Violence is acceptable tactics: White neo-fascists threaten death to police officers

The kerfuffle up in Coeur d’Alene, ID has led to neo-fascist death threats to the local police. As discussed here two days ago, 31 neo-fascists were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to riot at a gay pride event there. NBC News writes:

Idaho police said they've received death threats since arresting 31 men affiliated with white nationalist group Patriot Front near an annual LGBTQ+ event over the weekend.

Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White spoke to reporters Monday, saying that his department has fielded about 149 calls in the aftermath of the arrests. He said about 50 percent of the calls have been praise from the community, who offer their names and express pride in the department.

“And the other 50 percent — who are completely anonymous, who want nothing more than to scream and yell at us and use some really choice words — offer death threats against myself and other members of the police department merely for doing our jobs,” White said. “Those people obviously remain anonymous.”

Officers have also received threats of doxxing, a practice in which someone publishes personal information such as phone numbers or addresses online, White said. The majority of the threats being made appear to be from outside the Coeur d’Alene community, according to the chief.

Coeur d’Alene police with arrested neo-fascists

This is yet more evidence of the acceptability of violence to America's radical right and the Republican Party generally. As the 1/6 Committee hearings have pointed out, the ex-president said that he believed the people in the coup attempt who called for Pence to be hanged had the right idea. No wonder the GOP embraces violence and death threats when they don't like the way things go for them. 

From the Republican Party point of view, those 31 White supremacists were merely engaging in legitimate political discourse, not conspiring to break any laws or to riot or to kill anyone. As the RNC nicely put it about violence on their own side, the 1/6 coup attempt was just some innocent patriots engaging in harmless “legitimate political discourse.”[1]

Footnote: 

1. Washington Post on Feb. 8, 2022:

When the Republican Party voted to censure two of its own members of Congress last week at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City, it justified the move in part by declaring that efforts to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection amounted to the persecution of individuals engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”

John Oliver talks about tech monopolies

In this 26:49 video, John Oliver talks about monopolies and how they fight hard and dirty top protect their profits and markets from competition. He starts with some brief comments about the breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T, then moves on to Apple, Google and Amazon.

Although the video is long, it is well worth the time. It's about as funny as a serious talk about the power and poison of monopolies can be. There's some pretty funny commentary here, including a brief but great digression into the intelligent evil and malice of dolphins.

Given the power of monopoly money to subvert and corrupt our broken congress, two narrow bills pending in congress intended to partly defang the tech giants probably won't pass. They are the Open App Markets Act and the American Choice and Innovation Online Act. As usual, conflicts of interest and ethical sleaze are all over the place with congress. Schumer's daughters work for Amazon. That says it all. Those two bills are probably dead, probably leaving us screwed.

The ex-president's big grift rip off: It still rips people off today

The hearings this morning were interesting. But only interesting to open minds. 

Closed minds either didn't listen to it, or reject it as lies. Closed minds do not change. For the most part, evidence is irrelevant. Tribe and cult loyalty is everything, inconvenient facts and truth are lies.

The only point this post makes is that T**** used his position of public trust and power as a gigantic grift to cash in on at least $250 million. He was and still is interested in paying off his debts, not anything else.

The power and credibility of the American radical right Republican Party and its current leader T**** are built on demagoguery, lies, deceit, slanders, fraud, Christian fundamentalism, corrupt vicious capitalism and endless sleaze.

Most of the Republican Party and American conservatism is demagogic, neo-fascist, corrupt, mendacious and especially staunchly anti-inconvenient truth and anti-democratic. The Republican Party and American conservatism is the enemy of what is good, freedom-loving and honest.

 

Qs & commentary: Is that mostly false and therefore over the top? If so, my bad, but I don't think I am wrong, so, I'm not bad. Or, is that reasoning flawed? If so, exactly and precisely how is it flawed?

Many Dems now argue that Biden should not run in 2024

From NYT 6/11/22:

Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise.

In interviews, dozens of frustrated Democratic officials, members of Congress and voters expressed doubts about the president’s ability to rescue his reeling party and take the fight to Republicans.

