Dispatches

REPUBLICAN INCOMPETENCE MAKES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT POPULAR AGAIN.

After Senate Democrats approved the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (3/6), clearing its way to final passage, President Biden credited the American people with making possible what is arguable the most progressive piece of legislation in a generation, Kerry Eleveld wrote at DailyKos (3/8).

“Quite frankly, without the overwhelming, bipartisan support of the American people, this would not have happened,” Biden said. The president touted the “real, tangible results” delivered by the package. Americans, he said, “will be able to see and know and feel the changes in their own lives.”

It may simply sound like smart politics on Biden’s part (and it is), but it also has the benefit of being true. If the giant trillion-dollar package had been incredibly divisive among voters, clearing it on Democrats’ razor-thin Senate majority alone would have been a much heavier lift. But the fact is, Biden’s plan is wildly popular—polling at roughly 70% support in numerous surveys—including broad support among Republican and even Trump voters. Several polls also found that the public wanted passage of Biden’s plan more than they wanted bipartisan involvement from GOP lawmakers. That unflinching support, which was both broad and deep among the public, made its passage virtually inevitable.

But the bigger takeaway from the plan’s uniquely unifying qualities may be that the vast majority of Americans are simply hurting so badly after four years of total GOP incompetence, they actually crave a government that works again.

As the Washington Post noted, the nearly $800 billion stimulus package that President Obama passed at the outset of his presidency in order to save the economy wasn’t nearly so well received—not only by the public but also by centrist Democrats, who ultimately ensured the stimulus wouldn’t be large enough to give the economy a quick reboot. Instead, the Obama-era recovery sputtered along in a way that didn’t bring immediate relief to most Americans and failed to blunt an epidemic of home foreclosures that spread across the country.

But one of the lawmakers who was intimately involved in negotiating that stimulus package says the American public has undergone a seismic shift in the intervening decade.

“People have gone from being anti-government, to beyond being even neutral on it, to thinking: ‘We need the government; it has to help us,’ ” said former congressman Barney Frank, who chaired the House Financial Services Committee from 2007 to 2011. “You have a new consensus in America—that the government has an important role, and that Ronald Reagan was wrong. For the first time in my lifetime, people are saying that the government has done too little rather than doing too much.”

The case that Frank makes comes on the heels of a Republican reign in which GOP leaders ensured hundreds of thousands of Americans would die due to sheer governmental incompetence paired with outright indifference. On top of that, when Republicans had unified control of the federal government, they poured money into corporate coffers through a giant tax break that did next to nothing for working Americans. Even their pandemic stimulus packages were primarily targeted at helping American businesses survive, particularly as the crisis progressed. By contrast, Biden bet on the poor to juice the economy, as New York Times analyst Jim Tankersley observed. In other words, while Republicans hewed to the trickle-down economics championed by Reagan, Biden and Democrats are pushing the recovery from the bottom up.

But what we might in fact be witnessing is the dawning of a new era in which the decades-old GOP cudgel of big government being the problem rather than the solution has finally reached the point of diminishing returns. One of the reasons Republicans have remained so loyal to Reagan-era ideas over the course of decades is because they helped the party reframe a conversation about the role of the federal government that had mostly won the day since the advent of New Deal progressivism in the 1930s.

That changing public sentiment has undoubtedly been helped along by a Republican Party that is pitifully unserious in deadly serious times.

“Moderate vulnerable Democrats feel a lot more freedom to vote for a big spending bill in the current moment—because the polls suggest it’s popular, and because the case against Democrats is being made on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, not the debt,” said David Hopkins, a professor of political science at Boston College.

Even someone like Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), who spent the ‘90s championing Democratic candidates who campaigned on reducing the national debt, sees the need for a different approach.

“I was knocking doors for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania [last fall], and the most memorable conversation I had was with a guy who said, ‘I just want to know who will send me the checks,’” Beyer recalled.

The COVID-19 crisis has given Democrats an opportunity to address the dire needs of Americans in ways not seen in decades—even during the Great Recession. With Biden’s relief package, Democrats seized that opportunity in a way that just might influence Americans’ opinions about the role of government for a generation to come.

