Coup Part Two?

A perilous culmination to the Trump Era

The poster on the Left has been widely circulated. It calls for “armed marches” to the capitals of all fifty states on January 17. On the Right, we see a MAGA supporter from last Wednesday’s coup attempt on the Capital. He is wearing professionally produced merch, marking the date.

I spent last weekend trying to understand, as best I can, what happened with the coup attempt last week and what it means for the future of America. I am sure we can all agree that the United States is in a very dangerous situation right now — the world as a whole is in peril. My first impression of the storming of the Capital was that it was amateurish, bizarre — a kind of sideshow. After all, Trump was calling for this kind of mob violence for a long time. It seemed inevitable that something like this would happen eventually. If anything, it seemed like good luck that the body count was relatively small and that the election certification was able to proceed immediately. That shows how low my expectations are at this point. I suspect many feel the same. 

Compelling images from the storming of the Capital seemed to reveal it as a chaotic freak show, led by bizarre costumed Neo-shamans looking like Burning Man rejects. However, now that a few days have past, it is clear that the assault on the Capital was actually an organized, planned-out, well-funded effort to destroy American Democracy and establish autocratic rule or tyranny. The plan was crude but simple: Destroy the ballots so the election could not be certified, then declare Trump the victor. 

The important thing to realize — the reason I am writing this — is that the attempted coup is not over yet. As Congress dithers, the Fascists behind it are gathering their resources and plotting their next attempt. This is likely to happen before Biden’s inauguration on January 20. It may involve large-scale acts of domestic violence. As the poster shows, MAGA supporters are calling for an “armed march” to all fifty Capitals on January 17. Qanon-themed videos like this one are also circulating on sites like Parler. They target January 20 as a day of reckoning and the start of something like a Holy War. Even assuming the inauguration happens without some disaster, the prospect of violence from the Far Right will remain a serious threat.

As Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa explore in their excellent Gaslit Nation podcast, America has been in a “slow coup” or “slow civil war” for months now, since Trump declared the election a fraud. We teeter on the brink of entering an actual civil war. One of the most chilling aspects of the storming of the Capital, widely reported, is that the security forces that should have protected the Capital were MIA. This was especially marked considering that the intelligence agencies had ample warnings that Congress faced a massive security threat on that day. 

Clearly, there is collusion between factions in the police, military, and intelligence communities with the MAGA hordes, Right Wing militias, Qanon supporters, and Proud Boys who want the US to become a Right Wing dictatorship. There is also clear sedition — treason — on the part of Trump, his family, and his cronies in Congress. Beyond Trump’s impeachment, this should lead to their imprisonment. But as we can see, that isn’t happening, at least as of yet. Right now, the future of America is hanging by a slender thread. 

Evidence for all of this is available online. Videos of the attack on the Capital show a phalanx of men in body armor moving to the front of the MAGA mob, with military precision, before breaking into the building. Time Magazine reported: "Footage shows a small line of police officers on the Capitol steps bowled over by a mob that President Donald Trump had incited with a speech earlier that day calling on them “to take back our country.” …One video appears to show a Capitol Police officer taking selfies with the rioters. Another featured several officers removing metal barriers to let the mob freely pass toward the Capitol. In yet another video, an officer appeared to hold a door open for a handful of rioters, apparently allowing them to exit the Capitol building without being arrested or charged."

There is another extraordinary video circulating of Trump with Ivanka, Donald Jr, and other members of his inner circle from that day. They are watching the march to the Capital from inside of a tent, while the rock song “Gloria” plays loudly. Trump is jazzed up and excited, as is Donald Jr. The video makes it clear that this was a premeditated event.

Earlier that day, Trump made a speech to the MAGA thugs, essentially inciting them to attack the Capital. The MAGA rebels built a hangman’s platform with a noose next to the building. They also had plastic Zip-tie handcuffs ready and chanted about their desire to kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. At least one of the MAGA attackers wrote in text messages that he planned to find Pelosi and shoot her to death live on TV. 

Generally, in any effort to orchestrate a coup or revolution, the deciding factor is which side the military chooses to join. Unless Trump has some special surprises up his sleeve, it seems likely that the US Military will support Biden, however tepidly. Until now, the muted response to the coup attempt on the part of the mainstream media and most Democratic members of Congress is shocking, if not surprising. They may very well be fearing for their lives. 

