Failed election fraud, failed court battles, next violence

I downloaded Michigan coronavirus data this morning. The number of new cases per day is thankfully still trending downward, though daily counts will still likely be adjusted upward. A week ago there were several days with deaths above 130. On to another transcript from the Gaslit Nation podcast, hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Barr and Other Hacks. Chalupa gave her thanks for the two vaccines to halt the spread of the coronavirus, then discussed we might be entering the age of the pandemic. That would be due to climate change and human overpopulation that puts pressure on the natural world, as well as vulnerabilities from the way we raise animals to eat. So vote for people who trust and believe in science. One of the scientists is Katalin Karikó, who is a Hungarian immigrant. She studied the messenger RNA that has become the main component of both approved vaccines. She was spurred on by imagining all the diseases she could treat. Kendzior turned to the coup, usually known at the presidential transition period. We’re halfway through it. A big development is the resignation of William Barr, who had created the Department of Injustice. But people like Barr in the inner core of the nasty guy’s orbit – Bannon, Manafort, Stone, Flynn – don’t actually leave. In addition, he has been implicated in the Trump Russia and Jeffrey Epstein cases, and many other crimes going back to Iran-Contra. He’s the GOP cover up guy. He will likely continue his crime spree from a distance. He’s accomplished his department’s goals of burying the Muller Report and making the Epstein case disappear. Kendzior calls on media to not dare rehabilitate Bill Barr. Do not whitewash him. He’s the same guy he’s always been. He’s not and won’t be a secret white hat. The people who will try are the ones who vouched for Barr and don’t want to hurt their reputations by admitting they were wrong. Both Kendzior and Chalupa go into detail about what Barr has done in his Department of Injustice. I won’t repeat it. On to another topic. Chalupa said:

The 126 Republicans that signed on to this farce of challenging the legitimacy of Biden's very clear win, understand that, yes, they're doing that as a gesture. There's no real teeth behind it. There haven't been any real teeth behind any of these clown car efforts to overturn the election. But the real danger of what they're doing is disinformation. They're spreading harmful disinformation and continuing to convince tens of millions of Trump's voters that they're victimized, that they're oppressed, and therefore justified in using any means possible to attack and undermine what they're perceiving as a "tyrannical system", aka, democracy.

The oppression they feel is in not being allowed to be oppressors. Kendzior said:

Yeah. The coup has moved into its violent stage, and this is what we had predicted before. We had the first stage of the coup, which was Trump attempting to rig the election through things like trying to destroy the Postal Service, trying to delay the mail, making up narratives of election fraud. That has failed. They then went to the courts over 50 times and that failed, most notably, last week in the Supreme Court. Now, we are in the next stage, which is violence, as you said, by white supremacist groups acting on behalf of Trump and backed by the sedition caucus (which you just named) of these 150+ overtly treasonous Republicans. This is the revival of the Confederacy and they should be treated like Confederates. They should be marked as traitors and made to face serious consequences. It's sedition. It cannot be laughed off or treated as just a grift, or dismissed as inconsequential simply because the court cases failed. This is the building blocks of a new narrative—a narrative of violence—and it needs to be dismantled before it can grow. So yes, as you said, we had a violent weekend. We had the beginning of what may be many weeks of these acts of violence.

That violent weekend was the Proud Boys in DC. There is talk of a second Civil War. But it won’t be a Union v. Confederacy. It will increased incidences of violence…

bombings, mass shootings, and things like the desecration of Black churches, white supremacists burning Black Lives Matter banners in the streets in marching, stabbings, things like that, and we're going to continue to see people like Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, these are grifters but they're also extremely dangerous propagandists who have the ability to incite violence, and they were there last weekend trying to rev people up.

Kendzior said some white supremacist websites are calling for everyone to prepare for war, to get supplies to last for the duration. But others say that yeah, they support the nasty guy, but because of the coronavirus crisis the job is gone, there is no money, and they can’t afford weapons. Does it really have to go that far? The militant ones reply yes, we have to take it that far. Kendzior said that negates the idea in mainstream media that all 70 million people who voted for the nasty guy are equally fanatical and militant about having a war between Americans. Even so, there doesn’t need to be many violent fanatics to cause a giant problem in America. Maybe just a hundred. Will the FBI find them in time? Those of us who don’t want violence should not seek violence. Instead, peacefully stand up for those being attacked, such as black churches, and push for the end of elite criminal impunity. We want the people who have been committing crimes to be brought to justice. Many of these people are the same ones QAnon supporters also want brought to justice, such as Jeffrey Epstein and the Sackler family (who got rich off selling opioids). And that is a way of uniting a broken nation. For several days now I’ve been collecting tweets and articles in my browser tabs about the Russian cyber attacks. I’ve now got several. But I wouldn’t get to that topic in my evening writing and the next day the story would be bigger. So I decided to wait to see what Gaslit Nation had to say about it. That turns out to be plenty. Kendzior and Chalupa were discussing more than a year ago that a cyber attack by Russia was imminent. These attacks are not new. Kendzior said:

During the second term of the Obama administration, They hacked the DOD, the State Department, the White House, the DNC, the RNC, and the emails of seemingly everybody in government with one exception, which is of course, Hillary Clinton, who protected herself by having a private server and was punished for it. So how about that?