DEMS HAIL BIG SPENDING, WITH AN EYE ON INFRASTRUCTURE PACKAGE. Now that Democrats have gotten President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan for coronavirus relief through the Senate, they are turning their attention to a wide-ranging jobs and infrastructure plan that’s expected to come next — with an even higher price tag, Jacqueline Alemany noted at the Washington Post (3/8).

Democrats are considering as much as $3 trillion in new spending for the cornerstone of Biden’s “Build Back Better” program. Any bill that does not use the fast-track budget rules will need to clear 60 votes in the divided Senate — and Republicans, who criticized Biden for ditching his bipartisan approach to pass the bill without any Republicans, have described his infrastructure plan as “bad politics” and “wildly expensive” and indicated they eventually intend to plan to campaign against it.

Democrats plan to go on the offense — noting the relief package is overwhelmingly supported by an American public amid a health crisis that’s killed more than 525,000 people in the US.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told the Post that Americans need to know that “every single Republican opposed $1,400 checks for working families, opposed needed funding get more Americans vaccinated more quickly, opposed lifting 13 million Americans out of poverty, and opposed making health insurance more affordable for millions more Americans.

“Everything we are seeing in our polling is that the ‘Build Back Better’ framework, including its emphasis on clean energy investments, is as popular as the American Rescue Plan has been,” Garin said. “If Republicans are as obstructionist about that as they were about the rescue bill, they will pay a similar political price.”

SUPREME COURT DUMPS LAST TRUMP ELECTION APPEAL. The US Supreme Court disposed of the last of three cases brought by former President Trump challenging his election loss, bringing a muted end to his futile attempt in the courts to hold onto power, Reuters reported (3/8). The court, without comment, rejected Trump’s appeal challenging thousands of absentee ballots filed in Wisconsin, an election battleground that Joe Biden won by more than 20,000 votes. Biden became president Jan. 20.

It was the last of three petitions filed at the Supreme Court near the end of Trump’s presidency that the justices declined to take up. The court on Feb. 22 turned away Trump’s other two appeals — a second Wisconsin challenge and one relating to voting in Pennsylvania, another pivotal state Trump lost. Lower courts previously had ruled against Trump in those three cases.

In the Wisconsin case, Trump sued two days after the state had certified its election results. He challenged several Wisconsin election policies, including one allowing the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both a federal judge and the Chicago-based 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the claims, noting in part that Trump had waited too long to sue.

Courts around the country rejected the cases brought by Trump and his allies, sometimes in colorful terms. A judge put it this way in November in rejecting a Trump challenge in Pennsylvania: “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.”

IF DEMOCRACY LOSES TO MONEY, IT MAY NOT RISE AGAIN. “Now that the Senate has managed to produce a COVID relief package that only happens to be the greatest piece of social legislation since the Great Society, thanks in no small part to the efforts of voters in the state of Georgia, the passage of HR 1, the “For The People” Act, has become more than urgent,” Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (3/8). “It’s possible that the law is the last chance that democracy has against outraged privilege and the money power. The big guns are primed and ready.”

Fox News reported that Heritage Action for America, a conservative nonprofit tied to the right-leaning think tank The Heritage Foundation, plans to spend at least $10 million on efforts to tighten election security laws in eight key swing states. The details of the effort, first obtained by Fox News, will include digital and television ads, volunteer issue advocacy campaigns and lobbying state legislatures directly. Heritage Action will target Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin, all considered key swing states after the 2020 election. The $10 million will be an initial seed investment with more likely to come, Fox News was told.

“Ten million bucks is seed money? The noxious plants sown by Anthony Kennedy in Citizens United are, apparently, perennials,” Pierce noted. “If democracy gets money-whipped this time around, it never may rise again, not with a Supreme Court better than even money to bleed what’s left of the Voting Rights Act to death. The absurdity of ‘election integrity’ laws being needed after the most secure election we’ve ever had should not blind us to what’s going on. This is a concerted effort by the oligarchical right to make sure events like the election in Georgia never happen again.”

