A lot of people who would judge them are dead

Another Saturday, another download of Michigan’s coronavirus data. After a peak about November 9 the number of cases per day has been dropping. On the 9th it was 10.2K new cases a day and by the end of the month it was down to 8.9K. That’s still a lot and about six times the peak in April. The data for December is still changing. The deaths per day hit 129 at the end of November. Again, a lot, but if the death rate now matched the death rate in April we’d be up to 700 deaths a day. Thankfully, we aren’t. Though people will start being vaccinated in the US on Monday I figure I’ll be running my chart program every Saturday for another six to nine months. I read the transcript for another episode of Gaslit Nation, put out by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Donald Trump Is a Terrorist Attack on America and the audio was released December 9. They began again featuring the Georgia Senate runoff races. Those recently featured Democrat Jon Ossof debating against an empty podium because David Perdue refused to show. There was also Democrat Raphael Warnock debating Kelly Loeffler who was so stiff it was like Warnock debating a mannequin. Both Perdue and Loeffler should be under investigation for insider trading by capitalizing on coronavirus info given to the Senate before told to the public. But on to week five of the coup attempt. It has been going on long enough people might consider it normal. Kendzior wrote:

You should take this moment in history very seriously, not only for what may happen, but for what has already happened. The United States will never again be able to say that it is a country that always practices the peaceful transfer of power. It will never again be able to say that its candidates concede when they are defeated, and that they do not resort to tactics of violence and intimidation to harness an illegitimate takeover. Americans will never be able to look at attempted coups in other countries and say, “That can't happen here.”

A bit later:

An aspiring autocrat’s tactics are easy to predict, particularly one who has been in the public eye for 40 years. What is far more difficult to predict is how ordinary people react to the aspiring autocrat.

Kendzior noted the officials, especially the courts, who have been fighting back against the nasty guy, even in the face of threats from his goon squad.

It is good to see people doing their job, but that job should not come at the cost of threats to their lives, and that sacrifice should never be minimized. The threat will grow more intense as Trump's court losses continue to mount and his violent lackeys, like Michael Flynn, spread conspiracy theories and encourage vengeance, an occult of victimhood. Trump's base has been fairly quiet, and here I want to make a firm distinction between his fanatical base and his voters. According to polls, the vast majority of the people who voted for Trump recognize that he lost, but the base may resort to different tactics as Trump's odds of retaining the White House get smaller and their feeling of desperation grows. Adding to this crisis is a culture of timidity among the Democrats, who largely refuse to discuss what's happening in plain terms. The Democrats’ initial approach was to ignore Trump's attempted coup and to concentrate on cabinet picks, policies, and presenting Biden to the public as President-elect. This was not a bad move, and it was the right thing to do at the time to allow the public to adjust to the new reality. But when public officials are being routinely threatened with violence, elected officials need to do more than look the other way. We can all see this happening. People do not feel safe, and the lack of leadership from the Democrats opens a chasm for Trump to insert his vicious demagoguery and to contort the narrative, taking advantage of their timidity to speak the truth just as he has done over the past four years. Democrats need to talk with the American public about what is happening and establish that it is not normal or acceptable, and say that they are going to fight back. Trump's actions are putting American lives at risk. This is not something that can be dismissed as a partisan game or as a private grift. This goes so far beyond politics. It is about survival, particularly in a time of the pandemic, and that is what people must stress in plain terms. Trump's lawlessness is and always was a threat to American survival.

Chalupa told of an incident in the Florida of Gov. Ron DeSantis. Rebekah Jones, formerly of the Florida Department of Health, working as a data scientist. She refused to cover up bogus COVID outbreak data. State police raided her home and confiscated her computer and phone. In the process they pointed a gun at her and at her children. The state says she hacked into a government system. She says they took her computer because it contains other government whistleblowers who have been sending true COVID numbers to her. Chalupa said this is a classic Gestapo tactic. They want to map the resistance. She added: What's clearly disturbing here is that the growing autocracy of the Republican Party, along with the white supremacy terrorism found in the Republican base, is the greatest threat to our democracy. Kendzior added:

There's been this temptation throughout both the attempted coup and through the handling of the pandemic to say, “Oh, Trump is just pulling a grift, oh, he's just doing a heist”, as if that's normal, as if that's acceptable.

Chalupa said, referring to Vladimir Putin:

I've never ever seen Trump so deferential to anyone, where he felt... He looked to Putin as though he was like a baby at the bosom, like he was finally in the presence of somebody he felt safe with, that he felt protected by. Image speaks so much louder than words, and we know from their own admission, from the Trump kids telling us that they’ve relied, all these years, on Russian money. … Donald Trump is a terrorist attack. What he is doing is what he intended to do all along. He was never a president for America. If you wonder how so many people can follow him, it's the same answer to how so many Russians can follow Putin. It's been propaganda and disinformation all along. Russia, under Putin, is a dying country. It is a dying country, and yet Russians continue—many of them—continue to support Putin and they're brainwashed. … You would not imagine the level of propaganda and how inescapable it is inside Russia, and how it’s just permeated the country and turned people against each other. They really believe all the threats of the United States and of so called fascists in Ukraine and so on, that they get pumped full of, just like they do with Fox News and One America Network and Newsmax and Breitbart, and all of it. Disinformation, propaganda, it brainwashes. It creates a cult. And now you have the Facebook cult of social media brainwashing through QAnon and others. It's a very dangerous time where the worst of America is being weaponized against those just trying to live in a free and safe country.

How much damage is the nasty guy going to do on his way out? What is he going to do to set up Joe Biden to fail? How is he going to mess up the vaccine distribution? There are large sections of this podcast I’m not discussing or quoting because I’ve seen Kendzior and Chalupa, or perhaps other sources, already discuss what is said here. On to another topic, Kendzior said:

There's been talk of, “oh, we need to move on, let history judge them”. Well, a lot of people who would like to judge them are dead. They died because of Trump. They're not around to judge them. It doesn't just fall on the survivors, either, it falls on people who have positions of power, who can prevent another atrocity from happening again. And that is why Trump, Kushner, Pence, everybody who was in that coronavirus team, that is why they need to be held accountable for their actions, and I think that is the place to begin, when we start looking at prosecutions. … Coronavirus has destroyed our country, it has affected everyone, and as you said, it was preventable, we could have gone in a completely different direction. These people were not destined to die, they were killed. They were killed by their government.

Towards the end they turned to discussing Biden’s cabinet picks, though they named only one. That was Lloyd Austin for Department of Defense, the first black man nominated to the position. Chalupa said that one must be careful of diversity just for diversity, but didn’t follow up whether in Austin’s case it was good or bad. However, this pick shows that Biden is a person looking for connections with people and he had previously connected with Austin. In the past people have spoken of Biden as providing a workplace environment where the boss takes them seriously and creates a culture of fairness. The team he is building are people of substance with expertise and character who feel they can speak truth to the commander in chief. He’s building a cabinet that can feel like family. Quite the contrast to the previous guy. Then they turned to William Barr of the Department of Injustice. Kendzior said:

The bottom line of what Barr is doing is making sure that the broader GOP crime cult agenda will continue, regardless whether Barr is there, regardless whether Trump is there as president. ... They've been working toward this goal for decades on end and they're not going to be making decisions lightly, and they're certainly not going to be making decisions out of some sort of obligation toward the public good. That does not ever even enter their minds.