portrayed as evil,” and would be restored to office? And why is he promoting Irish-based evangelist Veronika West, who claimed to have seen a vision of the letters T-R-U-M-P written in gold on a stairway and saw it as a sign that God was going to bring him into “the fullness of his destiny”? And why is he hosting weekly “intelligence briefings” with Robin Bullock, an Alabama-based “apostle” who has declared Biden is not really president and demanded that Biden “repent” for stealing the election from Trump?

All things considered, one has to wonder—are Shultz, Enlow, Jansen, and their compatriots so loyal to Trump and so great a need for more donations that they are willing to erode trust in our democracy? Given their willingness to keep churning out this nonsense, that’s more than a fair question.

A deep dive into these outfits may make some people inclined to think I’m making a fuss over nothing. After all, Elijah List’s main Facebook page has just under 390,000 followers, while its video streaming page, Elijah Streams, has 24,000 followers. By comparison, Sean Hannity has over four million Facebook followers.

But there are a lot of reasons why we should be concerned. For one thing, poll after poll since the Jan. 6 insurrection has shown alarming majorities of Republicans still believe the Big Lie. Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed 60% of Republicans believe Trump was the victim of election fraud. It cannot be stated enough—a large majority of a major political party believes this nonsense.

The Survey Center for American Life, a project of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, drilled down further and looked at how white evangelicals saw the Big Lie. The results are disheartening—74% of white evangelicals believe the election was tainted by fraud, and only 27% believe Biden’s election was legitimate. We’re talking about a substantial component of the GOP base. Now, consider that much of Elijah List’s constituency consists of the most diehard of diehard Christian conservatives. This can’t be dismissed as the ravings of a small fry.

Moreover, many of Elijah List’s followers believe that God himself is speaking through Enlow, Jansen, and other “prophets.” For them, all that matters is that God told them Trump would win a second term—and everything else be hanged.

Unfortunately, it appears that the desire to deliver what Shultz sees as God’s voice for this hour has taken precedence over basic human decency. After all, it simply defies belief that Shultz isn’t aware that these false claims about voter fraud resulted in election officials being harassed and trolled, and caused an executive at Dominion Voting Systems to go into hiding. And what of the police officers who were injured in the Jan. 6 insurrection, including two who committed suicide soon afterward? Or the lawmakers who had to flee for their lives as these sans-culottes flooded into the Capitol? Is Shultz so determined to keep his followers bowing and praying to the orange god he helped make that he has no regard for the safety of those who had to endure the horror of Jan. 6? Judging by the content he has shared, the answer to that question, unfortunately, is no.

One may think this sounds harsh. But I’m reminded of a message Republican strategist Scott Jennings sent to Senator Josh Hawley in the wake of Hawley’s misguided championing of the effort to overturn Biden’s win even after the insurrection. Jennings wondered, “Once the Capitol had been occupied, how can you give quarter to the viewpoint that caused the occupation?” While he was directing that question at Hawley, it applies in equal measure to anyone who would continue to peddle the Big Lie when it is clear beyond all doubt that it caused an insurrection.

When you look at this from a Christian perspective, it’s no less outrageous. It’s pretty clear that Shultz, Enlow, Jansen, and friends have forgotten Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Like it or not, gentlemen—a term that I use in its loosest possible sense—these election officials, voting systems workers, and lawmakers are your neighbors.

One also has to wonder if Facebook and YouTube really understand the harm of this content. I have reported numerous videos and posts from Elijah List, as well as from Enlow and Jansen. These reports have passed without so much as a response. It looks like Facebook may be making the same error it did with its handling of Trump’s more incendiary posts. By carving out exceptions to its community standards for “newsworthy political discourse” in an apparent effort to avoid Trump’s wrath, it allowed Trump’s blatantly false claims about voter fraud to gain credence they didn’t merit. There’s no question about it—had Facebook dropped the hammer sooner, this nonsense about voter fraud wouldn’t have gained nearly the traction that they did. In all likelihood, there would have been no insurrection.

Indeed, if you strip the Christian veneer away, Enlow and Jansen’s screeds are no different from the kind of incendiary rhetoric that ultimately led Facebook to lock Trump out of his Facebook and Instagram feeds. Facebook’s reasoning for this was simple—it was necessary to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. And their spirit is the same as that of numerous tweets from Trump that were so egregious Twitter was forced to ban anyone from retweeting or replying to them—a prelude to his permanent ban from Twitter.