Pierce added, “This isn’t Trumpism, although The Big Lie is a barely submerged subtext in all of these laws, as well as in the opposition to HR 1 in Washington. This is the desperate final act of a campaign that began 50 years ago. The echoes of the truncheons on the Edmund Pettus Bridge will echo through every syllable of every argument ranged against HR 1, a debate in which racism is the only actual reality. Every other argument against it is smoke and mirrors and cheap camouflage. And choosing to preserve the filibuster rather than break up the assault on the most essential element of self-government is to surrender to the forms of democracy, place it in service to useless ritual, and to the mythology of what actually happened in 2020.”

“Fair elections are essential for every policy debate in the future,” Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson said in a statement. “We are working to help state lawmakers restore trust in our elections, ensure transparency, and protect the rights of every American to a fair election. This is our number one priority, and we are committed to doing whatever it takes.”

“There’s truth in that, god knows,” Pierce noted. “Down in Georgia, where the franchise is under sustained assault in a lot of directions, this is part of Whatever It Takes.”

WMAZ TV in Macon, Ga reported the election bill adds an ID requirement for absentee ballot requests. It also limits the number of absentee ballot drop boxes and requires them to be kept inside of early voting locations. People can be charged with a misdemeanor for passing out food and drinks to voters standing in line.

“You have to be more than half pissant to think of an idea like this, let alone vote for it,” Pierce noted. “But Whatever It Takes, right? With $10 million there for seed.”

LINDSEY GRAHAM ADMITS TRUMP COULD ‘DESTROY’ GOP, AFTER EX-PREZ SENDS RNC CEASE-AND-DESIST LETTER. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., described former President Trump’s hold over the Republican Party as something of a hostage situation. 

The former President, Graham said, “could make the Republican Party something that nobody else I know could make it. He could make it bigger. He could make it stronger. He could make it more diverse. And he also could destroy it.”

In an interview with Axios (3/7), Graham continued to describe the former president along the lines of the duality of man, Jon Skolnick noted at Salon (3/8). Trump, Graham said, has both a “dark side” and some “magic” in him. “What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.”

Before Trump’s nomination in 2016, Sen. Graham had been a staunch critic of Trump, arguing that he was not mentally fit for the role. After Trump was nominated, however, Graham quickly became one of Trump’s most ardent allies. 

Although Graham did not support Trump’s impeachment, the senator admitted that Trump “needs to understand that his actions were the problem” leading up the Capitol insurrection.

But Trump has also shown signs of breaking with Republican organizations cashing in on his political capital. On March 6, NBC News reported that Trump’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to three Republican organizations –– the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Senate Committee –– demanding that they discontinue the usage of Trump’s name and likeness.

During Trump’s CPAC speech two weeks earlier, the former President listed off the names of Congressional Republicans who voted to impeach him, urging his followers to “get rid of them all.” He said that the only way to support “our efforts” is to elect Trump-supporting Republicans.

Trump also told attendees “there’s only one way to contribute to our efforts” to elect Trump Republicans: donating to his PAC, or via his website.

TRUMP VANDALISM AT USDA IS JUST CONSERVATIVE GOVERNANCE. More than a year after two US Department of Agriculture research agencies were moved from the nation’s capital to Kansas City, forcing a mass exodus of employees who couldn’t or didn’t want to move halfway across the country, they remain critically understaffed and some farmers are less confident in the work they produce, the Associated Press reported (3/8).

The decision to move the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture in September 2019 was pitched as putting them closer to farmers in the nation’s breadbasket, though much of their work involves advising members of Congress back in Washington. After the relocation was announced, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Mick Mulvaney, joked that moving the jobs to Kansas City was also “a wonderful way to streamline government.”

Tom Vilsack inherited a demoralized workforce at the two agencies when he took over as secretary of agriculture under President Joe Biden. With 235 vacancies between them, the agencies continued to hire during the pandemic and administration change, but they are putting out work that is smaller in scope and less frequent, causing some farmers to look elsewhere for data they rely on to run their operations.

Among them is Vance Ehmke, a Kansas farmer who said since the USDA relocations occurred, he has been paying a lot more attention to private market analysis and what private grain companies are doing. The information feeds his decisions on everything from whether to buy more land or a new tractor to whether to build more grain bins.

