The Recently Disposed
In their testimony before the Committee, all four of the witnesses described the rioters as being supporters of the Recently Disposed one (t·R·D·o).
More than one of the four said that many in the crowd told them, the police, that they had come to DC at the invitation of t·R·D·o to stop the steal; and, — maybe overthrow the government while they were at it.
With invitation in hand, come they did. By mid-day 6 January 2021, as many as 30,000 of t·R·D·o’s followers had come from out of the woodwork to be in Washington D.C. where, after having been incited by t·R·D·o and others at a noon rally to ‘stop the steal’ by whatever means necessary; they stormed the US Capitol. Over a nearly three-hour period, in wave after wave, they viciously assaulted and finally overpowered the badly outnumbered Capitol and Metro Police, broke down the doors and windows of, and forced their way into, the Capitol building. The chambers where Congress was in session to ratify the election of Joe Biden as President-elect. For more than three hours the badly outnumbered Capitol and Metro Police valiantly fought back against the large vicious mob. For long hours, the Police, fighting for their lives, pleaded for help. For long hours, none came.
There were a lot of other calls for help that day from the leaders and members of Congress. There were a lot of those being called who should have done something to assist the outnumbered Police, to rescue the besieged Congress; to quell the riot. Calls made to those who were sworn to protect the nation, to protect the constitution; were chosen to lead us, but who would not, did not, do their job.
Who were these ‘they’ that came to DC on 6 January 2021? Many were self-avowed white supremacists. These self-avowed who came to act on t·R·D·o’s behalf saw him as one of them. Was he? Probably, if he was ever anything. He said that he would, but he did not go with them. Instead, he went back into his chambers and watched it all on TV. Is it possible that they, now, a very large mob of the incited, were but sheep following a Judas goat? A Judas goat that did not even go with them; that did nothing at all but watch it all on TV.
Obviously, these self-avowed white supremacists, from their choice of self-descriptor, thought themselves superior. Was this simply because they were white? Even a brief look back at the recent history of white supremacy lays the lie to such thinking. Those less than brave who killed Emmett, too, were also self-avowed white supremacists; white supremacists who also ran in a pack. Being white didn’t make them superior. Thinking oneself maketh oneself naught other what he is. Think of themselves what they might, those who brutally beat and killed Emmett were the lowest of the low; belong at the very bottom of the trash bin of history.
Fair to suppose that those who committed this heinous act on 28 August 1955 were probably of mongrelized, mostly white, mostly European ancestry. But, color is a quite relative thing. There was a time when any fraction of black ancestry made one a black, when Spaniards and Italians were considered non-white. And, after all, Africa is mother to us all. Are you still there Senator Cruz?
The crowd of self-avowed who came to DC on 6 January, too, were mostly-white. Of those four obviously superior hero officers testifying before the House select committee on 27 July 2021, only one was ‘white’. None claimed supremacy. Fair to assume that after his experiences on 6 January, Officer Hodges would be the last person on earth to espouse white supremacy.
Leading up to, and on the day of, 6 January, t·R·D·o had plenty of insider help in rallying his followers to come to DC, to disrupt the transfer of power, to steal the election (while all the while claiming to stop the steal). One of those insiders at the rally with t·R·D·o on 6 January was Congressman Mo Brooks, Alabama:
Mo Brooks addressed the large crowd at the January 6 rally. He said “America is at risk unlike it has been in decades, and perhaps centuries.” He told the crowd to start “kicking ass,” and he spoke with reverence, at a purportedly peaceful demonstration, of how “our ancestors sacrificed their blood, sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives,” before shouting at the crowd “Are you willing to do the same?!” Brooks intended these words as a threat of violence or intimidation to block the certification vote from even occurring and/or to coerce members of Congress to disregard the results of the election.
What was the “risk unlike any in decades” that you were speaking of, Mo? Was it perhaps the risk to white supremacy posed by the Civil Rights advances of the 1950s and 60s?
Was your “perhaps in centuries” perhaps in reference to the Civil War, Mo?
Was your “our ancestors sacrificed their blood, sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives,” addressed to only those with you on the stage and those in front of you? Tell us, Mo, did our ancestors include the black soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War? In WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq? How about the Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, Mo?
