With all the deadly energy of a massive hurricane

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that to defeat the coronavirus the nation needs more than a vaccine, it needs national and international health organizations that it trusts. Without that trust people will likely refuse the vaccine. Sumner told a couple stories where that was the case. But the nasty guy has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization and he has forced the CDC to revise it protocols on when to test for the virus in a way that will reduce testing and allow the virus to spread. That reduces the trust in both.



Joan McCarter of Kos reported that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is to regularly brief Congress about current and ongoing threats, such as Russia meddling in our elections. Those briefings are now to be only written, depriving Congress of a chance to query out details and probe the depths. So Russia may be stealing our election, but we’re not going to share details. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff have declared this is not acceptable and, as their release said, “will consider the full range of tools available to the House to compel compliance.”

Jay Rosen tweeted in response to the ODNI news:

Get ready for all rituals and routines that were part of normal constitutional government to essentially stop working between now and November, as what @mashagessen (following Bálint Magyar) calls an "autocratic attempt" begins to crest. It's like waiting for a storm surge.

Anil Dash responded:

This is well put. We’re seeing authoritarianism approaching on the radar with all the deadly energy of a massive hurricane, and almost no major media coverage warning people of the danger.

R. Bell tweeted:

Most of the US political and pundit class - including Dem leaders - still fail to recognize what @sarahkendzior and a few others have seen all along: Trump *isn't trying* to be a US president; he *is succeeding* at building a dictatorship.

David Neiwert of Kos reported that the Proud Boys, a group of far-right thugs, protested in the suburb of Gresham, OR. The protest was because the city had a Black Lives Matter flag on the city plaza. Wrote Neiwert:

These events serve a twofold purpose: First, to threaten and intimidate pro-Black Lives Matter protesters; and second, to create violent and menacing images intended to persuade the people who live in these suburbs and elsewhere—people who are far removed from most of the events—that protests of any kind against police brutality promote “antifa,” “anarchism,” and Marxism, representing the “violent left.”

All this helps promote the far-right claim that Black Lives Matter is a violent “hate group”—while in fact it largely embodies the opposite of such organizations, and indeed has come into its own as a global civil rights movement in the past six months.

Which, more than anything, is a message that white supremacists do not want anyone to hear.

Speaker Pelosi appeared on CNN to say she would accept the results if Trump wins reelection. Jennifer Cohn, an election security advocate, tweeted a response:

Again. It is not up to @SpeakerPelosi. It is up to the voters. If she wants to help, she should fight for transparency re: the “appalling” and “chilling” information that @SenBlumenthal says has been improperly classified. THAT wld be helpful. This was not.

Replies to Cohn question whose side Pelosi is on. Is she conceding already?

Benjamin Franklin also tweeted a response to Pelosi’s comment:

Committing your party to accepting the results of a clearly sabotaged and rigged election (postal service), which your opponent declares he can't lose, after leading an impeachment of the President for attempting to cheat in the election (Ukraine), is beyond inexplicable.

I am not the bad guy for saying something seriously wrong is going on here. I am looking at public events and statements and they don’t add up. Something is seriously wrong.

Alexandra Erin tweeted a thread:

I am straight up blocking people I see expressing the opinion that the Constitution means Trump is automatically not the president if he loses/stops the election.

Four years have not taught you nothing in law or government is automatic? Four years? This is wishful thinking.

Nothing magic happens at noon on January 20th. Nothing magically changes. I hate that we have to argue about this *before he's even lost*. But it's dangerous smugness, dangerous complacency, to think that it won't be treated as a difference of opinion, a partisan issue.

We still have to have the election and win the election, but the idea that our system is prepared to deal with anybody already inside the White House who absolutely doesn't go along with the results voluntarily... it's not. It hasn't ever been, and it's really not right now.
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"Are you seriously saying the Constitution is a matter of opinion?"

Has been for two hundred years. And more importantly: can you stop me? Can you physically stop me from arguing that it's, like, your opinion man?

If you can't... can you stop Trump? McConnell?