“Here, when we need really good, hard information, you are really starting to question groups like USDA, which before that had a sterling reputation,” Ehmke said recently. “But out in the country, people are worried about how good the information is now because those groups are operating at half capacity.”

“This is classic conservative governance made even worse by the ignorance and sloth that were the hallmarks of the previous administration,” Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (3/8).

In October 2016 — before Trump’s first year in office — ERS had 318 permanent employees, according to USDA data. By October 2019 — just a month after the move — its workforce had shrunk to 164. As of late January 2021, it had 219 employees, including 67 still based in Washington. The same trend played out at NIFA, which had 320 employees in October 2016. In October 2019, it was down to 112 workers, though it rebounded somewhat to 218 by late January, including 16 based in Washington.

“Best I can tell, they were putting out information that Trump really did not like hearing, like global climate change and things like that,” Ehmke said. “And here in the United States, what we do with groups like that — we can’t send them to Siberia, so we send them to Kansas City.”

“Better BBQ, but I take his point,” Pierce noted.

REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS ROLL BACK COVID-19 RESTRICTIONS — AND HEALTH EXPERTS ARE HORRIFIED. West University, a small city in Texas’ Greater Houston metropolitan area, is grappling with the state’s impending removal of COVID-19 mask mandates and business restrictions. Even though the policies are set to be implemented on Wednesday, many business owners in the state are unsure how to respond to it.

“I don’t believe the onus should be on small business, especially in the hospitality industry,” Al Jara, owner of a West University watering hole called Marquis II, told Houston ABC affiliate KTRK when describing his frustration over figuring out how to best satisfy his customers. “Over the last year, we’ve been hurt the most, and requiring us now to take a side on the mask isn’t right in my opinion.”

Texas is not alone in rolling back COVID-19 restrictions designed to protect public health. Last week Republican governors in West Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama joined Texas’ Gov. Greg Abbott in announcing varying degrees of loosening or phasing out pandemic regulations that had been put into place over the past year. Some states, like Alaska and Georgia, never implemented mask mandates in the first place. Others, like Florida, decided to reopen their businesses months ago (September in the case of Florida).

In Texas specifically, Abbott has vowed to open the state “100 percent” by ending a mask mandate implemented in July and telling businesses they can reopen. Mississippi has already ended its statewide mask mandates and state-imposed pandemic restrictions. In West Virginia, the governor announced that restaurants and bars will be able to operate at 100 percent seating capacity, but he drew the line at revoking the mask mandate.

It seems political leaders in the South are particularly fed up with pandemic-related public health restrictions. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey actually announced that she was extending the statewide mask mandate until April 19, but it is currently expected to expire at that time. Arkansas announced an end to most of its indoor capacity restrictions last month and said that, if the state falls below certain thresholds in hospitalizations and test positivity, it will end its mask mandate on March 31.

Public health experts have been unequivocally horrified at the moves, and say prematurely removing mask mandates and fully reopening businesses is a very bad idea.

“The decision to reduce mask wearing and reopen business anywhere in the US in extremely unwise and in fact dangerous,” Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist and chair of Access Health International, told Salon by email. “Twice we reopened prematurely and have suffered grievously in terms of numbers of dead and of those who are suffering from long term Covid-related disease.”

Haseltine was not alone in expressing this concern.

“From a public health perspective it makes zero sense to abandon pandemic precautions at this time!” Dr. Alfred Sommer, professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, wrote to Salon. “Only a small percentage of our population has been vaccinated as yet — we won’t have herd immunity that would materially reduce our collective risk until 70+ percent have been immunized. Nothing has changed that should embolden relaxing our guard at this point.”

HELD BACK OUT OF FEAR OF TRUMP, FEMALE GENERALS FINALLY GET PROMOTED BY BIDEN. The Department of Defense announced (3/6) the nomination of two female generals for four-star command positions just months after Pentagon officials delayed their nominations for fear that Trump might reject the two women and replace them outright before leaving office, Jon Skolnik noted at Salon (3/8).

The Pentagon announced that Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost will be promoted to Transportation Command, which oversees the US military’s transportation network. Van Ovost is the only active-duty, four-star female general officer in the country. She currently serves as the Air Mobility Command and has 4,200 hours of experience flying 30 different aircrafts.

