Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Capitulants

 


The above cartoon was created by Pulitzer Prize-winning Ann Telnaes, then spiked by Jeff Bezos' Washington Post. So she resigned. The worst is yet to come.

Last time round, Trump lost the popular vote by millions, but the antiquated Electoral College, disinformation from Russia and others, and a rightwing media conglomerate devoted to replacing truth with fiction put him in the White House. He proceeded to run up massive debt, mishandle the pandemic to the tune of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and gift world leadership to our adversaries. Then, at the end, he lied about losing a free, fair, multiply-adjudicated election and instigated an attempt to overthrow it. The lie lives on.

This time, all memory erased, Americans gave him more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris; though, as in both prior elections, more voted against than for him. Baseless claims of receiving a “mandate” notwithstanding, it was one of the narrowest margins of victory in history. But they gave him both houses of Congress, too, Republican members of which are more MAGAfied than ever. The Supreme Court was already his. It’s a four-fecta. How quickly we forget.

Well, not forget, so much as succumb to four years of concentrated whitewashing. Because they know their agenda depends on obsequious acquiescence by Congress and voters, along with the press and social media, it’s been an all-out effort by Project Trump 2025. Who remembers Trump’s words on January 7, 2021, when he said that “the demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy”? He doesn’t. He never meant it in the first place. Now he agrees with Rep Mike Collins (R-GA), who said this week, evidently without irony, “On this day in history in 2021, thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building.” And if he was being ironic, his colleagues and voters nevertheless buy the rewrite like Trump Bibles.

This Olympic-level gaslighting has been furthered by relentless attacks on big- and small- “ell” liberalism as hatred of America. Holy Mike Johnson, whose ear, by his own report, God has, just referred to Democrats as “the enemy.” Newly-elected MAGA Congressmen Brandon Gill of Texas and Riley Moore of West Virginia, on the occasion of their swearing-in, unlimbered themselves of their demagogic Trumpist bona-fides:

Gill: “We want to end the woke chaos that they have unleashed on this country, that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, and that boys should be in girls’ sports and boys should be in girls’ locker rooms.”

Moore: “My constituents have sent me here to this town not to work with Democrats but to destroy their agenda over the last four years that has crushed the American Dream and the American worker.”

After Vice-President Harris swore in three-time Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), the senator’s husband shook off Harris’ proffered hand. Placing themselves on the side of the lawbreakers and against its defenders, Republican leaders have refused to install an authorized plaque in the capitol honoring the police who fought to stave off the riot. Thus is the division and hate Trump has stoked within his party and among his voters.

There are consequences to accepting this totalitarian repetition of lies and rejection of legitimate dissent. Before blowing up himself and a rented Tesla in front of Trump’s Las Vegas hotel, the deceased had written: “Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.” It’s all but a direct quote from Trump at every one of his rallies.

The perpetrator of the terrorist attack in New Orleans was immediately hyped on Fox “news” and the rest of rightwing dissemblers as an illegal immigrant rather than the US-born Texan he was. The truth hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to blame it on President Biden’s so-called “open borders.”

The political inversion of America is nearly complete: an incoming administration promises to lie to us, suppress truth, and punish those who dare tell it. While claiming to be protectors of free speech. Rather than taking a principled stand, self-serving media oligarchs are pre-capitulating, donating millions to Trump’s inauguration, which, for lack of regulation, may as well have been slipped directly into his pocket. Because they knew President Biden and Democrats weren’t a threat, those same moguls gave nothing, or next to it, to his. 

Let’s assume not all Trump voters are happy with what they’re seeing now, that they’re not as enthusiastically destructive as those legislators and people like these. But, having been willing to overlook the obvious and believe the lies, they’re complicit. If it’s not already too late, they should consider Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress as Civil War approached: 
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

10 comments:

  1. I ain't seen any signs of giving up. In fact? We got a reason to FIGHT! :OP

    https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2025/01/trump-is-back-so-are-the-marches-peoples-march-seattle-planned-to-step-off-from-capitol-hills-cal-anderson-park-on-january-18th/

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    1. I'm not sure marches have the impact they once did, but I don't judge what others want to do to express their views. I will always agree with you Smooth, that 'we got a reason to fight'. Hell yes.