Does anything physically prevent every national name Republican still in government from going to the Sunday news shows and saying, "Well, at the time the twentieth amendment was ratified, I don't think anyone foresaw a party spending four years undermining a president."

They will treat it as a political dispute, a matter of opinion, and literally all the people with guns and federal powers related to using guns will either be on Trump's side or on the side of not using guns to settle political disputes. All of them.

Yes, she is saying that these Republicans might be accusing the Democrats of spending four years undermining the nasty guy, though they won’t mention how the Republicans spent eight years undermining Obama.



Franklin tweeted the front pages of the The Washington Post with the headline “Trump draws stark battle lines,” and The New York Times with the headline “Accepting Bid, Trump Paints Biden as Unsafe.” Then he added:

The national media, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is on Trump’s side.

Normal people don’t think, they passively receive their ideas from newspapers and TVs and earnestly repeat them, and if the news is not painting trump as dangerous or even leading with his illegal use of the White House then the normal people will have no idea what’s going on.

They are not being incompetent, they are not chasing ratings, they have actively aligned with Trump and are working in his interest no different than state media in an authoritarian country. But they’re happy for you to think they’re greedy or dumb.

It’s not just the traditional media, it’s also the social media giants like twitter and Facebook. They allowed and are allowing extremist content to flourish as part of an active alliance. They want you to think they’re greedy or dumb but something more sinister is at work.

SimonF added “Funny how he attacks the media but they're a great help to him.”

Franklin replied:

It's a trick to get people to trust them and to prevent anyone from pointing out that the media is the enemy of the people by saying it first.

When the nasty guy refers to the media as the enemy of the people he is using “the people” for a stand-in for himself. When Franklin here says it he really does mean the media is acting like an enemy of the people, meaning us.

Franklin linked to a thread from the week before:

Some asked for a realistic description of the danger we’re in. Okay, it’s not pretty. There is literally not a single institution capable of saving us, they were all taken over before 2016, and our key leadership positions are filled with enemies pretending to be friends.

The entire thing hinges on people not knowing this and because the national media is under the control of our enemies, there’s no platform that can reach the entire country to warn them. If you try telling an averagesomeone, they won’t believe it and will shut down or get angry.

Social media? Infiltrators have turned that into a comedy club with a fantasy tone.

So you can’t even warn people that we are in trouble and being led by our enemies, it just can’t get through. So we’re fighting with more than half of our people totally asleep. When effective communicators arise, they are smeared by a coordinated network of influencers.

This has been the situation for four years. During this time, our enemies have further consolidated power to the point where they can destroy the post office knowing there will be no resistance. They’re going to steal the election and no one will stop them. No one believes this.

The only way out of this there ever was is mass protest, but because there are dozens of fake magic bullets each of which have a cult following, it is not possible to convince people we need to act. And we have less than 90 days to remedy this.
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And yet, there’s hope. There is a slim window when people will be forced to reckon with reality and before the seizure of power is complete. Perhaps then they can be galvanized to action when there is no other choice. But it is a slim, slim window within roughly 90 days.

Even then, it means civil unrest. It means fistfighting q cultists in the streets. It means dodging rubber bullets. It means blood and struggle and horror. And unless you, personally, are ready to go through hell to win we will end up in hell but without even a struggle.

If you are not willing to die for the country, then it will surely kill you. You’re on a list, we’re all on a list, and our enemies will purge anyone that poses a danger to the new order to
the cheers of Q cultists. And that is the realistic assessment of the situation.

Gred Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, included a bit from a recent poll: “Even the president’s most fervent supporters, after explaining their affinity for him, will stop and say something to the effect of, “His tweets drive me nuts” or “I would never speak the way he does.” Then Dworkin quotes Christopher Orr:

It is almost always interpreted--and is clearly meant to be interpreted--as "I'd never speak/tweet that way because THOSE ARE BAD THINGS TO SAY, AND I DISAPPROVE OF THEM." But what if the unspoken 2nd half is often or even usually something closer to "I'd never speak/tweet that way, BUT BOY WOULD I LOVE TO IF I COULD GET AWAY WITH IT."

After all that we need a cat video, a cat that can do for itself.