The snow this week covered my nearby world in white; the
serene image this created was misleading. In fact, much of the political world
is currently ill at ease. The United States is not exempt from this turmoil.
Commemorations this week on the anniversary of January 6th have refocused
attention on the disruptions of that day and those days preceding it. Many
thought that the widespread public horror felt after the actions of the insurrectionists
at the Capitol would turn voters against the former president who incited it.
After he lost his public platforms on Twitter and Facebook, some thought he
would slink away.
That has not turned out to be the case. After some initial
condemnation, elected Republicans across the country carried his banner as he
amassed an enormous war chest supposedly gathered to fight against the stolen
election. Aside from the reality that the premise was false, his fans continued
to send money after his incessant appeals and repeated lies. Candidates for
future elections soon realized that he might support them if they echoed his
calls of “stop the steal” or called for reviews and audits of the 2020 election
long after President Biden was inaugurated. Whether he intends to run again or
not, he will be an influencer in many other electoral contests, if only for his
endorsements or lack of them.
According to the New York Times, he had amassed over a quarter billion
dollars on the pledge to fight a stolen election, but it is in a fund that does
not require him to use the money for that purpose and allows him to divert it
to any causes he chooses. The Republican Party continues to pay many of his
legal expenses;
so far, they have reportedly covered over 1.6 million dollars for him. Many
corporations declared at the time of the Insurrection that they would no longer
support the elected Republican members of Congress who did not vote for certification
of the election. According to CREW (Citizens for Responsibility in Ethics in
Washington)- Several
have since recanted those vows as 717 corporations have given over 18 million
dollars to these officials.
Since the Supreme Court allowed the excesses of untraced
political funding in Citizens
United, the far-right has poured millions of funding into candidates and
those who would limit free speech. Powerful corporations, men such as the Koch
brothers, and families, such as the Mercers, have all joined with other powerful
and wealthy entities to send money into races and movements they considered in
their interest. Money from groups, such as the Petroleum Institute, flowed into
the 2021 Georgia Senate races to try to prevent a Democratic Senate. The right-wing
media, initially, was mostly Fox News, its talk hosts, and talk radio, but
now has expanded to include One America News (OAN), Sinclair broadcasting, and
News Max, among others. Newer talk hosts, podcasters such as Steve Bannon and
Alex Jones threaten the dominance of Fox as they are far more extreme and throw
out the red meat that brings in listeners and money. Together they still spread
a destructive message, one that continues to chip away at what I have always
considered our democracy and the idea of “E Pluribus Unum”–out of
many people we can build one nation. They lie, make up rumors, promote conspiracy
theories, and spread them to a population conditioned to receive such messages.
In my opinion, that is why “Stop the Steal” found such a warm reception; it
played into the months of messaging by the former president that absentee
ballots were suspicious and the Democrats were out to steal the election.
According to several pundits, his internal polling showed him he would lose,
which was something he could not accept. So, well before election day, he set
out to undermine our system of free and fair elections instead.
The right continues to spread a message of ‘replacement theory’
that is against immigrants and people of color and note that immigrants dilute
our ‘white nation’ and that Democrats are encouraging the browning of America.
In truth, America is becoming less white and is now more of a nation of many
races and ethnicities. The 2020
census reported that over 60% of us identified as white, accounting for
over 204 million people; more people (an additional 33 million) identified as multiracial
than ever before. The total population was 334 million and showed a decrease in
the white population of 8% from the 2010 census. The Hispanic population showed
the greatest increases to 62 million, with African Americans at 47 million, Asian
Americans at 24 million, and Alaskan and native Americans, 9.7 million followed
by Hawaiian/Asia Pacific islanders at 1.7 million. My numbers here are
approximated from the census tables.
