The USA by a slim margin votes for Fascism, Rascism, Mysogeny, Hate.

[Peter Lemkin]

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it!!! Here we in the USA go into FASCISTLAND again!

[Peter Lemkin]

[size=12] [/size]Trump and Hitler - the ominous parallels!

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Double face, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler (2016). Photo credit: p. klashorst / Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0 DEED)

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Comparisons of Team Trump and Team Hitler have long — and with some very good reason — been off the table. And yet the list of parallels, of echoes, grows steadily:

• Exalting one’s own “tribe” (white supremacy)
  
• Vilifying and scapegoating the “other” — claiming opponents are “criminals”
  
• Intimidating others with rhetoric, and even violence
  
• Creating camps to hold undesired human beings
  
• Intolerance of the least fortunate; expressing delight at others’ suffering
  
• Glorifying male sexuality
  
• Encouraging couples to make more members of the “superior” race
  
• Demanding total loyalty
  
• Expecting obedience to all demands of the leader, without question
  
• Oversimplifying complex matters, promoting self-serving “common sense” solutions
  
• Disseminating propaganda and targeted disinformation to low-information citizens
  
• Trying to impress with military-style pageantry
  
• Exploiting superstition
  
• Invoking a mythical past to justify self-aggrandizement and predation
  
• Coveting other countries
  

Adolf Hitler with Benito Mussolini and senior Nazis, 1944. The photograph was taken after the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944. Left to right: Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, Colonel General Loerzer, Hitler, Mussolini.

With confirmation hearings unfolding now in Washington, we get to see this displayed in all its grotesque glory.
Old fashioned values are out the window. Decency, competency, honesty, honor — words that today sound so quaint, they might as well be from Old English. Thou may rest assured, none apply to the new regime.
Republicans have clearly abandoned the ostensible purpose of confirmation hearings spelled out in the US Constitution: to decide if nominees are well qualified to carry out the duties entailed by the position. Trump’s nominees stick religiously to a script. Everything is predetermined talking points, quite likely not even written by the contenders nor the GOP senators themselves nor necessarily even by their own staff.
Nothing will change GOP senators’ minds or occasion spontaneous inquiry. It is all performative. They are in lock-step behind a feared leader.
As for the Democrats, their senators come across as intelligent and passionate, yet clearly frustrated by the charade these sessions have become.
They do try to bring out blatant deficiencies in woefully unqualified candidates. But instead of following a coherent strategy to expose dangerous failings in Trump’s nominees, they seem to be taking random shots at targets that pop up like flashing dots on a visual field test.
One Democratic senator after another sought to discomfit Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, with questions about embarrassing facts in his past — which he mostly deflected, sometimes clumsily, but often like a tennis pro practicing overheads in warmups.
Echoing the awful, bloody Kavanaugh hearings, they went after him for infidelity to his wife and to his girlfriend, alleged sexual assault (go here to see the police report), misuse of money, and bacchanalian drinking (in several instances, he had to be carried out.) To these charges, Hegseth responded repeatedly, “Anonymous smears!”
Hegseth had no answer when Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) pointed out that the stories were clearly not anonymous — that they had seen several signed witness statements describing those incidents.
In any case, Hegseth predictably deployed the Jesus Defense — he had been absolved of anything and everything that had gone on before he found salvation.
Aside from his playing the religion card, it should have been obvious to the Democratic senators that their questioning of Hegseth about his personal improprieties was unlikely to resonate with Americans who already overlooked similar and worse things from Trump. More importantly, even Hegseth’s clear lack of character and moral compass must be considered a distant second or third to the real whopper: his manifest, glaring unfitness for the job itself.
Even Hegseth admitted his scant qualifications for such a difficult and sensitive position — managing nearly 3 million people and a budget not far off of a trillion dollars — by saying he plans to hire people smarter and more capable than himself. Which should have immediately prompted the questions: “Then why aren’t we actually considering someone smarter and more capable?” and “Why, really, are you in front of us at all, besides the fact Trump saw you on Fox?”
Saying that he is especially the guy to run the Pentagon because he has no experience in the institution (i.e., he’s an “outsider”) — though he had been a soldier on the front lines — raises a comparison: Should Apple be run by someone whose main experience in tech was working in one of its retail stores?
Republicans were, at best, able to get Hegseth to confirm that he would comply with basic things like submitting paperwork. For a position presiding over situations that could lead to the annihilation of humanity!
***
What the Democrats need to do is find more effective strategic communicators — who are fearlessly direct and relentlessly focused on issues that have a chance to move the needle of public opinion, however slightly. They should at least have been ready with charts comparing Hegseth to highly qualified past Republican picks, including Gen. James Mattis, a widely admired figure who resigned after a falling out with Trump during his first term.
We all know the awesome responsibility of running the Pentagon. Hegseth should have been questioned by someone who would skip quizzing him over the details of specific policies, alliances, and terminology and instead drill down on what Hegseth actually understands about the vital role of the secretary of defense, the precise skills, talents, and knowledge needed for the job, and the tremendous risks involved.
The bottom line is that — putting aside all of his character issues, even if his character were impeccable — Hegseth is completely and totally unqualified to run the Defense Department.

