What is left but violence to determine who should govern?

Yesterday was the fourth hearing by the January 6 Committee. This session focused on the people who were harmed by the relentless push to overturn the 2020 election. These were the people who stood in the way out of principle. Brandi Buchman of Daily Kos liveblogged the session, then she and others examined the testimonies of individual people. Rep. Adam, Schiff led part of the session. He started by saying the scheme didn’t end with the way the nasty guy treated the vice nasty.

It targeted every tier of election officials... The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on the body politic. If you can convince Americans that they cannot trust their own elections and any time they lose it, it is somehow illegitimate, then what is left but violence to determine who should govern?

Buchman tweeted:

The Tump campaign spent millions running ads saying that fraud was widespread and urging people to call their governors and state officials. Protests became increasingly dangerous in battleground states as Jan. 6 approached with the help of those ads. We see a clip of Nick Fuentes saying "What else can we do but kill them" when talking about members of state legislatures if they wouldn't go along with Trump's push to install bogus electors.

Russell Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House, was contacted by Rudy Giuliani with insistent claims of fraud in the order of thousands of votes. Giuliani eventually told Bowers, “We’ve got lots of theories just not the evidence.” Others called Bowers to decertify the election. He refused. In part 2 of the liveblog Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, and his deputy Gabriel Sterling discussed the phone call from the nasty guy begging to add close to 12 thousand votes to his tally. Shaye Moss testified that she and her mother Ruby Freeman loved their jobs helping people vote. Then the nasty guy targeted them, accusing them of fraud. They began to get threats. Moss said:

There is nowhere I feel safe. Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United States target you? The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote more about Bowers, a staunch conservative Republican. He chose to honor his sworn oath to the country and refused to pretend the Big Lie had any legal validity. This year the stopped the AZ Republicans from claiming the right to overrule an election. Bowers faced an overwhelming number of threatening emails and calls. Trucks with display screens outside his office claimed he was a “pedophile.” Loudspeakers circled his neighborhood. This was while the family was dealing with the final illness of his daughter, who could hear what those loudspeakers were saying. She died while this was happening. April Siese of Kos gave details of Shaye Moss’ testimony. The attacks weren’t just from the nasty guy. They also came from Giuliani. A mob went to the home of Moss’ grandmother (who wasn’t an election worker) to make a citizen’s arrest. That isn’t legal, but it is menacing and terrifying. Moss had a difficult time coping and the stress has resulted in health issues. In a summary of the day Bachman described Bowers’ testimony in more detail. He confirmed the election had not been rigged. He repeatedly asked Giuliani for evidence of fraud. It never came. When he was asked to hold an official meeting to explore allegations of fraud he refused, saying he did not want to be used as a pawn. When Giuliani asked him about replacing electors, Bowers said he would not break his oath. When John Eastman asked about decertifying electors, which Bowers had authority to do, he said he would consider it if there was evidence of fraud. Gabriel Sterling, Deputy Sec. of State in Georgia “had enough” when a manager for Dominion Voting Systems received an online message of a noose with his name on it. Dominion was accused of cheating because their voting machines made it harder to cheat. Sterling demanded the nasty guy stop the inflammatory rhetoric. One guess how the nasty guy responded. The pressure was intense. Brian Dickerson of the Detroit Free Press talked about the five remaining candidates for the Republican nomination for Governor in Michigan. In a debate three of the five did say they would accept the results of the November election no matter who won. Only one said he would – if there were proper poll watchers. As for the fifth... That’s Ryan Kelly. The US Justice Department filed criminal charges against him for participating in the Capitol attack, to help block the certification of Michigan’s electoral votes. He’s allowed to campaign until his trial and his popularity went up after the charges came out. Dickerson wrote:

But the real problem with the paranoiac suspicion those assertions evoke is that it is contagious. In their unfounded but relentless attacks on the integrity of Michigan elections, Republicans risk providing unsuccessful candidates in both parties with a ready excuse for ignoring the popular will. If the electoral process itself is suspect, how will elected officials establish their right to exercise governmental authority? Why concede defeat if counting votes is only the prelude to litigation — or political violence? Forgive my melodrama. But isn't this where we're headed when the players can't even agree when the game is over, or that the team that's leading at the end of nine innings is the presumptive winner?