Mo, no doubt, you can tell us what you meant, since, in written testimony to the Justice Department, you swore that you wrote the speech yourself; as a part of your congressional duty. The arc toward the trash can has taken far too long for some, Mo. The passenger will please fasten his seat belt in preparation for landing.
And, Mo, could you please tell us a bit more about the bullet-proof vest under your bright yellow vest (wind-breaker)? Did you not understand, Mo, that Mouvement des gilets jaunes was called that because of the gilets jaunes (the yellow/orange vests) they wore, and was a demand for economic justice? Or, was it that you thought you were in costume for playing the part of the ‘Cowardly Lion’ in the wizard’s little party?
At this point, there is still much that is unknown about how many Republican members of Congress colluded with t·R·D·o and his followers in the lead up to, and on the day of, the insurrection of 6 January. It is known that he spoke with House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy by phone, during the siege of the Capitol. It now appears that t·R·D·o, probably also spoke with his best-bud Jim Jordan on the phone while the Capitol was under attack. A more honorable, more patriotic, pair would be hard to find. But, who else among this membership abetted t·R·D·o and the insurrectionists on 6 January?
Given that today’s Republican Party has been completely co-opted by the former, known to have been white supremacist, Southern Dixiecrats, that the Republican Party has almost completely been co-opted by t·R·D·o, that all the red states are enacting voter suppression legislation: How many Republicans, Republican members of state legislatures, of the US Congress, are white supremacists?
The cult of t·R·D·o followers includes cults other than white supremacists. Many of those who came to his insurrection were followers of QAnon. Though nothing about QAnon makes sense; that doesn’t mean that it can be ignored; QAnon has an estimated thirty million followers in the US. It is as if some deranged psychologist has taken a hand at writing the script for a Russian cult movie and millions of people believe it all is real. Little is also known about some of the other cults within the cult of, or loyal to, t·R·D·o.
6 January 2021 was a very scary day; too close of a call.
Amazing how many words are spilled to say a simple thing: Trump, Brooks and other GOP politicians incited a riot, a seditious attack on the US government. That much is obvious on casual inspection.
Yes, I get that it hurts the feelings of dishonest and benighted people who refuse to face the obvious facts and evidence. Facts and evidence matter, and lying about facts and evidence matters. The lying needs to stop. It’s not about feelings, it’s about our nation’s future.
Joel,
As disgusting as Phil Gramm has been (for which the words to such extreme fail me now), then he was still correct about one thing. We have become a nation of whiners. We have right wing whiners and left wing whiners making most of the noise. At times the grownups intervene when things get too far out of sorts to allow to continue. Witness the POTUS elections of 2008 and 2020, when those generally too disgusted to bother with voting showed up to put our pathetic government a little back on track. Fortunately for the left wing whiners, they do not have same delusion of being permitted to take over the government with which the more idiotic right wing whiners are disposed to amuse themselves.
The historical comparisons made with Hitler conveniently overlook the role that Woodrow Wilson had in creating the Third Reich by way of austere reparations in the Treaty of Versailles. The Weimar Republic provided the domestic enemy. Genocide was the result of economic demographics. Hitler was an effect rather than a cause. The US is different. It is not because the US does not have a strong streak of nationalism in its past, but rather because we have a distinguished history of killing anyone that gets in our way and we have never been very good at being mindless followers.
Slavery, The Trail of Tears, native apartheid and genocide, Jim Crow, and an incredibly long list of wars all show of what we are capable. Trump et all are punks and if they keep it up then they will be dead punks.
“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground,
Mother Earth will swallow you,
Lay your body down.” – C S N & Y
No, it is not like words do not matter, but rather like the leadership of BLM is lacking of the gravitas that was seen in MLK, Medgar Evers, X, or even Dick Gregory. We give sociopaths guns and uniforms and then bad shit happens. Sure, de-fund the police; that will work. Stupidity stands close to us all.
Which is not to say that Joel was wrong about anything other than “It’s not about feelings, it’s about our nation’s future.” It is a big country that came at a high price to natives and blacks, but also to early Americans and the dead on both sides or our most unCivil War. It cannot be stolen away cheaply regardless of the outcomes of words and courts. The republican system of government insures elitism, but only the courage to stand and die can insure the freedom of ordinary people.
t·R·D·o
Is that pronounced turdo? Asking for a friend…
Was working from an image of trash being disposed of in a trash can.
Spot fixing on
The irony that this would come about by co-opting
the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator,
is all the more deeply disturbing.
