The opposite of the white flag of surrender

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has scheduled the Freedom to Vote Act for a floor vote next week. Finally! This is a bill that Sen. Joe Manchin spent time helping to craft (so it is a bill important to him). It is also a bill he’s been shopping around to Republicans, hoping there are “10 good people” on the Republican side who will vote for it. There needs to be ten GOP votes because Manchin also refuses to get rid of the filibuster. McCarter wrote:

Manchin has remained convinced that by the force of his personality and magical belief in bipartisanship, there will be enough Republicans who think every eligible voter needs easy access to the polls. Maybe the brick wall of opposition will do the trick of bringing Manchin around on the filibuster. Even though Mitch McConnell broke last week on the debt ceiling, supposedly out of fear that Democrats would nuke the filibuster to pass it, he’s not going to let 10 GOP senators loose on this one.

McCarter then reviewed all the good election protection stuff in this bill. Then she wrote:

“We cannot allow conservative-controlled states to double down on their regressive and subversive voting bills,” Schumer said in his letter, calling for a vote as early as Wednesday. “I hope that our Republican colleagues will join us in good faith,” he wrote. “But Republicans must come to the table to have that conversation and at the very least vote to open debate.” Or what? That’s where we’re all left dangling, including Manchin, who has staked an awful lot on this bill. So far, no Republican has expressed any interest in voting for it. Schumer has said, lots and lots of times, that “everything is on the table” in restoring voting rights. We might just see whether he means it next week.

David Neiwert of Kos reported there is a new flag being flown at far right events, a black American flag. It’s all black, though the small variations in color show the traditional stars and stripes. Neiwert wrote:

Black flags have a particular historical meaning for Americans: They first appeared on Civil War battlegrounds, carried by some Confederate Army units, and symbolizing the intent of the soldiers to neither seek any quarter nor give any—essentially, the opposite of the white flag of surrender, signifying that enemy combatants are to be killed rather than taken prisoner. It’s a vow to massacre their enemies.

This flag joins several others – the Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flag, the Blue Lives Matter flag, and several other MAGA themed flags. It is a sign the person flying it is ready for a Second Civil War. Writing about the Capitol attack, Neiwert wrote:

If anyone believes the radicalized American right’s drive to push the nation into bloody civil strife was somehow expiated or exhausted that day, they only need check the presence of black American flags the next time there is a right-wing protest in their town. Or maybe they can just check the front porches in their neighborhoods.

Neiwert also began a post from last Monday with:

The scene in Rome this weekend had a disturbingly familiar feel to it: An angry mob, fueled by far-right conspiracy theories and disinformation, besieging and invading and vandalizing the stately offices of the country’s largest workers union at the culmination of a protest against public COVID-19 health measures. And leading the violence was a gang of far-right neo-fascist thugs. Yes, it had more than a passing resemblance to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection in Washington—as well as similarities to the recent COVID-19 measure protests in Melbourne, Australia, not to mention multiple school and health board meetings in towns across America in the months afterward. Many of these scenes have been “mini-insurrections,” and their repetition on a global basis makes clear that this is the post-Trump strategy being adopted by the radical right: Generate controversy with disinformation that in turn leads to mostly localized protests to which violent far-right groups can then attach themselves and expand their campaigns of terrorizing both “the left” and the public generally.

Why a union office? Fascists – frequently sponsored by corporations – don’t like unions. Rioters also attempted to enter the residence of the prime minister, but police repelled them. A mob entered a nearby hospital emergency unit and trashed equipment. Other fascist parties, from Germany to Australia have also adopted these tactics. Neiwert wrote:

The model for this has been the Proud Boys’ chief strategy since Jan. 6: operating on a purely local level, consistently hijacking causes and events organized by local activists and communities. But as intelligence analyst Kristopher Goldsmith recently explained on MSNBC, these mini-insurrections are in fact a form of preparation for a much more overwhelming event farther down the road. "Every failed coup is just practice,” Goldsmith said. “What's, I think, most disturbing, to people now is that it's become out in the public." ... The constant drumbeat of mini-insurrections, he said, pose a real threat to democratic institutions. “Right now, everyone from Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers to QAnon influencers are trying to encourage their members, their followers, their maniacs to show up at school board hearings and intimidate members so that those people resign,” he said. “That creates vacancies so that they can run for elections and win. “It’s not just a spontaneous thing. It’s completely organized. And it’s not just organized by extremist groups, it’s organized by some of the most well-moneyed and flashy PACs, like Turning Point USA.”

Hunter of Kos wrote:

The Republican Party has now adopted the big lie, the hoax that looks to undermine democracy by declaring that important elections not won by Republican candidates are somehow "rigged" or "fraudulent," and are running with it. The chances are good that there will be another insurrection or similar act of terrorism in the next election. Fox News and top Republican leaders are both making sure of that. ... It is a frame that Fox News has been pushing: Not just the last election, but the next elections are also under threat due to unspecified, invisible supposed fraud unfairly cheating Dear Leader's party and minions out of their rightful places in office. That each of the Giuliani-pushed, Powell-pushed, Trump-pushed claims of fraud have been proven hoaxes at this point makes no difference to [Fox News host Maria] Bartiromo or the others. The goal of Bartiromo and other insurrection-backing Fox pundits is to use the false claims to create an overriding belief, in their audience, that the next elections will either be won by Republicans or will be "illegitimate." The Big Lie is not meant to be proven. It is a weapon. It is the knife that top members of new Republicanism will threaten each new election with, if the nation dares vote against them. We can see how important the election hoax is to Republican Party strategy in the absolute unwillingness of Republican leaders to concede its falseness. ... There will almost certainly be another insurrection. It may be in one of the state capitols, rather than inside the U.S. Capitol itself. It may again be violent, or it may consist of a state's Republican lawmakers simply nullifying an election outright with claims no more substantive than Rudy Giuliani's seditionist hoaxes. Everything Republican leaders are doing, from new election laws to the drumbeat of "fraud" rhetoric clogging the Fox News arteries, has the toppling of elections themselves as necessary end point.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat quoted a tweet from historian Dr. Joanne Freeman, who quoted an article in Slate:

"They no longer think they’ll have to answer to the entire public, ever...[A]bsolutely nothing else we do will be as imperative as ensuring that we have free & fair elections whose results are honored." Popularity doesn’t matter in a post-voting America.

Ben-Ghiat added

Correct. It's not about being liked. it's about getting people to submit to you & follow you blindly.