YouTube banned QAnon in October, and Facebook followed suit around the same time. And yet, by not taking action against Elijah List, it is continuing to let Enlow have a forum to normalize QAnon lunacy. Past history suggests that this won’t end well.

One would have thought that Jan. 6 would have awakened Facebook and YouTube to the dangers of allowing the words of these false and seditious prophets to be written on their walls. Apparently, they don’t see it. Hopefully it won’t take another violent episode to change their minds.

Kevin McCarthy must face consequences for promoting Trump’s Big Lie

Posted on (Updated by Darrell Lucus

Donald Trump still has a hammer lock on the Republican Party. That was amply demonstrated in the days after all but seven Senate Republicans voted to acquit Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Of those who joined the bipartisan rebuke of Trump’s conduct and voted to convict, Sen. Richard Burr and Bill Cassidy have been censured by their state parties, while the other five face calls for their censure.

Yet an even clearer and starker indication of the hold Trump still has on the GOP came much earlier, on Jan. 28, when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet with him. The topic? How to take back the House in 2022. This came on the heels of McCarthy voting to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, hours after the insurrection—thus not only giving succor to the insurrection, but to the false claims of election fraud that triggered it.

It is impossible to overstate just how outrageous this was. The leader of the House Republicans, the second most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill, saw fit to publicly kiss the ring of a man who spent months attempting to steal a second term—an effort which culminated in a deadly insurrection that came frighteningly close to claiming the lives of members of both chambers of Congress (and the vice president). And yet, as near as can be determined, McCarthy has faced almost no blowback for it, nor for effectively promoting the Big Lie by voting to object.

To be sure, Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have gotten well-deserved scorn, and even calls for their expulsion, for their “leadership” in the effort to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Sen. Lindsey Graham has crassly declared that the GOP needs Trump’s help to win. He has been pilloried in the reality-based community for this, and rightly so. But it is one thing for backbench senators to subvert the will of the American people. It is quite another for the leader of the House Republicans to do so.

The leadership of the Republican Party in situ, January 28, 2021. pic.twitter.com/40lYItNPpw

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) January 28, 2021

McCarthy objected to Biden’s victory, and then embraced Trump, despite knowing full well that Trump had told the biggest lie in a political career shot through with them. The fact that McCarthy hasn’t had his feet held to the fire for either of these outrages can only be described as political malpractice of the highest order. It’s long past time to correct that oversight.

Minutes after the insurrection died down and the Capitol had been finally secured, Dave “I’ve seen enough” Wasserman, House editor of Cook Political Report, tweeted that McCarthy had acknowledged what the nation already knew: Trump had lost the election.

A few weeks after the election, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy acknowledged Trump's clear loss to me and I asked him if the president's refusal to concede would lead the country down a dangerous road. His response: "Maybe."

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) January 6, 2021

Wasserman doubled down the next day, noting that McCarthy objected to the certification of Biden’s victory even after repeatedly acknowledging to Wasserman that Biden had won. Then, five days after the insurrection, Wasserman revealed that McCarthy had previously told him that if Trump made good on his repeated threats to reject any result other than his reelection, he knew he’d have to enter the fray.

True story: the day before the election, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy told me that if Trump refused to concede, he and McConnell would eventually have to come out and issue a joint statement acknowledging the result. In the end, McCarthy left McConnell twisting in the wind.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) January 11, 2021

McCarthy knew that Trump was blowing smoke when he claimed the election had been stolen. And yet, McCarthy remained silent even in the face of reports of election officials being harassed, trolled, and threatened due to these claims. He remained silent even as an employee at Dominion Voting Systems was forced into hiding after being targeted with vicious smears and threats.

When I first saw these reports, my thoughts turned to Frank DiPascali, who helped Bernie Madoff run his Ponzi scheme from 1986 until Madoff’s arrest in December 2008. Though he died before he could be sentenced, DiPascali pleaded guilty to his role in the racket, nine months after Madoff’s scheme imploded. He admitted that he had known since at least the early 1990s that Madoff wasn’t trading. And yet, not only did DiPascali squander numerous chances to come clean over the previous two decades, but he actually helped Madoff further the scheme. For instance, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, when Madoff realized he was on the brink of collapse, DiPascali persuaded Madoff to use the remaining balance in Madoff’s now-infamous Chase account to cut $350 million in checks to relatives and favored investors.