A nuanced view of ‘the great emancipator’
https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation
Updated:
Jun 23, 2020
Original:
Sep 21, 2012
5 Things You May Not Know About Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and Emancipation
The 16th U.S. president was firm in believing slavery was morally wrong, but his views on racial equality were sometimes more complicated.
Sarah Pruitt
1. Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist.
Abraham Lincoln did believe that slavery was morally wrong, but there was one big problem: It was sanctioned by the highest law in the land, the Constitution. The nation’s founding fathers, who also struggled with how to address slavery, did not explicitly write the word “slavery” in the Constitution, but they did include key clauses protecting the institution, including a fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause, which allowed Southern states to count enslaved people for the purposes of representation in the federal government.
In a three-hour speech in Peoria, Illinois, in the fall of 1854, Lincoln presented more clearly than ever his moral, legal and economic opposition to slavery—and then admitted he didn’t know exactly what should be done about it within the current political system.
Abolitionists, by contrast, knew exactly what should be done about it: Slavery should be immediately abolished, and freed enslaved people should be incorporated as equal members of society. They didn’t care about working within the existing political system, or under the Constitution, which they saw as unjustly protecting slavery and enslavers. Leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell,” and went so far as to burn a copy at a Massachusetts rally in 1854.
Though Lincoln saw himself as working alongside the abolitionists on behalf of a common anti-slavery cause, he did not count himself among them. Only with emancipation, and with his support of the eventual 13th Amendment, would Lincoln finally win over the most committed abolitionists.
2. Lincoln didn’t believe Black people should have the same rights as white people.
Though Lincoln argued that the founding fathers’ phrase “All men are created equal” applied to Black and white people alike, this did not mean he thought they should have the same social and political rights. His views became clear during an 1858 series of debates with his opponent in the Illinois race for U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, who had accused him of supporting “negro equality.”
In their fourth debate, at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln made his position clear. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and Black races,” he began, going on to say that he opposed Black people having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites.
What he did believe was that, like all men, Black men had the right to improve their condition in society and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In this way they were equal to white men, and for this reason slavery was inherently unjust.
Like his views on emancipation, Lincoln’s position on social and political equality for African Americans would evolve over the course of his presidency. In the last speech of his life, delivered on April 11, 1865, he argued for limited Black suffrage, saying that any Black man who had served the Union during the Civil War should have the right to vote.
3. Lincoln thought colonization could resolve the issue of slavery.
For much of his career, Lincoln believed that colonization—or the idea that a majority of the African American population should leave the United States and settle in Africa or Central America—was the best way to confront the problem of slavery. His two great political heroes, Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson, had both favored colonization; both were enslavers who took issue with aspects of slavery but saw no way that Black and white people could live together peaceably.
Lincoln first publicly advocated for colonization in 1852, and in 1854 said that his first instinct would be “to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia” (the African state founded by the American Colonization Society in 1821).
Nearly a decade later, even as he edited the draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in August of 1862, Lincoln hosted a delegation of freed Black men and women at the White House in the hopes of getting their support on a plan for colonization in Central America. Given the “differences” between the two races and the hostile attitudes of white people towards Black people, Lincoln argued, it would be “better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Lincoln’s support of colonization provoked great anger among Black leaders and abolitionists, who argued that African Americans were as much natives of the country as white people, and thus deserved the same rights. After he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln never again publicly mentioned colonization, and a mention of it in an earlier draft was deleted by the time the final proclamation was issued in January 1863.
4. Emancipation was a military policy.
The Civil War was fundamentally a conflict over slavery. However, the way Lincoln saw it, emancipation, when it came, would have to be gradual, as the most important thing was to prevent the Southern rebellion from severing the Union permanently in two. But as the Civil War entered its second summer in 1862, thousands of enslaved people had fled Southern plantations to Union lines, and the federal government didn’t have a clear policy on how to deal with them. Emancipation, Lincoln saw, would further undermine the Confederacy while providing the Union with a new source of manpower to crush the rebellion…
Fortunately, these are all technicalities.
Lincoln believed slavery to be immoral. As did my Quaker forebears.
He believed that the nation could not survive ‘half-slave & half-free’.
He believed in the preservation of the ‘United States’
He would have preferred this matter to resolved peacefully,
This was not to be, after the Fort Sumter attack.
