They didn't prevent it because they didn't want to. Why?

More than a month has passed since I last read through and shared a transcript of an episode of Gaslit Nation hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. I’ve skipped several episodes because I’ve probably read much of what they have to say through their Twitter feeds or other online sources. Over the month of March the topics have been: An interview with Adam Jentleson, the guy who wrote the book calling for the end of the filibuster. A discussion of why the GOP votes to hurt their own base. I already know – that’s what supremacists do. An interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies electoral autocracy. An interview with Rep. Gwen Moore, who lived through the Capitol attack. And on to this week’s episode. This one is called Sleeper Cells. Just the title sounds important. After all the stress and trauma of the last year and knowing that Joe Biden is now in charge of the federal government there is a strong feeling to move on. But we can’t. The conditions and fractures of the insurrection still linger beneath the surface. This year, 2021, is when the 17 year cicadas will emerge. Here in southeast Michigan we might see and hear them. They’re much more prevalent in Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere. Kendzior wrote about her first encounter with the cicadas, then wrote:

I want you to remember that that is exactly what is happening with Trump's criminal cohort, with this transnational crime syndicate that we continually reference on this show—a syndicate that is a criminal underground, a syndicate that exists beneath the surface, only to emerge as a swarm every now and again into the public view. But it is there all along. That is the era that we are living in now, during these early years of the Biden administration. The political cicadas are currently in hiding. You have Trump, basically off the radar. You have the instigators of the Capitol attack escaping accountability. You have white supremacist terrorists not being held accountable for their crimes. And you have, of course, a global mafia comprised of plutocrats, oligarchs, corrupt state actors, and organized crime itself.

This swarm will emerge later this year and particularly in 2022. So stay on guard and push for accountability. Chalupa described a person, who sounds just like the nasty guy. Then Chalupa said she was describing Hitler from a documentary series titled The Rise of the Nazis. The parallels between the nasty guy and Hitler are many. Hitler came to power because conservative leaders refused to stop him as they dismantled democracy. The only thing they wanted was to keep the Left out of power. The Nazis were considered the “lunatic fringe,” fueled by hate, scapegoating, and violence. Stormtroopers committed violence in the open. The leaders knew who Hitler was. I’ve found in cases like this the definition of the Left is rather simple: those who don’t want white male supremacy. Those who tried to investigate Hitler found their efforts too late. The law turned against them. Hitler needed only six months to dismantle democracy. They started building their first concentration camp as soon as they were in power. They passed economic policies that helped many Germans financially as they normalized genocide, making it look as common sense as possible under slogans like “law and order.” Chalupa reviewed that justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett all have ties to the Federalist Society as former or current members, or as a periodic speaker. The Federalist Society is a powerful organization of conservative lawyers who are protecting white male patriarchy. This majority will be deciding cases based on the original meaning of the Constitution – when slavery was legal. The current makeup of the Supreme Court didn’t allow the nasty guy to steal the last election, but back in 2016 they tipped the scales to allow the nasty guy to get elected in the first place. They did that by gutting the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, such as those in Georgia with their voter suppression law, are making it easier for another nasty guy to come to power and stay in power. Another member of the Federalist Society is Christopher Wray, the current head of the FBI, who seems to be doing nothing to investigate the crimes of the nasty guy and the crimes committed during the insurrection. He’s doing that because, as a white supremacist, he doesn’t want to investigate white supremacy. The FBI is only 4% black, and those agents complain of racial discrimination. All of this is funded by Charles Koch and other billionaires like him. Koch is working to block the fix to the Voting Rights Act, named for John Lewis. Chalupa said:

I cannot emphasize enough: they [the FBI though also the Federalist Society] are allowing a Hitler to come to power in exchange for attacking the Left, in exchange for weakening our democracy, at a time when White supremacist violence is one of the greatest threats.

A bit later, Chalupa said:

Police forces and the military are infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists, as has been widely reported. On January 6th, at the violent coup attempt, police officers were beating up Capitol Police. Hitler, like Trump, used to say “law and order.” What they mean is they want to live above the law and unleash raw power and not be held accountable, to kill George Floyd and get away with it, to scapegoat like they're doing with Asian Americans right now, to be a proud cult of narcissists led by a narcissist. That's what the Nazis did. That is what Trumpism is currently doing, and we have a massive, deeply funded, far reaching far-right elite establishment that is empowering them to do this. The staggering lack of diversity at the FBI under Christopher Wray helps explain why the FBI under Christopher Wray failed to stop the violent attempted overthrow of our democracy by White supremacists. We saw it coming. We here at Gaslit Nation even let people know we were going to do a special episode about the attack before the attack even happened, because we saw it coming, because our show regularly covers White supremacy. We saw it coming and the FBI did not, because the FBI has a White supremacy crisis under Christopher Wray, and is led by someone who at least at one time was a member of a powerful organization—the Federalist Society—that works to uphold the insidious power structure of White supremacy.