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Defense Secretary Nominee Pete Hegseth testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing, January 14, 2025.

If, as many have suggested, a substantial subset of Trump’s nominees were picked precisely to convey the utmost disrespect for the seriousness of governing, to give the middle finger to what may go down in history as the American edition of the Weimar Republic, Hegseth can take his shameful position at the head of that class. He has almost literally no redeeming qualities that would make one inclined to overlook his grave character flaws.
Senators could have moved away from what might have felt to some viewers like a game of gotcha, by stressing the big picture — and the risks to America and even the world — with putting an incompetent man in charge of the planet’s most powerful military.
In a time when a large share of the public seems to have been cognitively reengineered through social media, it’s essential to experiment deliberately to see what, if anything, works in getting really vital concepts across to the electorate.
And while we’re at it, we might consider cueing up those Nazi-themed documentaries. The comparisons cry out, right down to the unqualified and insane but highly ambitious monsters Hitler put in charge of large parts of his government. Only very belatedly, with their country and its reputation in ruins, did Germans discover that the early misgivings expressed by a few prominent anti-Nazi figures had a factual basis.
Oh, and regarding that old story, widely recirculated in 2024, in which Trump’s first wife, Ivana, reportedly told her attorney that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside cabinet, Trump’s artful response was that he had never read Mein Kampf. One does tend to believe Trump’s claim that he did not read something — but, more importantly, Ivana had not said it was Mein Kampf — which is a book-length manifesto rather than a collection of speeches, of which there are plenty of published collections.
In any case, if Trump hasn’t been cribbing from Hitler’s speeches and program, well, one can only say that the resemblance is remarkable and uncanny. Then again, it should not surprise us that diseased minds, just like great ones, think alike.
russbaker@substack.com

[Peter Lemkin]

The start of the Fourth Reich! Musk has also met with and openly supported the German neo-Nazi AfD Party. This 'accused' bullshit is called denial and normalization by the press. NYT said it was a 'Roman Salute'.

[Peter Lemkin]

This from the Simon Rosenberg - Hopium Chronicles [on Substack.com]

I couldn’t sleep on Elon Musk going full Nazi at an official event with the President of the United States this afternoon.

Most of the videos circulating around the Internet show him making the salute once. The clip above is from a different angle and shows that after giving the first enthusiastic salute Musk turns around and gives it a second time so people in the back could see it too.

We began the morning celebrating Dr. King. This afternoon Donald Trump’s Inauguration celebrated Nazism.

Why would anyone suspect that Musk is a Nazi sympathizer and that this wasn’t just “locker room talk,” you know boys being Ketamined boys?

First, here’s a link to the Rolling Stone story from above. On-line Nazis were ecstatic.

Next, let’s dive a bit deeper in Musk and his political views and activities.

Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, J.N. Haldeman, was a far-right political activist:

Haldeman was born in Minnesota in 1902 but grew up mostly in Saskatchewan, Canada. A daredevil aviator and sometime cowboy, he also trained and worked as a chiropractor. In the nineteen-thirties, he joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.

Elon played a significant role in electing Trump, a far-right extremist with Russian sympathies, and in keeping the House Republican. He has turned Twitter into the loudest platform for far-right politics in the world. After unseating the Democrats here he is working now to unseat liberal, pro-Western political parties in Canada, Germany and the UK and replace them with far-right parties. He is an advisor to the incoming President of the United States and this event today where Musk let loose was not a campaign event but an official event of the new government of the United States of America with the entire world watching.