McCarthy’s behavior in the months after the election isn’t much different from DiPascali’s behavior in the last two decades of Madoff’s fraud. Based on Wasserman’s accounts, McCarthy knew the Big Lie was, well, a lie—and he didn’t do a damn thing about it. He didn’t speak out publicly, nor did he tell Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the rest of the Sedition Caucus to call off their plans to object.

We won't forget what you said on 11/5/2020 and your complicity in the insurrection @GOPLeader: "Trump won this election, so everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes... join together and let’s stop this.” pic.twitter.com/bLOieBxlh2

— Alfred Spellman (@AlfredSpellman) January 20, 2021

This was a time where the leader of the House Republicans had a chance to, you know, lead. In this case, it was a chance that McCarthy was morally, and almost certainly legally and constitutionally, required to take. He blew that chance eight ways to Sunday. In so doing, McCarthy did something that, on paper, takes a lot of effort: For a time, he made McConnell look like a paragon of integrity.

What in the world could McCarthy have been thinking, you might ask? Well, one answer can be found in a profile that The New York Times ran on him in January, days after Trump was impeached for a second time. McCarthy was getting a lot of blowback from Republican constituents back home in California’s 23rd district, based in Bakersfield and the Central Valley, for not being supportive enough of Trump. When McCarthy publicly stated that Trump bore responsibility for the attack during the certification of the Electoral College votes, hours after the Capitol had been secured, it ruffled a lot of feathers among his Republican constituents. According to The Times, at least one local tea party activist, who ran against McCarthy in 2016, is giving serious thought to primarying McCarthy again in 2022. Before Trump, it would have been unthinkable for a party leader in the House to face a substantive primary challenge.

McCarthy may have taken a trip to Florida to smooth things over back home in Bakersfield, but he seems to have forgotten that he is not only the congressman for CA-23, he is also the leader of the House Republicans. As such, he would have the inside track to becoming speaker if the GOP retakes the House. If McCarthy has any ambitions of peeling off swing voters and suburbanites in 2022, being seen publicly with a man who stirred up a deadly insurrection can only be described as an unforced error. It’s particularly outrageous when combined with the fact that he knew Trump had lost and said nothing for months.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blames *you* as he tries to clear up his statements on whether Trump bears responsibility for the January 6th attack on the Capitol or not. “I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility," Rep. McCarthy says. pic.twitter.com/aBeGBsA9sJ

— The Recount (@therecount) January 24, 2021

Recall that in 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught a lot of scorn from the right for ripping up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech. Self-promoting conservative law professor (and Fox News pundit) Jonathan Turley went as far as to call for Pelosi to step down saying that she forgot she was representing the whole House.

McCarthy’s meeting with Trump is far, far worse. There is something wrong if merely ripping a copy of a speech draws more hackles than meeting with a president who spread pernicious lies about an election being stolen, then incited a deadly insurrection to overturn his defeat. By meeting with Trump, McCarthy thumbed his nose at the many police officers who were injured, including one who died in the line of duty and two others who died by suicide soon after. He thumbed his nose at those who were harassed, trolled, and threatened as a result of the Big Lie that he knew it was a lie. That’s hardly behavior becoming of someone with ambitions of representing the whole House.

McCarthy will never resign, of course. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make him answer for his misdeeds. According to the latest Cook Partisan Voting Index, there are only four districts in California with ratings of R+10 or worse. McCarthy sits in one of them; with a PVI of R+14, on paper, it’s the reddest district in the state. There’s no denying it: This district is one of the few red smudges left in a state that has turned an unrecognizable shade of blue. But the trendline suggests that if done right, a Democrat can at least keep McCarthy tied down.

Bakersfield is undergoing considerable demographic change, for one thing. Once dominated by the descendants of people who fled Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas during the Dust Bowl, figures from the 2010 census showed Bakersfield was 45% Latino and 38% non-Hispanic white. According to The New York Times’ profile from January, Bakersfield is now majority Latino. This shift suggests that the city’s Latino population is growing too rapidly for neighboring CA-21, which has long served most of the Latinos in the Fresno-Bakersfield corridor.