That means Wray and the FBI are not investigating the current white supremacy violence or the political warfare being waged against democracy. The next nasty guy will be far more successful. “Hitler did not steal power. Hitler was handed power.” The highest priority is strengthen the rule of law, strengthen democracy. Do that by ending the filibuster, passing voting reforms, banning all weapons of war.

So, the threat remains, the genocidal culture remains. Think of this time as living among sleeper cells. They're there. They're in the police force. They're in the military. They're far-right ideological judges appointed by the Federalist Society's dark money. They're the Republican Party, the NRA, the Trump family, the Kremlin dark money, the greed of big tech that pushes disinformation in exchange for profits. The sleeper cells are among us.

Kendzior said at the end of 1918, the end of that flu pandemic when people were finally able to leave their homes again, there was a rage of white mob violence. That violence in many major cities prompted the summer of 1919 to be called the Red Summer. The massacre of the Tulsa black community was in 1921. The rise of fascism – Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin got their start in the years after the pandemic. All of that was from an incredible place of trauma. The recent shootings show the violence has started. The FBI could have stopped the insurrection and didn’t. They could investigate the abysmal handling of COVID response and are not. There are multiple cases of obstruction of justice not being followed (and where is the original Mueller report?). Kendzior said, as she has many times, we have a consistently bad record of FBI directors. Have we ever had a good one? Several have been complicit actors with transnational organized crime. Two – William Sessions and Louis Freeh – went directly to work as paid consultants for the Russian mafia. At the moment the leaders, and many of the agents, are not committed to justice, accountability, and transparency enough to take on powerful white men no matter their reputations or their international backers. The job of the FBI is to protect us. What does the security apparatus of America think is going to happen if they’re this reluctant to protect us. They won’t protect us from autocrats, transnational organized crime, a pandemic, white collar crime, or white supremacists. Instead, they focus on Islamic terrorism – and burying evidence of the things they won’t protect us from. This is a history going back 30 years. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is the only one willing to take this on. The rest of the Democrats are intimidated. Kendzior posted an important question:

This all could have been prevented. It was so predictable, so preventable. They didn't prevent it because they didn't want to. You need to ask, but why didn't they want to, and why would Biden not remove the person who allowed this to happen immediately?

Chalupa tackles the GOP slogan that they’re tough on crime, but they’re actually a criminal operation:

Republicans are not tough on crime, that is why we had criminals come to power. That is why we had criminals in the White House enriching themselves and mass murderers... Failing to prevent a pandemic which led to essentially mass murder by corruption, carried out by Trump and his family, Ivanka and Jared and their cronies. Republicans are tough on poor people. Republicans are tough on Communities of Color. Republicans are tough on LGBTQ people. Republicans are tough on women. They are not tough on crime. What they are trying to uphold is this destructive power structure known as White male patriarchy.

After Chalupa said again that Christopher Wray is part of the problem, Kendzior said:

Yeah, because the criminals are their friends, and that's it. It's as simple as that. Their definition of a criminal is created in advance of actually finding the crime. A criminal is a Muslim. A criminal is a Black man on the street. A criminal could never be Donald Trump, who committed a lifetime of crimes in plain sight. He was investigated by the Treasury. He was investigated—and has a very interesting little relationship—with the FBI, because that's their friend. That's their accomplice. ... I look at all of these cases, and whenever I hear the words “FBI informant”, I'm always thinking that it's such an incredible euphemism for somebody that you have befriended in order to carry out your own criminal activity under the rubric of the law.

This not protecting us has been going on for decades – Kendzior wrote the book, as did others – though the difference now is the brazen way the FBI and the GOP display it. See Georgia and its new voter suppression law as well as lots of similar bills around the country. Florida has “anti-rioting” legislation we know will be used against black and brown protesters. Kendzior said:

That's what the GOP is doing out in the open, so I can only imagine what they're doing in secret, buried like those little cicadas in the ground, because this level of brazenness is the kind of thing that happens when a country is turning from a democracy to an autocracy once the groundwork of that autocracy has already been established, once it's in voters' minds that this is, if not normal, just like a thing that happens, just like a bad thing that you should expect to happen, that no one is really expected to fight aggressively against, that we should come to accept somehow in our lives.

We’re to the point where the term “fascism” has become acceptable. Tucker Carlson on Fox News said we should move towards being a fascist country. Antifa – anti-fascist – is being labeled as radical and unAmerican, even though opposing fascism is as American as one can be. That the Republican Party is embracing fascism is a choice they’re making. Democrats not fighting this aggressively is also a choice. The choice to fight now is not easy. But it will be a lot harder if we don’t do anything.