That New Yorker story about Musk’s grandfather I cite above goes on to report that of some of his South African writings were discovered in 2017. All of what follows may sound a bit familiar:

    In 2017, the collection acquired two of Haldeman’s tracts, as part of a trove from an anonymous donor which has now grown to nineteen thousand pieces of right-wing propaganda and conspiracy literature. One of the Haldeman tracts, “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa,” is dated May, 1960. The timing is significant. In February, 1960, Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, delivered his famous “Wind of Change” speech to the South African Parliament, discountenancing apartheid and urging acceptance of independence movements: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” In March, South African police opened fire on a crowd of thousands of Black South Africans protesting outside the Sharpeville police station, killing sixty-nine people, including children, and wounding nearly two hundred. The killings were captured on television and the coverage reached around the world. In the ensuing protests and state of emergency, Nelson Mandela was among eighteen thousand people arrested and jailed. Haldeman’s tracts defended white rule against an “international conspiracy” that opposed it.

    “Every day the brain-washers repeat and emphasize the things they want us to believe,” Haldeman warned in his forty-two-page May, 1960, tract. “As examples ‘The Natives are ill-treated,’ ‘underpaid,’ ‘underprivileged,’ ‘separate development is wrong,’ ‘apartheid is un-Christian.’ Every day newspapers, magazines, commercial radio newscasters, bioscopes, din this into the conscious and subconscious minds of the public.” (“Bioscopes,” here, means motion pictures.) “People who know it is 99% untrue repeat these lies emphatically and emotionally,” Haldeman wrote.

    Haldeman railed against many dark forces that he believed to be propagating these ideas: Jewish bankers, Jewish intellectuals, philanthropic foundations run by Jews, communists, Black leaders, and anyone who supported the overthrow of colonial rule in Africa. “The facts of history show that the White man has always developed the country he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned,” he wrote, peddling stock apartheid propaganda, and “The Black people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization from the earliest times but, on their own, built nothing and discovered nothing, not even the wheel.”

    In the second tract that M.S.U. holds, “The International Conspiracy in Health,” Haldeman blamed the “collectivist-internationalist” conspiracy—“from Kennedy to Kenyatta”—for “centralized health schemes” that include national health insurance and various pharmaceuticals (including fluoride in the water, another conspiracy), all of which he considered “anti-Christian infringements on human liberties.” If some people were not alarmed by all of this, he wrote, it was because of mind control. “When a Christian subscribes to this, it is the result of the concentrated, intentional brain-washing done by the International Conspiracy.” Submitting to national health care was one way the conspirators were allowing “Black or Coloured political puppets” to take “control of responsible White people.” The Conspiracy, he warned, controls universities, medical schools, and even textbooks. “The Conspiracy feels that any medical intervention, so long as it is in mass, is a desirable procedure.” Above all, “The promoters of World Government have always been behind mass vaccination programmes.”

Yes, my friends, we have a lot of work to do - Simon

[Peter Lemkin]

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Message from the Executive Director

 
Today was a hard day for many people, especially immigrants and trans* people, groups whose rights and dignity have been assailed and threatened by Donald Trump and the Republican Party for almost a decade now.
 
We at the Lemkin Institute were particularly horrified, however, to watch billionaire Elon Musk, the most powerful man on earth with unfettered access to the new US president, give a Nazi salute not once, but twice during his inauguration speech. While some apologists are claiming that this was not a Nazi salute, but rather a mistake, a wave to the audience, or a 'Roman salute' (which is also associated with the "alt-right" anyway), many Holocaust and genocide historians have weighed in that Musk most certainly was intentionally using the Nazi Salute. All of us who have studied the Third Reich know a Nazi Salute when we see one.
 
We can debate, however, why Musk may have done this. Was he so caught up in the sense of victory that his true leanings came out in a moment of forgetfulness? Was he stupidly and vapidly cos-playing triumph from films and other popular depictions of Hitler? Was he signalling his intentions to fellow-travelers? Was he seeking to undermine the president?
 
Whatever he was doing, it was a frightening start to the second Trump administration. As we note in our Red Flag Alert, we have learned to take powerful men at their word when they signal genocidal leanings. Musk's gesture cannot be and must not be explained away. The Trump administration must be made to address this head-on and to take clear steps to distance itself from Musk and other neo-Nazis.
 
So, despite our warnings about Republican hate speech and genocidal language during Trump's presidential campaign, we are surprised to be issuing a Red Flag Alert for the United States of America on the very first day of the second Trump term as president.
 
Elon Musk's clear use of the Nazi salute during his speech has given us no other option. The use of an antisemitic genocidal signal by the world's most powerful man, who has engaged in racism and antisemitism in the past, cannot be taken lightly or written off as a mistake.
 
Please read our full statement below.
 