President Biden also nominated Army Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson for a promotion from the commanding general of the US Army North in Joint Base San Antonio to the head of Southern Command, which oversees American military operations in Latin America. Richardson was the first female officer in military history to serve as the commanding general of the US Army North.

According to the New York Times, the two women’s promotions had been delayed by former defense secretary Mark Esper and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley due to fears that Trump might reject and replace Van Ovost and Richardson’s nominations based on their gender.

“They were chosen because they were the best officers for the jobs, and I didn’t want their promotions derailed because someone in the Trump White House saw that I recommended them or thought DOD was playing politics,” Esper said in an interview with the Times in February. “This was not the case. They were the best qualified. We were doing the right thing.”

POST-INSURRECTION CRACKDOWN ON FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISTS LEADS TO ARRESTS, CHARGES AROUND THE COUNTRY. If there has been a silver lining in the Jan. 6 insurrection, it would be this: Law enforcement officials finally appear to be taking far-right extremist criminal behavior seriously. That’s become abundantly clear in the wave of arrests of multiple extremists in the weeks following, not all of whom are connected to the attack on the Capitol, David Neiwert noted at DailyKos (3/5).

The week up to March 5 was especially eventful: A livestreaming white supremacist fond of threatening strangers online was arrested in Florida on a weapons charge. A member of the Proud Boys was arrested in Philadelphia for harassing a community organizer. And even more Capitol insurgents were placed under arrest, including a former State Department aide and Donald Trump appointee.

Tuesday’s arrest of notorious far-right troll Paul N. Miller, 32, who goes by the online moniker “Gypsy Crusader,” in Fort Lauderdale was predicated on a single charge—being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, based on a grand jury indictment. But that indictment resulted from Miller’s practice of harassing people with racist epithets while dressed in costume—and often holding a gun in the video.

His “Gypsy Crusader” account at Telegram has more than 40,000 followers. He specializes in videos in which he dresses up as fictitious characters such as Nintendo’s Mario or DC Comics’ The Joker and then uses the chat app Omegle to verbally assault strangers, including children, with racial epithets.

Miller also posted videos to the online platform Bitchute in which he brandished and discussed using different weapons. “I am armed to the teeth tonight. ... I have two new guns,” Miller said in a Dec. 2, 2020, video in which he displayed a pistol.

Miller expressed his hatred for Jewish people and an apparent desire to organize violence in the same video. “I hate the Jews. I want to gas ‘em,” he said. When another person on the video stream asked, “You gotta army?” he replied, “I’m trying to build one.”

Miller’s other videos also show him heckling strangers with Nazi banners hanging in the background. He described the story of his “radicalization,” which he says began after a joining the Proud Boys for a violent altercation with antifascists in New York City in October 2018. Miller played a key role in the brawl by shooting videos in what he described as an attempt to “instigate” a conflict with protesters outside a Proud Boys gathering in Manhattan.

Miller, who was openly sympathetic to the Proud Boys, was beaten and had his backpack stolen. Afterward, he tried to claim that he was “jumped by 10 members of antifa” and that they “robbed and tried to kill me,” but claimed “I wasn’t looking for trouble at all.” He also was interviewed on air by One America News network, a far-right channel. “I had gotten into an argument or a fight ... with some leader of antifa,” Miller told OAN.

A grand jury indicted Miller Feb. 25 on the weapons charge, according to court records, charging him with illegally possessing a gun on Jan. 17, 2018, though the indictment doesn’t describe the incident.

Far-right extremists who participated in the Capitol insurrection, in the meantime, continued to be arrested and charged. Among the more noteworthy cases was the arrest of Federico Klein, a former State Department aide, on multiple felony charges related to the Capitol siege (3/4). His case became the first known instance of a Trump appointee facing criminal prosecution following the attempt to block Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s election victory.

Klein, 42, was taken into custody in Virginia. A former Trump campaign employee, he was still employed as a staff assistant at the State Department on Jan. 6, according to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI. It alleges that Klein joined a mob in one of the tunnels leading into the Capitol, and then “physically and verbally engaged with the officers holding the line” at the building’s entrance.