There was also a prelude to these tactics in Ukraine. Chalupa said that Russia changed the results of Ukraine’s election in 2014, though Ukraine’s authorities caught it early and changed votes back. In 2017 Russians launched the NotPetya attack. It was intended for updates of a Ukrainian tax software company. But the malware quickly spread and caused $10 billion in damage around the world. This was documented in the book Sandworm by Andy Greenberg. Part of the book explains why Ukraine matters to the world and how to confront Kremlin’s aggression (which will outlast Putin). The Kremlin has no trouble using methods the rest of the world cringes from. Russia also hacked Ukraine’s power grid, causing a massive blackout with humanitarian consequences. John McCain, before he died, said that Russia had infiltrated the US power grid. US officials looked at it quite seriously in 2017-18, but very little since. So maybe we should stock up on extra supplies. The current hack happened through malware attached to upgrades from tech company SolarWinds, which makes network modules. SolarWinds said that 18,000 of its customers installed this bad upgrade. It allowed hackers to spy for nine months. Affected were Departments of Homeland Security, Treasury, Commerce, State, and Defense. Also National Institutes for Health and thousands of business that work with the government. It’s a massive hack. There was a prior hack at Treasury, done back in 2015. Obama only punished the whistleblower. The story broke publicly in 2018 by BuzzFeed. Steve Mnuchin was chosen to head Treasury to allow that hack to continue. Mnuchin is one of a cult of corporate raiders. Before this year’s hacks he and Wilbur Ross at Commerce had already compromised the departments they lead. They were never loyal to America. Strangely (though not surprisingly) the nasty guy has said nothing about the current hacks. Kendzior ponders whether these hacks were made public and tied to Russia so that the nasty guy could not blame them on Iran. The nasty guy had already revised the Nuclear Posture Review to say nukes could be used in response to a cyber attack. Perhaps the Russia connection was leaked to prevent a lame duck nasty guy from using nukes against Iran. Kendzior said it was interesting that right after this massive cyber attack was revealed to be Russian (and after the Electoral College vote) Putin congratulated Biden on his victory (which allowed Moscow Mitch to do the same). But don’t think Putin is abandoning his efforts to bring Biden down. Chalupa read from an article in Newsweek. A cybersecurity firm FireEye was one that got hacked. In investigating its own hack they traced the problem to SolarWinds and alerted the National Security Agency. If FireEye hadn’t been hacked the campaign could have gone on much longer. So why didn’t the NSA know about this predicted hack and respond? Had the agency been purged of the competent? There are signs the pandemic princess is moving to Florida and eyeing Marco Rubio’s seat in the Senate. Yeah, elbowing her way straight to the Senate. The nasty guy is allegedly pondering pardoning his kids. That’s a way of saying Daddy knows the kids were committing crimes while in the White House. Chalupa then listed some of the Princesses’ crimes. One is tax fraud, much more serious than tax avoidance. Slate has been documenting the crimes of the Trump Crime Family. One of those is grift. China has been awarding the Princess trademarks for her lifestyle brand. She was presented to the public as a senior advisor, moderating the extreme views of her father. But that idea has been shown false through the lack of any affect on his extreme actions, such as separating kids from parents. Slate also calls the Princess “probably the most prolific government grafter of the siblings.” It wrote that the Prince and Princess reported $135 million in income in 2018, much of it from foreign business. And there is much more. The list of crimes committed by the Prince is probably longer. Let’s hope these investigations lead to indictments – before she tries for that Senate seat. Beware of attempts to rehabilitate the Prince and Princess. They have deep roots in public relations in New York. Maggie Haberman, the daughter of a Trump and Kushner family publicist, loves to write puff pieces for the families from her perch in the New York Times. Getting them in prison is all about reducing the harm perpetrated on the American people. Dave Wasserman, a polster at the Cook Political Report noted Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes and came within 77,744 votes of winning the presidency. This year the nasty guy lost by 7.1 million yet came withing 65,009 votes of winning. He could have lost by 6 million and still won. So another Trump in power in ten years is easy to imagine. Remain vigilant.