Midway through the 2022 primary season, many Democratic lawmakers and party officials are venting their frustrations with President Biden’s struggle to advance the bulk of his agenda, doubting his ability to rescue the party from a predicted midterm trouncing and increasingly viewing him as an anchor that should be cut loose in 2024.

As the challenges facing the nation mount and fatigued base voters show low enthusiasm, Democrats in union meetings, the back rooms of Capitol Hill and party gatherings from coast to coast are quietly worrying about Mr. Biden’s leadership, his age and his capability to take the fight to former President Donald J. Trump a second time.

Interviews with nearly 50 Democratic officials, from county leaders to members of Congress, as well as with disappointed voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020, reveal a party alarmed about Republicans’ rising strength and extraordinarily pessimistic about an immediate path forward.

“To say our country was on the right track would flagrantly depart from reality,” said Steve Simeonidis, a Democratic National Committee member from Miami. Mr. Biden, he said, “should announce his intent not to seek re-election in ’24 right after the midterms.”

 

Democrats’ concerns come as the opening hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol made clear the stakes of a 2024 presidential election in which Mr. Trump, whose lies fueled a riot that disrupted the peaceful transfer of power, may well seek to return to the White House.

For Mr. Biden and his party, the hearings’ vivid reminder of the Trump-inspired mob violence represents perhaps the last, best chance before the midterms to break through with persuadable swing voters who have been more focused on inflation and gas prices. If the party cannot, it may miss its final opportunity to hold Mr. Trump accountable as Mr. Biden faces a tumultuous two years of a Republican-led House obstructing and investigating him.

Read the rest of the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/us/politics/biden-2024-election-democrats.html

See also this related article in The Guardian: "AOC refuses to endorse Biden for 2024 as Democrats doubt his ability to winhttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/12/aoc-biden-2024-election-democrats-anxiety

 

White domestic terrorists stopped while trying to do their thing

Arresting bigoted White terrorists before they

could attack and/or murder innocent people they hate

Bigoted and/or racist White supremacists are among the top terrorist threats in the US at present. The Spokesman-Review writes:

‘Little army’ of 31 masked Patriot Front members arrested in Coeur d’Alene 

near Pride in the Park

Police in Coeur d’Alene arrested 31 masked members of a white nationalist group suspected of conspiring to riot in the city’s downtown on the same day as a scheduled Pride in the Park event nearby.

The arrested men of “Patriot Front” arrived in Coeur d’Alene inside a U-Haul truck that police pulled over. Only one was from Idaho. The rest came from Washington, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming. Among the arrested is the national leader of the group, Thomas Rousseau, according to the Kootenai County Jail roster.

Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said the group evidently “came to riot downtown.” White said the group also had “paperwork” that appeared similar to a police or military operations plan.

The arrests became a spectacle as onlookers watched and used cellphones to take video and pictures of numerous police officers standing by as others rolled up the rear door of the U-Haul near the Paul Bunyan restaurant to reveal more than two dozen men wearing khakis, blue shirts and coats, white balaclavas and baseball caps. The U-Haul was eventually towed away.

 

An unmasked angry White bigot boy going to 

the slammer where he belongs

Why is it always males, especially T**** supporters? 

Are they just evil, stupid, something else or 

all three?

“Patriot Front” my ass. They are not patriots. They are murderous White neo-fascist terrorists and traitors. No doubt they support T****. They are fine Republicans in good standing with the neo-fascist GOP. Marjorie Taylor Greene will probably be Tweeting in their defense soon claiming something crackpot like fluoride in the water and/or Hunter Biden's laptop made them go out to attack non-heterosexual people.

What Biden and democracy defenders need to focus on, if it's not too late

The Washington Post published an important perspective article by Richard L. Hasen professor of law and political science at the University of California at Irvine. This is well worth paying attention to. Hasen writes: 

The special House committee hearings investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — which began Thursday night, in prime time — are serving multiple purposes: They are revealing evidence that could be used to file criminal charges for attempted election subversion against some of former president Donald Trump’s lawyers, against people who tried to manipulate the count of electoral college votes and potentially against Trump himself. They have begun to provide the most comprehensive account yet of the unprecedented attempt by Trump and his allies to disrupt the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election.