Lincoln particularly disliked the comparative advantage of slave-owners over free farmers, in say Illinois. In any case, my intended rebuttal was to your statement “The irony that this would come about by co-opting the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, is all the more deeply disturbing.” More to the point was that Abe was just one guy, a very convenient guy of the moment. The two party system had been about the division of elite political power between northern bankers and industrialists versus southern slave-labor plantation owners from the start. After the Civil War, then the Democratic Party had to turn to immigrants and labor unions for a constituency until the end of Reconstruction availed them to Jim Crow in the South. Federalists, Whigs, and Republicans always represented primarily wealthy elite interests with overtures to various religious and nationalist factions to form an effective electoral constituency. Of course the most potent platform of the Republican Party with the electorate has always been their opposition to whatever the Democratic Party was for. In any case though, Lincoln was the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1860 far more than the Republican Party was Lincoln’s by design rather than mere circumstances.
There is no denying that over the course of a hundred and fifty years since the Civil War, the two major parties have basically switched positions on racial and other matters. Originally, the Republicans were essentially an Abolitionist party, though Lincoln was not exactly an Abolitionist candidate. (He was in effect an Abolitionist president.) And the Dems were essentially a party of Southern slave-holding states-rights believing aristocrats. Therein lies considerable irony.
That’s all in the past. Now, history is trying to repeat itself.
The Black population of the US in 1860
was roughly 4 million people. Do explain
how it would have been possible to transport that
many people to Africa at that time. And how
would that be in any sense ‘moral’, unless
those people would be willing to leave.
One would imagine that they would
prefer to remain in the US and free.
Slavery was understood to be immoral by most people, including many slave-owners, from the beginning. Prior to mechanization though, it was also considered a necessary evil for the purpose of exploiting the agricultural potential of the southern American colonies from the northern mid-Atlantic all the way south to Brazil. In parts of present day Central and South America then natives were enslaved for this purpose almost as frequently as blacks imported from Africa. I have never read anywhere anything suggesting that this practice were moral.
Colonization to end slavery once that mechanization began to open up alternatives was not just planned to utilize Liberia in Africa, but also Caribbean islands. Regardless of how difficult and unlikely the proposal, then it still reflected the attitude of the times, not because it was fulfilled, but rather because it was a widely accepted proposal. White people were not concerned with what black people would prefer.
Native Americans were not particularly willing to march on the Trail of Tears either, but the US military found a way. My own native ancestors hid out in Appalachia rather than be moved to the Oklahoma Territory.
Wikipedia: Abraham Lincoln is generally considered the greatest president for his leadership during the American Civil War and his eloquence in speeches such as the Gettysburg Address.
(Except among Republicans, it would seem. Presumably they would point
out that Lincoln was drafted to be the first Republican presidential
candidate, and was a Whig at heart.)
Wikipedia: After serving a single term in the House of Representatives, Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, where he worked as lawyer. He initially remained a committed member of the Whig Party, but later joined the newly-formed Republican Party after the Whigs collapsed in the wake of the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska Act.
Speaking of ‘deeply disturbing’…
In the Republicans’ disinformation campaign, the arrested Capitol rioters are political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blame for the attack. …
Their new claims, some voiced from the highest levels of House Republican leadership, amount to a disinformation campaign being promulgated from the steps of the Capitol, aimed at giving cover to their party and intensifying the threats to political accountability. …
Already Distorting Jan. 6, GOP Now Concocts Entire Counternarrative
Welcome to August! Prepare to be disappointed? …
Trump to be reinstated in the White House in August ?????
Turdeaux was akin to the red capped dragon of the south in white letter print asking the people to do “something about this”. “This” is nothing new. “This” is called a coup. We cannot have this again and 2024… I’ll be damned if we have anything but a moderate v moderate.
Vous parlez français!
juste un peu
Democrats ALERT: The crazy, lunatic, cultists GOPers that believe t·R·D·o’s “ROUTER THEORY” are getting closer to taking over the House & Senate. You better fix the Voting Rights issue, stop Voter Suppression and update the Electoral Count Act, if you want to save the country and our democracy. Now is not the time for Summer Vacation. Midterm 2022 is just about 15 months away.
https://t.co/6yQhHAHlI8?amp=1
https://tinyurl.com/5xd93kxu
The GOP Menace to Society