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    2. I like it. When people around here were pissed? People won elections and shit got done. Now? The city council takes credit for balancing a budget over 300 million in debt for ghost cops. Pet projects like Saka's left turn lane into the private school his kid attends (2 million dollars estimated. and we know it'll be a cash grab.) They stole 250+ million from Jump Start housing and green energy. They lobbied AGAINST it with millions and millions of dollars. Today? They say progressives suck, look at how we saved Seattle AND get EVERYTHING the RINO's wanted. It's sickening really. They are desperately clawing back everything while they can and saying they are the reason everything is better. I say? Get their OWN revenue then? Okay they say. All 'small businesses" do not pay full minimum wage. $3 an hour per employee forever. 500 or less employees is a "small business". All the city council is self dealing there. It goes on and on. It's shameless.

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    3. Hey? Call the library and volunteer. Right up your alley.

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  2. I read this yesterday on Substack, and I think it is one of your finest and sharpest commentaries ever, Sid.

    I am now fully detoxed from all the META platforms, but still waiting for my account to download and be sent to me. Since I joined FB in 2009, there's quite a bit of post activity for them to pull. They said by January 31, 2025 I should have everything. Based on the actions of Zuck over the last few days and the announcement of stopping all fact checking, I have no reason to regret my decision. It was a little bit of a 'withdrawal' for a couple days, but I'm free and clear now.

    I heard Heather Cox Richardson on the Politics Girl podcast the other day speaking about the similarity of now to the turn of the 20th century. The same kind of wealth accumulation, the same authoritarian or oligarchical overreach, the same subjugation of anyone not a white male, the same anti-regulatory and dangerous business practices, the same mistrust of news sources. What happened? New sources were born to fill the public need for real information and truth. I think that is what's happening now as WaPo, NYT, "legacy media", corporate media, and the like see their viewership and subscribers dwindling. HCR said it took about 12 years for the switch to happen, but it did. I don't anticipate it taking that long now because of the internet and electronic communication overall.

    I'm reading and listening to folks who are talking about community building, local support and activism, and I'm stewing some ways in which a 70 year old woman can still be of use without putting her health or life in danger. I also remind myself that so much of what those dummies blather about is nothing more than another 'shiny object' meant to distract us from what is really happening and what matters. For Trump, this week is was the obvious comparison of his inadequacies with the towering virtues of James Earl Carter, Jr. coupled with the imminent court proceeding cementing his own legacy as a convicted felon.

    Hey, it's going to be a tough four years--no doubt about it--but I'm off the mat.

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    1. I continue to be impressed by you, Mary Ellen.

      I doubt it'll ever happen that people who allowed all this to happen by voting for him, will ever realize, in significant enough numbers, to faciltate its undoing. The best hope, maybe, is that the 20 million who stayed home, compared to last presidential election, will wake tf up.

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    2. It's the gilded age on steroids. The history on how we got here is self-evident. It's sad really. We'll make it back somehow.

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    3. Smooth, it is absolutely the Gilded Age Redux, and it is incredibly sad. You know I don't practice a religion or even believe in god, but I will say one good thing about my Catholic upbringing--there was a strong emphasis on caring for others and not being wrapped up in myself. My dad and mom were born in 1918 and 1920, respectively, so they lived through the depression. They gave me and my siblings a lot of lessons in "there but for the grace of god, go you and I". So, I see the current ignorance about what we are, where we came from, and what we are doing as more than sad--it is criminal and/ or sinful.

      I'm going to keep beating the drum and I know you are too.

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    4. Sid, I don't know if the millions who stayed home need to wake up if the danger is not real to them because they haven't been hurt yet. Maybe they don't know what they have to lose? I think that was part of it. I also think there was so much hopefulness projected by the Harris/ Walz rallies and Zoom fund-raisers, and webcasts/ podcasts that it created a kind of mirage to folks. I still have a hard time believing we didn't win. I'll probably never understand.

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    5. Well, you know what they say: you can lead a voter to the booth but you can't make them think.

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