Fascism is very much a white collar crime

This afternoon the nasty guy was impeached a second time. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos has a short summary of the vote. This time ten GOP members voted to impeach, so the final tally was 232-197. I heard on NPR that the Senate won’t return from recess early to take up the impeachment trial. Also, Moscow Mitch is saying he hasn’t decided how he will vote. That’s a big change from last year’s impeachment. The Senate not returning early from their recess, according to Leah McElrath, is a bad thing. She quoted a tweet from Andrew Solender of Forbes that included a statement from Mitch (which I didn’t include), claiming there just isn’t time.

NEW: McConnell says the Senate will spend the next week "completely focused on facilitating a safe inauguration and an orderly transfer of power to the incoming Biden Administration."

McElrath responded:

McConnell will NOT allow the Senate to proceed with a trial to convict Trump of the high crimes and misdemeanors for which he has been impeached FAST ENOUGH TO REMOVE HIM FROM OFFICE. He and other Republicans have been engaging in political theater. Make no mistake: The insurrectionists are going to see this as encouragement to engage in more violence and to continue to attempt to overthrow the election results and the newly elected government This decision by Mitch McConnell is ESCALATORY. He knows it. He is complicit.

The inauguration is in one week. There will likely be a great deal of violence between now and then, also during and after. Take care of yourself. A tweet from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, explaining why she would vote for impeachment.

They had bombs. They killed several people. They had nooses, zip ties, and pipes. They came armed & with bulletproof vests. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence." They hunted the Speaker of the House. This was a serious attack on America—and it was incited by Trump. We must remove him.

Before then… Guy Benson quoted from a tweet from Meet the Press.

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) says majority of GOP "paralyzed with fear" @RepJasonCrow: "I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. … A couple of them broke down in tears … saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment."

Benson tweeted:

I can confirm this. I spoke with a GOP member moments ago, asking if it is true that there are House Republicans who favor impeachment but fear for their lives/physical safety if they follow through with that vote. Answer: “Yes.”

Before now I thought such pressure was coming from nasty guy supporters. But… Ana Cabrera of CNN tweeted:

In the category of shocking but not surprising: CNN’s @jamiegangel reports that the WH is putting huge pressure on members, and that members are saying "they want to vote to impeach but they legitimately fear for their lives and their families’ lives."

There are many indications that parts of the attack on the Capitol were an inside job. ContextFall is keeping a list of such reports. An example is Sarah Groh, chief of staff for Ayanna Pressley, reported the panic buttons in her office had been torn out before the attack. Mark Sumner of Kos reported more inside involvement, including Rep. Lauren Boebert was doing such things as tweeting the location of Speaker Pelosi. Sumner also reported there were several outside groups in the Capitol complex on January 5. Unusual because the place has been closed to public tours since March. That means a member let them in. Rep. Mikie Sherrill stated (as Sumner wrote)…

that she witnessed Republican members of Congress leading would-be insurgents on a “reconnaissance” of the Capitol.

Hunter of Kos reported that the FBI did have advance information about the intended attack on the Capitol on January 6. They knew organizers were describing it as a war. They assembled a report, which included maps of the building and the escape tunnels underneath. They shared it with the FBI head office. The administration knew. Yet the Capitol police received no backup from federal law enforcement nor from the Department of Defense. Hunter wrote:

The lack of security at the Capitol was an intentional act. We do not yet know how many officials participated, but it required the cooperation of at least several. All the others should be investigated for gross incompetence. It is one thing to be caught unaware by a violent planned attack that was widely being warned of beforehand. It is another to refuse to provide rescue during the attack, as congressional leaders and the vice president hid in safe rooms and called various agencies warning that there were injuries, possibly deaths, and that many other lives were now in danger. That is treason, and should result in more than mere resignations.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed that “unity” thing the GOP members of Congress are pushing right now. The Democrat’s push for impeachment is unifying a lot of people, though maybe not far right GOP members. Yet. Eleveld listed several things that various groups are uniting behind. Things like corporations halting donations to the sedition party. Big Tech shutting down the nasty guy’s accounts. The military Joint Chiefs of Staff issuing a statement condemning the “sedition and insurrection” at the Capitol. Early public opinion polls showing 52% support for impeachment. Jen Sorenson of the Kos community created a comic of a partial cast of people describing how we got here. There is the disinformation enabler, saying “How dare you suggest Fox is not journalism,” the Republican reversalists, saying “We’re the real victims here!” and a few more. In response to a tweet suggesting a liberal arts degree could keep one from being brainwashed and storm the Capitol Mikki Kendall, a black woman tweeted a thread:

Most of the current architects of fascism have humanities degrees. From top flight institutions ranging from Duke to University of Chicago to Harvard. They include degrees in everything from literature to political science to theology. College isn't a shield against hate. … Let me remind you, poor undereducated people do not have the power or access to be the architects of oppressive systems. They are often the fodder & may become enforcers. But they didn't build it. It's the lawyers and doctors and teachers and politicians. And the people that stormed the Capitol? Largely turning out to be business owners, CEO's, doctors, nurses, marketing directors…fascism is very much a white collar crime. Stop trying to shift the blame and deal with the problem inside your communities. … These people are making a choice. I know we talk about the last four years in terms of cults and brainwashing, but that's not all that happened. At some point we have to talk about the fact that 70 million people looked at the hate & either embraced it or decided it didn't matter. They cared more about money than anything else. And they were willing to watch everyone else suffer as long as they were comfortable. That's not an education problem. That's a basic human decency problem.

I think they cared about something more than money. Read on … Kim Kelly tweeted:

The bad takes on “who the Trump rioters are” ignore the fact that most poor and working class people can’t even afford to take off work when their kids are sick, let alone load up on Trump merch and body armor, travel across the country, and spend all day playing fascist putsch. It costs a lot of money to fund this fascist bulls---. Don’t lay the blame solely on the lazy avatar of the “blue collar Trump voter.” There were lawyers and CEOs and a judge’s son leading the charge. One of them took her private jet out to storm the Capitol! If you’re going to spout this kind of toxic, uninformed rhetoric, just say you think the working classes is bad and rich people are good and go.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer tweeted to introduce a new column:

1 thing wasn't in the air at Capitol insurrection: Economic anxiety. They were affluent suburbanites - real-estate broker, lawyer, doctor's spouse, business owners, etc. They flew to DC and risked all for what mattered to them: White privilege.

That is what’s more valuable to them than money. Hunter of Kos has a good rant about the people that go to nasty guy resorts in hopes of mingling with him. Hunter got started because of the news that a request was made to county officials that Mar-a-Lago should be shut down for repeated violations of pandemic safety measures.

The message of Mar-a-Lago is the same message Trump spreads everywhere he goes. The wealthy are allowed to be superspreaders; it is their right. The wealthy are allowed to injure and kill; it should go without saying. Whatever laws exist, they no longer exist in the areas where cash collects. It is a game. … The whole of the country is corrupt. It took only the slightest push from Trump to send the entire Republican Party hurdling into hoaxes and delusions, because the party was already nine-tenths of the way there. They were already declaring non-Republican rule to be illegitimate. They were already declaring non-Republican wins to be the result of the wrong people voting. They were already responding to scandal and superscandal by claiming that the real outrage was that law enforcement, tax officials or the press still dare to probe such things … It is not that the wealthy can get away with violating petty laws intended to better secure the safety of petty people. They can mock those laws. They can turn the laws that irritate them into a new campaign, with captured faux-press outlets bellowing day after day to the common rabble that they, too, are terribly wounded by having to do the most trivial of things for their fellow man. They can turn it into a movement. On a whim.