Add that to the fact that McCarthy’s district as a whole is currently just barely majority white, at 50.5%. Wasserman suggested earlier this month that CA-23 could potentially become whiter and more Republican in redistricting. But that seems hard to believe if Bakersfield is already majority Latino, or close to it. While Wasserman argues that it’s very likely the state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission will create two Latino-majority districts in the Fresno-Bakersfield corridor, mathematically it’s hard to see how the 23rd would not absorb more Latino voters if its central city is already majority-Latino. Coupled with the right candidate, policies, and outreach, this shift can only help Democrats.

The vote margins between McCarthy and his challenger are a FIFTH of McConnell’s. CA-23’s demographics (+30% Latino) are similar to CA-25, whereas Kentucky is 87% white. CA-23 can be flipped by investing in Latino working class enfranchisement and turnout.#GetThatMangone https://t.co/Uc22ihrsS2

— Ricardo Gutiérrez (@icaito) June 17, 2020

Beyond demographic shifts and redistricting, Trump actually underperformed in a McCarthy’s district, which the Grey Lady describes as an area with “bobbing oil pump jacks (that) dot the landscape like a page out of West Texas,” with a strong historical bent of social conservatism. In other words, classic MAGA territory. According to the latest numbers crunched by the folks at Daily Kos Elections, while Mitt Romney won this district over Obama 61-36 in 2012, Trump only won it 58-36 in 2016 and 57-41 in 2020. Contrast that with IA-04, the former balliwick of Steve King, now held by Randy Feenstra. It swung from a 53-45 win for Romney to a 61-33 win for Trump in 2016 and 63-36 in 2020. Or OH-05, Jim Jordan’s domain. It swung from a 56-42 win for Romney to a 64-31 win for Trump in 2016 and 67-32 in 2020. What’s more, in 2020, McCarthy sits in the only district in the Fresno-Bakersfield corridor, long one of the more conservative parts of the state, where Trump won by double digits.

Moreover, McCarthy’s own winning percentages have been tailing off. After winning his first five terms with 70% or more of the vote, his totals have actually dwindled since Trump: 69% in 2016, 63% in 2018, and 61% in 2020. It’s no coincidence that McCarthy’s vote totals have tailed off as his Democratic challengers have spent more money. His 2016 challenger only raised $35,300 for the entire cycle. By comparison, his 2018 challenger raised $106,000; an improvement, but still nothing to write home about. His 2020 challenger, Kim Mangone, raised $1.6 million … not what you’d expect for a Democrat in an R+14 district. 

If the blue team plays it right, McCarthy could potentially face a reckoning back home for first remaining silent the wake of the Big Lie, and then kissing Trump’s hand after said lie triggered an insurrection. There’s already at least one Democrat running against him: naval veteran and ironworker Bruno Amato.

YouTube Video

Looking at his website, Amato doesn’t have the look of the sacrificial lambs and Some Dudes that typically surface in districts that are R+10 or worse. Moreover, it’s not often that you see Democrats already stepping up to run in districts this red.

Amato has a lot of work ahead of him, as will any other Democrat challenging McCarthy. This is a tough, tough district. But given the prospect that he’ll be running in a district that will be a bit more Latino than its predecessor, there’s a chance that he’ll be in a position to give McCarthy heartburn.

But we can do even better than that. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney should tie McCarthy’s duplicity about the Big Lie around the GOP like an anchor. For the last two cycles, the Republicans have tried to position the Democrats as a radical socialist mob. It would more than even the score to point out that the leader of the House Republicans remained silent about the Big Lie despite knowing that it was a lie, even after that lie stirred up an actual mob. That he did so to put out fires back home is no excuse, and Maloney and his team ought to remind the nation that this is not the kind of behavior we should expect from the likely speaker of a Republican-led House. If swing voters and suburbanites recoil from McCarthy over his embrace of Trump, it will all but assure that the GOP stays in the minority.

One way or another, McCarthy must answer for behaving beneath the dignity of someone who has ambitions of becoming speaker. We can make McCarthy do some heavy lifting in his own district, tie his duplicity around the entire House Republican Conference, or some combination of the two. Either way, McCarthy must learn that when you have ambitions of representing the whole House, you cannot forsake your oath in the name of keeping the wolves from your door back home.