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote the biggest revelations from these hearings are that the nasty guy has one simple trick – the threat of violence.

The biggest revelations are about fear—the fear that Donald Trump spent months generating. Trump spent years grooming his followers to be angry, delusional, and pliable. He spent years creating a mythology around U.S. elections. He spent years gathering up white supremacist groups, cheering on militias, and collecting everyone he saw as a tough guy, from “Bikers for Trump” to the Proud Boys. What happened on Jan. 6 was unthinkable. But what Trump did in the months and years before not only made that day possible, he create a state in which people would bow to him simply out of fear over what his followers might do. ... The rallies that Trump held going back to before the 2016 election were never about creating support. They were always about demonstrating support—and about demonstrating the level of personal loyalty and frothing anger present among those who follow Trump. Trump wanted everyone to know what he had built. The comparisons between what happens at any Trump rally and what happened at Nuremberg are perfectly apt, because they were all about demonstrating a level of personal power that was intended to make people quake.

He used fear of what he might unleash on January 6 to try to get the Supreme Court to defend his takeover. And he still uses fear – that what happened on January 6 was just a taste of what his followers might do. Sumner soon posted again with an example of that fear. He quoted Sen. Lindsay Graham at a Faith and Freedom Coalition in Nashville:

At the podium, Graham made it clear what he really missed about Trump — the bullying. “You know what I like about Trump?” Graham asks the audience, before providing the answer. “Everybody was afraid of him.”

Sumner concluded, speaking of the nasty guy:

He’s a guy who thinks his ability to hate powerfully, is his best quality. He may even be right. The difference is … Republicans like it. They like being afraid. They want that bully at the bully pulpit. They want a “strong man” to tell them what to do, to yell at anyone who strays from the course, and to threaten everyone who refuses to go along with the fascistic flow. They don’t want to have to deal with facts and reason, much less justice and fairness. Republicans like being afraid of Trump. It’s no wonder that they are always making paintings and posters in which Trump is some muscle-bound action hero. Because admitting they enjoy being bullied by the actual Trump … is simply pathetic.

Republicans may want the nasty guy to bully them. What they want even more is the nasty guy to bully everyone who isn’t a Republican. Joan McCarter of Kos reported on Republicans who support the nasty guy and who won their primaries. There is a contradiction here. Most of them ran on saying there was fraud in the 2020 election, or that the election system is fraudulent, perhaps under the control of some deep state cabal. Yet, when they win the election system worked just fine – their election wasn’t fraudulent. Strangely, they can’t explain why such endemic fraud just happened to miss their own election. So, for the moment they’re silent. But they’ll be back to full voice in time to claim the November election is fraudulent – unless they happen to win. Biden has asked Congress for a federal gas tax holiday. Since that’s been discussed for a while and since Biden has attacked the oil companies for price gouging, last Saturday Brittany Cronin of NPR took a look at the situation. She mostly talked to Denton Cinquegrana of the Oil Price Information Service. The big problem is oil refinery capacity. The first hit to capacity was at the start of the pandemic when everyone stopped driving. Refineries were idled. Second was damage – Hurricane Ida took out one refinery. A fire took out another. And the third reason is we’re in the midst of an energy transition – championed by Biden. He has said he wants to phase out fossil fuels as fast as possible. Some refineries have been repurposed to make things like biofuels. And the rest, the ones that are operational, are running at capacity. To bring idled refineries back online is not quick or cheap. Cinquegrana said:

You're talking about a lot of money to get these refineries that are idled up and running. And when I'm being told, five years from now, we hope you don't exist, why should I help you?

Of course, given that, no company will want to build a new refinery in the US. So we can’t refine our way out of high gas prices. So let’s push for renewables. The high gas prices will accelerate the push to electric cars. But the auto industry doesn’t yet have the capacity to supply the need. High gas prices will be here for a while.