Reporter Peter Osnos recently spoke on
NPR about his profile of Dan Bongino, a talk show host, who is planning to
build his own media empire in a parallel mock of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook,
so that the speech he wants to promote cannot be taken down such as Twitter, YouTube
and Facebook have done with incendiary or misleading speech. Osnos reports, in
his piece in the New
Yorker, that Bongino is in the business of returning the former president
to power. He tracks which of his rants receive the most press and doubles down
on those inflammatory topics, not unlike many others of his ilk. Bongino, a
former police officer and presidential secret service member once was part of
the Republican establishment and an elected candidate. Many in Maryland will
also remember that he ran for office as a Republican in Maryland a few times -for the
Senate seat now held by Ben Cardin and for Congress in the seat won by John
Delaney. He also ran for the House in Florida. He lost each race. A cancer
survivor, he took the COVID vaccine but continued to support the ant-vax
movement. The anti-vax movement is another anti-government movement that is hypocritically
supported by the right while vaccinations are enforced by corporations such as
Fox media.
This week saw President Biden speaking on the anniversary
of the January 6th insurrection from Statuary Hall in the Capitol. He
gave his strongest condemnation yet of the former president and his actions
before and since the election. According to NPR,
Biden “referred
repeatedly to the former president with forceful, and, at times, personal,
denunciations of his actions. {The former president}, Biden said, “values power
over principle.” His “bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy,” the
president continued, adding, “He can’t accept that he lost.” Biden said the US
is in “a battle for the soul of America. I will stand in this breach. I
will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the
throat of democracy.”
“To me, the true patriots were
the more than 150 [million] Americans who peacefully expressed their vote at
the ballot box, the election workers who protected the integrity of the vote,
and the heroes who defended this Capitol. You can’t love your country only when
you win.” (NY
Times)
Vice President Harris also spoke at the event and said, “the American
spirit is being tested. The answer to whether we will meet that test resides
where it has always resided, in our country, with you, the people,” she said. Harris
said “the work ahead will not be easy” and called on the Senate to pass voting
rights legislation-an unlikely prospect unless the Senate changes its rules to
prevent a Republican-led filibuster.
Last week, the New York Times
published an editorial from its entire editorial board, with some of the
phrases noted below and stating that every day is now January 6th.
“This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year,
Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the
Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills
have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower
state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of
their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy
organizations. …. campaign targeted voting results in all these [battleground] states,
suing for recounts or trying to intimidate officials into finding “missing”
votes. The effort failed, thanks primarily to the professionalism and integrity
of election officials. Many of those officials have since been stripped of
their power or pushed out of office and replaced by people who openly say the
last election was fraudulent. Thus, the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country,
in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no
prosecutor can try in court. A healthy,
functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went
wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The
Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself
recently to be incapable of doing this.
It concludes in part: “Mr.
Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what
remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights
legislation, even if nothing else. Whatever happens in Washington, in the
months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their
self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years
but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the
basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can
win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.”
Today the
Times also published editorials from historian Rebecca Solnit, former President
Jimmy Carter, scholar Francis Fukuyama and academics Jon Grinspan and Peter
Manseau that discuss where they think our democracy is headed. I will discuss
them next week.
*********************************************************************************
Now for a
brief discussion of the Omicron virus. The virus has expanded case numbers
across the US rapidly, with over 500,000 cases each day and charts showing straight-up
increases instead of gradual rises. January promises a repeat of these numbers
each week with the hoped-for decline, maybe by March. Although more infectious
than other variants, Omicron, by targeting the nose and throat, causes fewer
fatalities than the others.
The
debate about school openings and virtual schools continues as community spread
increases. There are few simple solutions.
COVID
Stats–NY
Times:
Total US
Cases: 60,164,525. New Cases: 677,243.
Total Deaths: 836,236. New Deaths: 1559.
MD
totals: Total cases: 831,182. New Cases:13,392.
Total Deaths: 12,211. New Deaths: 49.
********************************************************************************
I
continue to stand by the principle that this country is a democracy and will be
as long as its government is: For the people, by the people, and of the
people- (not some self-styled autocracy). As long as the American public
continues to actively support its rights and protects honest officials, we will
maintain these values. If it instead surrenders these precious rights to the cult
of personality and leadership of demagogues, our democracy will not survive. The
future, sadly, remains unclear; the choice is up to each of us.
Finally, ‘gotta’
love the pandas in the snow -you can watch it here.
“Til next
week – Peace!
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