But the most important thing the hearings, which will continue into July, can do — given that, if someone tries to steal the next election, they won’t do it precisely the way Trump and his allies tried in 2020 — is to shift our gaze forward: They can highlight continuing vulnerabilities in our electoral system and propose ways to fix them, before it is too late.

The hearings also represent the best chance to galvanize public support to address these weak points, which is important, because the window for passing such legislation is closing: If Republicans retake the House in November, they will never put forth bills that imply the country needs protection from Trump, their kingmaker. If these hearings don’t spur action by this summer or fall, expect Congress to do nothing before the 2024 elections, at which point American democracy will be in great danger.

Any attempt to subvert the next presidential election is likely to be far more efficient and ruthlessly targeted than the last effort. It will be focused on holes and ambiguities in the arcane rules for counting electoral college votes set forth in the Constitution and in a poorly written 1887 law, the Electoral Count Act.

There’s much that can be done to fix those problems, as a diverse group of prominent legal scholars, convened by the American Law Institute and including former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer and former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn, has suggested. To begin with, Congress can revise the Electoral Count Act to create a more robust role for federal courts in making sure that states follow their own rules for picking the winner of their electoral college votes. Courts are not perfect, but they stood strong in 2020 against more than 60 attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn election results, and they are the best hope to deal fairly with any future conflict over the rightful winner of a state’s electoral college votes.

Congress should also mandate that voting machines produce paper ballots that could be recounted in the event of an election dispute, provide adequate funding for fair elections, increase protection of election workers and officials against harassment and violence, and stiffen criminal penalties for interfering with official election proceedings. (Some of these provisions, like the paper-ballot requirement, were in the Freedom to Vote Act, which Democrats failed to get through the Senate this year.)

But revision of the Electoral Count Act may prove especially important. Imagine that 2024 features a rematch between Trump and President Biden, and Biden once again narrowly prevails in Arizona and Pennsylvania. By that year, those states may have as their governors two leaders who embrace the “big lie” that Biden’s victory was fraudulent: Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, and Kari Lake, who is making a strong bid to be the Republican nominee in Arizona. One or both could reject a state vote tally favoring Biden and attempt to send in an alternate slate of electors in 2024 favoring Trump.

On what basis could they try to reject a vote of the people? As Politico has reported, the Republican Party is instructing volunteer poll workers on how to challenge voters on Election Day, teaching them to report any issues at polling places directly to GOP-affiliated lawyers rather than to their poll-worker superiors. This disruption of the chain of command in state election machinery could easily lead to chaos and confusion, which then could serve as an excuse for someone like Mastriano to claim that Trump is the real winner.

The Electoral Count Act says a challenge to electors can proceed if one member from each chamber (House and Senate) agrees. That threshold should be raised significantly. Congress can clarify, too, that challenges to electors must focus on such constitutional issues as the eligibility of candidates, not on disagreement over vote totals. Moreover, Congress can specify that a “failed” election — language used in the current act to specify an instance when state legislatures might need to step in — refers to elections thwarted by, for example, a natural disaster, not by false claims of voter fraud or irregularities.

By showing precisely what went wrong in 2020, and which safeguards held, the committee hearings can make clear to the public the need for new legislation. The story of 2020, the hearings will reveal, is that a few heroic Republicans and Democrats acting in good faith — such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) — protected our election process from subversion despite our murky and byzantine laws.

Just as important, the hearings should try to rally public opinion about the need for Congress to act to protect free and fair elections. Americans may have different views about abortion, taxes, climate change and immigration. But we should all agree that American elections should be conducted so that all eligible voters, but only eligible voters, may easily vote; ballots are accurately counted; and the winner assumes power.

In January, after Democrats failed to pass major voting rights reform, reports emerged that Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) were in talks aimed at combating election subversion by, among other things, fixing the Electoral Count Act. There are some indications that a Senate deal may be close. And USA Today reports that two Jan. 6 committee members, Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), are nearing agreement on their own reform package.

Given inflation, arguments over gun violence, the resurgence of the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine, it would be quite easy for election legislation to fall off the agenda. That would put American democracy in serious danger, even if most Americans don’t realize it. The window is closing on the chance to protect the 2024 presidential election from interference. But if the Jan. 6 committee conducts its hearings effectively, it will improve the odds that our democracy can be safeguarded in time.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this important article out.