Yes, the Republican Party is aiding and abetting terrorism. It’s worse than you think

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy jetted to Florida this week to kiss the ring of the man who tried to get him and his congressional colleagues killed at the Capitol on Jan. 6. McCarthy, who is now groveling at Donald Trump's feet after admitting he "bears responsibility" for the violent siege, was there to enlist Trump's help in retaking the House majority in the midterms. "United and ready to win in '22," McCarthy tweeted following his unconditional surrender to Trump, as the Trump campaign circulated a garish photo of the two making nice.

And after letting reports flourish earlier this month that he believed Trump had committed impeachable offenses, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell joined 44 of his GOP colleagues in casting a vote to discredit Trump's impeachment trial before it even starts. McConnell, who ensured Trump's trial wouldn't begin until he had already left office, provided his caucus the escape hatch of claiming the trial is unconstitutional precisely because Trump has left office. Right on cue, McConnell's lieutenants have piped up to tell us why they don't have to lift a finger to hold Trump accountable. "I think he's been held accountable in the court of public opinion already,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas told CNN.

But more importantly, McConnell, who was straddling the fence between truth telling and sedition abetting, has come down squarely on the side of the seditionists. 

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the only GOP congressional leader who has unequivocally told the truth about Trump's "betrayal" of the nation without going squishy, has now found herself the subject of a targeted revenge campaign by Trump and his henchmen. The lion's share of Cheney's time over the next two years will be consumed with an existential battle to retain her leadership post, survive a Republican primary for her seat, and, well, just plain survive.

In the meantime, federal agents at FBI headquarters are likely drawing links between at least a handful of Republican lawmakers and right-wing extremist groups in spoke-and-wheel analysis charts—a proposition former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi marveled over on MSNBC. "To think that the images of U.S. members of Congress are now on those connected-dots charts inside some office at FBI headquarters is unbelievable to me," he said on Friday. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rather bluntly referred to a group of radical GOP lawmakers this week as the enemy “within,” as her Democratic members lobby for increased personal protection from their Republican counterparts.

But as damning as the extremest links of GOP representatives like Arizona's Paul Gosar and Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene are, it's the election fraud lies Republican leaders continue to stoke that present the gravest long-term threat to our democracy. Left to fester unchecked among the masses, those lies will lead to violence, mass destruction, and even systemic abuse of innocent Americans by the U.S. government if an autocrat-in-waiting rises to power. And plenty of those autocrat wannabes are waiting in the wings to capitalize on the unrest alongside Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas. 

Just this week, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has led particularly lethal nonresponse to the pandemic, refused to answer whether Biden's 2020 victory was the result of a free and fair election. In November, Noem claimed the election was "rigged," and she clearly wants that characterization to remain her most decisive declaration about Trump's loss.

And Fox News host Tucker Carlson is weaponizing the federal government's new effort to crack down on fringe white supremacist and domestic terror groups. After playing a clip this week of Rep. Adam Schiff of California saying federal law enforcement officials should retool in order to combat domestic extremism “just as we did after 9/11 to the threat from international terrorism,” Carlson twisted the sentiment into an ad hominem attack on all GOP voters. 

“Got that? Vote the wrong way, and you are a jihadi," Carlson said. “You thought you were an American citizen with rights and just a different view, but no, you’re a jihadi, and we’re going to treat you the way we treated those radicals after 9/11, the way we treated bin Laden. Get in line, pal. This is a war on terror."

No, it's not a war on Republican voters, it's a battle against right-wing groups and individuals who resort to violence as a means of achieving political ends. But what we must now accept as Americans is that one of the parties in our two-party system is helping to radicalize domestic terrorists in the homeland. In other words, it is functionally working as a domestic terrorist organization, or House Speaker Na By failing to tell Republican voters the truth about Trump's bogus election fraud lie or, worse yet, selling the dangerous notion that GOP voters are being targeted simply for their views, Republican leaders are fueling a sense of helplessness that leads people to believe their only option is to upend the system.

"When those individuals embrace the former president's rhetoric... when they embrace the extremist rhetoric that the democratic process is broken and the election was stolen, they put people in this mindset that their only recourse is violence and no longer through the political process," explained Miles Taylor, the person who once penned the dubious "Anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times, but who nonetheless has a window into domestic terrorism and the Trump administration's efforts to cover up the threat. Speaking with MSNBC on Thursday, Taylor called the GOP's posture "extraordinarily dangerous," adding that "we've never seen anything like it" in modern American times. 