In Peace and Solidarity,
Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey
 

Red Flag Alert for Genocide - United States of America

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention is without words after the billionaire Elon Musk gave the Nazi salute twice during his speech at the inauguration of President Donald Trump in the United States of America. Musk’s act is a frightening signal of things to come, an offense to the nation, and, possibly, an effort to embarrass and weaken an aging Donald Trump, making him vulnerable to a Musk takeover.

 
In light of Musk’s important influence on the new administration, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is issuing a Red Flag Alert for genocide in the United States.

 
We at the Lemkin Institute had no misperceptions about the possible threats of a Donald Trump presidency, particularly to the rights of refugees and the LGBTQ community, as well as the likelihood that America’s weakened democratic institutions will be undermined if not completely destroyed by an administration that is formed by people who have lauded autocrats and dictators in other regions of the world. We made this clear in our Statement on Genocide and the US Presidential Election on 4 November 2024. 

 
However, we did not expect to be issuing a Red Flag Alert for genocide on the very first day of President Trump’s presidency after one of his closest advisors gave the Nazi salute twice to a crowd of cheering Americans.

 
We remind Americans that many of their fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers died fighting the Nazi regime during World War II in the name of the aspirational goals of the United States to be a beacon of liberty. The memory of those lost fighting fascism is honored by memorials in most US cities and towns – their names sit on street signs and their faces are remembered in portraits in the houses of patriotic Americans proud of their anti-fascist history. They were heroes. Many of the victims of Nazi terror and Nazi genocide found a safe haven in the United States after 1933, including Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term genocide and who was the driver behind the adoption of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in 1948. Lemkin, who was Jewish and Polish, lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust.

 
That Elon Musk, an unelected figure close to the president, should feel free to flash the Nazi salute on inauguration day, a day that this year coincides with Martin Luther King day, is hard to fathom. It is an insult to this country, to its Constitution, to its veterans, and to the many survivors of the Holocaust who created new lives and new families within our safe borders. 

 
Should Mr. Musk argue that he “did not mean” to flash the Nazi salute, or that he was doing some other arm gesture, we ask Americans to respond with critical thinking. Is it possible that any person – especially in South Africa (where support for Nazism was very strong) or the USA (where the History Channel has introduced almost all but the youngest generations to the Nazi salute) – is unaware of this salute or what it means? And we ask Americans to try it out: The salute is not at all a “natural” gesture of the arm as it moves the hand from the heart into a wave to an audience. It is almost impossible that this was an unfortunate mistake. Finally, can we really believe that someone who is so often in the public eye would risk an arm gesture – twice – that looks almost exactly like the Nazi salute while he is supposedly celebrating Donald Trump’s election to president? We strongly believe that Elon Musk’s gesture was intentional. We will be happy to be proven wrong.

 
Nazism must be fought everywhere it rears its head. It imbues more generic forms of fascism with racialized fantasies of natural hierarchies of humanity and always calls for the elimination of certain groups from society in the name of self-preservation. Racialist fascism is at heart a genocidal process that often starts with one group and moves on to others. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist movement in Germany saw Jews as its principal and cosmic enemy, although Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the German population. Jews were singled out – along with the Roma-Sinti people – for total annihilation. But the Nazis, as part of their genocidal remaking of Germany, also targeted a host of other groups for sterilization, torture, murder, and ‘partial’ elimination, such as gays, trans people, Jehovah’s witnesses, black Germans, communists, socialists, trade unionists, Social Democrats, the physically disabled, people deemed to be mentally ‘unfit,’ and many more. The Polish nation was slated for a 75% decimation and was to be rendered a permanent slave class. 

 
The Nazis began their genocidal process by targeting their primary political enemy, the German Communist party and its members. The popularity of this terror campaign among pliant, timid middle class Germans, who were staunchly anti-communist, weakened German institutions and paved the way for Hitler to institutionalize his dictatorship, which eventually sought to root out all difference and all dissent from the German social body. We know now that Hitler brought ruination on Germany, destroying those same middle class families with war and economic devastation, and burdening the entire nation with responsibility for the murder of 6 million Jews alongside the massive casualties experienced by all sides in the war. Germany will be branded by Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust for as long as it exists. 

 
We cannot forget these facts. The worst mistake any American can make at this time is to believe that Musk is stupid or to be pliant and timid in the face of this provocation.

 
At the Lemkin Institute we have learned that we must absolutely take leaders, and people in positions of great power, like Elon Musk, at their word when they signal allegiance with hate groups through signals or through speech. 