The FBI says that, after ignoring officers’ orders to move back, he assaulted officers with a riot shield stolen from police, and then used it to wedge open a door into the Capitol. Video also showed Klein interfering with the efforts of Capitol Police to retrieve an officer who had been dragged into the mob and beaten.

The Washington Post notes that Klein has a top-secret security clearance that was renewed in 2019. He had been active in Republican politics since 2008 and was employed by the Trump campaign in 2016 before joining the State Department in 2017.

THE CALL (TO THE PROUD BOYS) IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE (WHITE) HOUSE. A study of social media has determined that it took just a handful of “super spreader” accounts to infect the entire Republican Party with a disease that led directly to the Jan. 6 insurgency, The Guardian reported (3/5). The accounts that did the most damage were not no-name accounts manned by people surfacing from the dark side of conspiracy land. In fact, of the top 21 accounts most responsible for spreading false information on Twitter, 15 were verified accounts. If that little blue checkmark was supposed to connote some kind of reliability, or to suggest that Twitter will in some sense hold the person behind the account to a higher standard … it clearly failed.

But it may not have been just social media that was acting as a gateway between the people spreading the Big Lie and those bashing down the doors of the Capitol, Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos (3/6). As The New York Times reported, the FBI identified at least one direct connection between the Proud Boys and the Trump White House.

According to the Times, the FBI learned that one member of the white supremacist group Proud Boys was in direct communication with someone in the White House in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 insurgency. That includes using “metadata”—so often a topic of concern to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)—to directly connect a call made by a Proud Boy member with someone in the White House. Exactly who that might be, the FBI hasn’t yet made clear.

However, that same FBI contact who made this tie to a White House official also indicates that there was “no evidence of communications between the rioters and members of Congress during the deadly attack.” That comes as a surprise, considering how Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was providing text updates on actions inside the House chamber, and how others, like Hawley, have asked whether the FBI is looking into phone records of Congress members at every hearing on the Capitol assault.

So if the source behind The Times story is right, the connection between the people prowling the halls of Congress may have not been directly between those that were hiding elsewhere in the same building.

Though just who the Proud Boys were speaking with inside the White House isn’t made clear, the report published by The Guardian may provide some clues. The top offenders when it came to pumping out false information about the election included Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, and dead Venezuelan dictator fan Sidney Powell. Also on the list of worst offenders was perennial liar and pitiful video faker James O’Keefe. However, O’Keefe wouldn’t seem to be a candidate for the White House contact during the Pizzagate Putsch.

But then, it wasn’t just White House insiders getting calls from white nationalists. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio already made it clear that he was in contact with Roger Stone. That was an easy enough admission, because Tarrio put Stone on speakerphone, and let him talk to the rest of the violent racist extremist group. And Stone, of course, cheered them on. After all, a month after the attack on the Capitol, Stone stepped outside CPAC to make a rap video that describes the deadly attack as “patriots knocking on the Capitol.”

But Stone doesn’t appear to be the White House contact now identified as being in direct contact with the Proud Boys before the attack.

Also, just because the FBI may not have been able to find records of members of Congress egging on the assault while it was underway, this doesn’t mean that Republican legislators are in the clear. As The New York Times noted back in January, records show that almost all the groups who burst through the doors of the Capitol had riends on the inside. The Oath Keepers had connections to the openly racist Rep. Paul Gosar, as well as Rep. Andy Biggs. Before Boebert was giving her on-the-ground updates on the insurgency, she was making nice with the Three Percent militia group (as well as leading those mysterious tours). Rep. Matt Gaetz also made a personal appearance at a Proud Boys event.

What both reports make clear is that, whether it was social media or direct contact, the assault on the Capitol didn’t come from some twisted form of grassroots. This was a top-down operation, with agitation and coordination conducted from Republican politicians who nurtured and directed white supremacist for political purposes. Also … they’re not embarrassed about it. Not even a little bit.

But while Republicans in the Senate may have demonstrated that their ability to cover for Trump is infinite, the social media report does show something about how these companies can deal with disinformation that continues to be put forth, and what they can do right now. What it shows is that the most important step is, unsurprisingly, to rein in the most important people—those with the checkmark, and the follower count, that makes them best able to spread a lie.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2021

Populist.com