To be clear, our current political picture is one of democracy in retreat, and the Republican party is actively fueling that destabilization. Violence of the kind we saw on Jan. 6 is only the tip of the iceberg, and the vast majority of GOP officials are either afraid of the monster now devouring their party (e.g. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman retiring) or hideously trying to figure out how to capitalize on the outrage to their own political benefit. 

But as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank observed, "Democracy can’t function at the point of a gun." 

No, it cannot. Any normal column would end about now, but the question clearly is: What do we about all this to save our democracy? And while I don't have all the answers, I'll offer a few brief insights, most of which were inspired by the Throughline podcast on The anatomy of tyranny with historian Timothy Snyder (I highly recommend a listen and see the follow up episode with Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen has also dropped).

In brief, we need a dual short-term and long-term approach. In the short term, Democrats need to keep winning elections. Period. But on top of that, we must actually deliver on making people's lives better and more stable through providing decent jobs, dependable health care, and particularly right now, immediate economic relief. As Snyder noted, chaos and instability only feed the beast by making people feel more helpless and resentful. In order for people to have the bandwidth to listen to each other in a democracy, they must have some measure of stability and the prospect of opportunity in their lives.

Longer term, we absolutely must hold Trump accountable in order to knock him down from his demigod status among Trumpers and also keep him from creating a shadow presidency (for which he is clearly already in the process of consolidating power). The FBI must rigorously be monitoring extremists and prosecuting them, which sounds obvious. But the people who attacked the Capitol must be clearly marked as having participated in a crime against the state. And more federal resources must be devoted to the effort to root out domestic terrorism.

But the bigger goal here is to do everything we possibly can to keep Trump's "big lie" about election fraud and, more broadly, disenfranchisement from living on unchallenged in such a way that it gains steam over a period of years. Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, told Throughline it's the type of lie that many German's believed about Jews that Hitler helped fuel and then capitalized on to seize and consolidate power. Here's Snyder on a separate NPR piece: 

A big lie has singular potency, says Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, whose books include studies of Hitler, Josef Stalin, the Holocaust and tyranny.

"There are lies that, if you believe in them, rearrange everything," he says.

"Hannah Arendt, the political thinker, talked about the fabric of reality," Snyder says. "And a big lie is a lie which is big enough that it tears the fabric of reality."

In his cover story for The New York Times Magazine this week, Snyder calls Trump "the high priest of the big lie."

As for where big lies lead, Snyder writes: "Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president."

"When I say pre-fascism, I mean when you take away facts, you're opening the way for something else," Snyder tells NPR. "You're opening the way for someone who says 'I am the truth. I am your voice,' to quote Mr. Trump — which is something that fascists said, as a matter of fact. The three-word chants, the idea that the press are the enemy of the people: These are all fascist concepts."

"It doesn't mean that Trump is quite a fascist himself," Snyder adds. "Imagine what comes after that, right? Imagine if the big lie continues. Imagine if there's someone who's more skillful in using it than he is. Then we're starting to move into clearly fascist territory."

All of this is much too big to address in one piece, but we need more real facts to reach people who are instead turning to sources like YouTube and Facebook to selectively reinforce their worldview. Part of that is because local newsrooms across the country have been decimated. Part of it also due to lack of education and critical thinking skills. We must make education affordable and find ways to build fact-based news back into American life, so that it isn't only accessible to the elite. 

And finally, as much as I'm not a fan almost any Republican, we desperately need the ones who have at least been willing to tell the truth about Trump's lie. The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach and the five Senate Republicans who at least voted to proceed with the trial can be at base be part of the solution even if some of them have also done considerable damage as part of the problem. We should absolutely be trying to defeat every Republican at the ballot box, but I'm at least willing to give these 15 Republicans a small piece of credit. To greater and lesser extents, some of them actually put their lives on the line because that's how rabid the fringes of the GOP base have become.

Anyway, much of the short- and long-term solutions involve developing a more robust welfare state. Republicans will spend the next four years crowing that we simply cannot afford it, because deficit (which they didn't give a damn about for the last four years). What's clear given where we are now is that we can't afford not make these investments because cost of not doing so could be democracy itself.