 
Musk’s Hitler salute cannot and must not be swept under the rug. The US press, cowed as it has been under President Biden, cannot be trusted to cover the new president’s administration with any backbone or honesty. It is up to the American people to defend the Constitution and this country’s core values against all threats. 

 
Trans people, refugees, and migrants are not the threats. The billionaires with close ties to our new president who flash the Nazi salute and seek to replace the old elites with a new caste – that is the real threat to America. 

 
We hope that President Donald Trump will see this threat for what it is and that he will have enough love of country to do what any patriot would do in his shoes: Repudiate Musk and strip Musk of the position and the access that he has been granted, assuring the American people that a Trump Presidency will not serve to empower present-day Nazis of any stripes.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

A lot here on both Trump's dividing the US population into Us and Them, as well as the Genocidal War in Gaza. 

It is about the weaponization of political speech.

[Peter Lemkin]

A Day That Will Live In Infamy
And an existential battle that we have to win
Harry Litman
Jan 21

Trump’s blizzard of executive orders in his first hours as president includes a dozen or more dangerous edicts that bring us closer to an authoritarian state. Driven by lies, propaganda, and pro-billionaire policies, they will come under heavy fire in the courts, as a few already have. His brazen moves to revoke enemies’ security clearances, manufacture an emergency to justify draconian immigration measures, ignore Congress’s command with respect to TikTok, and overturn the clear constitutional command of birthright citizenship, among others, are a tsunami of outrages by a madman. In the coming days, I and many colleagues will do all we can to painstakingly explain their anti-constitutional, anti-rule-of-law, and anti-American character.
Upgrade to paid
But all of these moves are swamped by the sweeping pardons that Trump extended to nearly all the 1,600 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a murderous rampage whipped up by Trump to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. As a former DOJ official, line prosecutor, and partisan of the rule of law, I am loath to lump in this putrescence with the other assaults on constitutional rule. They call out for an initial separate condemnation.
The pardons are vile, vicious, and despicable. They are the most flagrant show of disrespect and tyranny toward the country by any president in our history. If they are not strongly repudiated by history, it will mean that the country has been lost.
In my paroxysm of blue-sky posts in the wake of the news, I wrote, “I cannot think of a remotely similar betrayal of country by a sitting president,” and served it up as a question to our national historian laureate, Heather Cox Richardson. She was good enough to reply quickly: “I got nothing. This is huge.”
Trump’s outrages, as I wrote yesterday, are invariably based on a lie. The pardons are based on several big lies.

We Are Now A Backsliding Democracy
Harry Litman
·
Jan 20
Read full story
The first big lie was his elaborate insistence that he won the 2016 election, which was rigged against him. Jack Smith's report makes clear that the claim not only was always laughable, but Trump knew it. Incredibly, he maintains it to this day: the pardons are part of an overall mission to erase history that would be poignant if it weren’t so dangerous.
The second big lie is Trump’s assault on the mammoth Department of Justice operation, the biggest in its history, to bring over 1,500 of the marauders to justice. Trump’s portrayal of the prosecutions as politicized—a trope that Pam Bondi picked up on in her nomination hearing—is grievously wrong and insulting to the army of career prosecutors at the DOJ who brought the offenders to justice while safeguarding their constitutional rights. One reason, in fact, that Trump was unable to cull out nonviolent offenders is that the department had already given most of them a pass. It was an extraordinarily resource-intensive operation, and an undeniably righteous one.
After Vance and Bondi’s pronouncements, it had seemed likely that Trump would pull back from the more extravagant versions of his promises to pardon the marauders. It would have been in character with Trump’s playbook of under-delivering and declaring victory, as I expect he will try with the imperialist threats on the Panama Canal. But he couldn’t resist the full embrace of the thugs who came to his aid and the full rebuke of the people who sought to bring them to justice.
Trump’s action delivers two middle fingers to the Department of Justice, raised higher than Elon Musk’s already infamous Roman salute. (There’s another, more disgusting image to call on, involving Trump’s doing to the country what one of his now-pardoned patriots did to the floor of the U.S. Capitol.) That, in fact, was part of the point.
The third big lie was his portrayal of the vicious marauders he had called into action as “heroes” and “patriots.” In fact, they were thugs and domestic terrorists. It fell to the judges of the D.C. district court—young and old, Republican and Democrat, and Trump appointees—to reject Trump’s lies and set the record straight. They dismissed Trump’s characterizations as preposterous and insisted that the defendants were enemies of democracy. Many of them, pushing on limits for judicial public speech, had cautioned Trump not to issue “blanket pardons.” They are surely among the most frustrated and disappointed American citizens today.
As for the pardoned horde, it’s hard to see why they wouldn’t conclude they now have license, even duty, to intimidate Trump’s opponents anytime they perceive a wink and nod from the boss. Or do we expect them to now go back to their day jobs and become peaceful model citizens?
Fourth and finally, both Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance and Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi assured the public that pardons should not be given to violent marauders or anyone who had threatened law enforcement. Vance and Bondi either were sending up smoke screens or they themselves were left completely in the dark by Trump’s radical plans.
If she had any self-respect, Bondi would now withdraw her nomination. Not only is this the worst affront to the DOJ in its history, it contradicts her testimony and her expressed revulsion for pardoning people who are violent to law enforcement while making her look impotent.
Worse, enormously worse, the pardons sweep in some of the most dangerous domestic terrorists in American history, including the two organizing forces behind the operation, Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, and Enrique Tarrio, former chairman of the Proud Boys, who made their name with political street violence.
Both were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a famously rare and difficult charge and one of the most serious offenses in the books against not just a person but society and the Constitution. Tarrio received the longest sentence—22 years—of any January 6 marauder; Rhodes received 18 years.
A few of Tarrio’s and Rhodes’s words, set out in their indictments for seditious conspiracy:

• Tarrio: “If Biden steals this election [the Proud Boys] will be political prisoners. We won’t go quietly…I promise.”
  
• Tarrio: “It’s time for fucking war if they steal this shit.”
  
• Tarrio: “Hopefully the firing squads are for the traitors that are trying to steal the election from the American people.”
  
• Rhodes: Trump has to involve the Insurrection Act, and if he doesn’t, it would lead to a “much more bloody war.”
  
• Rhodes: After the insurrection, “We should have brought rifles. We could’ve fixed it right then and there. I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamp post.”
  

And for good measure, there is this gem from Daniel Rodriguez, which Professor Richardson highlighted on her indispensable Substack, Letters From An American. Rodriguez received a 12 ½ year sentence after he pleaded guilty to tasing Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, causing a heart attack and traumatic brain injury. After the tasing, he boasted to his friends in a group chat: “Omg I did so much fucking shit right now and got away. Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue.”
All in all, Trump’s blanket pardons include over 600 marauders convicted of crimes of violence, including assault, resisting or impeding law enforcement, or obstructing officers during a civil disorder. 174 of those were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Besides Rhodes and Tarrio, several other high-up members of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
These were villains to the Constitution who belong in the same infamous company as Timothy McVeigh, the Tsarnaev brothers, and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.
There may be some crazed MAGA extremists out there who applaud Trump’s treachery. But all the political figures that continue to support him surely know how sickening and dishonest it is. You have to wonder how Republican members of Congress, forced to flee from the Capitol floor when the mob Trump sicked on them broke through, are feeling tonight. Not to mention Mitch McConnell, whose loss of nerve at the second impeachment allowed Trump to fight another day. Or the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who buoyed his return to power.
But the greatest grievance belongs to the country—that is, to all of us. Some of Trump’s orders today harm some constituencies but not others. Not the pardons. Like January 6 itself, they are an assault first and foremost on the Constitution and the rule of law. They reward violence not just against people but against the Constitution, and in the service of a treacherous lie on his behalf. The more they sink in, the more sickening they are. They are, and will remain, a deep stain on our history.
It follows that our 47th president, in his very first hours in office, has become a profound traitor and extreme menace to the country as a whole. It is, in a way, a moment of excruciating moral clarity. It reveals that the people and institutions—notably media and big tech—who are bowing the knee are betraying the national good, and the figures counseling finding middle ground are misguided.
I want, as always, to bring it home to the smart fight. I recognize the apocalyptic tenor of my reaction to the pardons, and it’s a fair fit to the off-the-charts level of constitutional insult. I also realize that it’s critical not to be fatalistic and, moreover, to keep an even keel for the marathon we are in. For one, it’s hard to be persuasive when you are screaming at the top of your lungs. So I intend to be keeping it together even as I implement the two-part platform I’ve set out in various entries in these pages: 1) always call out the lies; 2) never capitulate to an inroad on constitutional rule.

How to think about protective pardons
Harry Litman
·
Jan 13
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But make no mistake about where things stand as of today, day 1 of a historically miserable presidency. We are in an existential battle for our democracy. It's a battle that could be lost but must be won.