I agree with Kendzior in her book, Hiding in Plain Sight, and her Gaslit Nation podcast. Trump is an asset of Putin’s and the frontman for a transnational crime syndicate. The goal of his Presidency has been to enrich himself while wrecking and humiliating the United States. He has been effective on both counts. “Trump wants to destroy the U.S.: he wants to strip it down and sell it off for parts to both domestic and foreign backers,” Kendzior said in a recent interview with Anand Giridharadas. “His cohort's ambitions are similar to what oligarchs and other hyper-capitalists did to the U.S.S.R. after its collapse — which is not surprising because the Kremlin and an associated network of plutocrats and oligarchs are the prime backers of this operation.”

More Bad News!

In other bad news: Apparently, in December, there was a massive data breach by Russian hackers who got through US security firewalls to access the networks of major US corporations as well as the Department of Energy, Defense Department, and so on. This is considered the worst security breach in US history. According to The New York Times, “Russia aimed not at the election system but at the rest of the United States government and many large American corporations.” We still don’t know “whether what the Russians pulled off was simply an espionage operation inside the systems of the American bureaucracy or something more sinister, inserting “backdoor” access into government agencies, major corporations, the electric grid and laboratories developing and transporting new generations of nuclear weapons.” 

If Russia is colluding with Trump to keep him in power, and if they have gained backdoor access to our energy grid and missile systems, one can’t rule out the possibility of something like a multi-pronged attack on the US occurring before the inauguration. This might include temporary shutdowns of the energy grid, interruptions in Internet and the banking system, and so on. By now, we know that Trump is an extreme narcissist sociopath who will stop at nothing to maintain his power. If he feels cornered, he could try literally anything. (As someone who writes about prophecy, I also found this article, ‘Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist?’, to be intriguing and worrisome). However, Russia may already feel they are winning in their asymmetric war against the US, with or without Trump, and that is in their best interests for the US to maintain a facade of Democratic normalcy with Biden.

Some Good News!

On Gaslit Nation, Kendzior and Chalupa also highlight some good news, namely, the Georgia elections, which historically flipped two Senates, enabling a Democratic majority in the Senate. This was due to an extraordinary grassroots effort, largely orchestrated by Stacey Abrams. Abrams has become the most important unelected figure in Democratic politics. Several years ago, she lost an election for Georgia Governor due to voter fraud and disenfranchisement. Since then, she has focused on addressing the voting system. She built a nonprofit, Fair Fight, and orchestrated a large-scale campaign of calls and door-to-door canvasing of voters, which Kendzior and Chalupa supported through their podcast. The result was that Georgia went to Biden by 11,000 votes while both Democratic Senators won in the runoff election. This limits Mitch McConnell’s power and gives the Democrats the chance to pass their legislative agenda.

Here I want to admit a personal mea culpa. Just before the election, I had a debate on Facebook Live with my friend Richard Greene, who has consistently argued and staunchly believes that America’s problems can be mainly resolved through the electoral process. I tend to take a more cynical view, particularly after the Obama years, which seemed a disaster to me. Obama swept into office in 2008 with a tremendous progressive mandate but he failed to accomplish anything significant over eight years. In fact, wealth inequality increased during his time as the US became the world’s number one oil producer again via fracking and other unconventional methods that cause intense ecological destruction, while he continued US drone strikes and covert military operations around the world. The working class felt deeply betrayed by Obama’s faux progressivism, which provided the opening for Trump. I found this speech by Obama, after he left office, at the James Baker Institute in Texas, to be revealing. Obama was a puppet of Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and the oil companies. There is no reason to think anything different of Biden, based on his record.

My tendency has been to dismiss US electoral politics as a stage-managed spectacle. However, it is now clear, with the Georgia victories as well as the power held by Left-leaning congresspeople like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that, at least on the local level, we can build counter-power to the Right Wing via the electoral system. It takes extraordinary efforts like that made by Stacey Abrams in Georgia to address the systemic corruption, gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, and so on, but we now know that it can be done. It is conceivable that a significant Left-ward shift can be engineered through the electoral system. I intend to support this movement in the future, while still promoting more radical and visionary projects. In fact, it is this threat — which is partly a demographic inevitability unless the US implements extreme xenophobic policies — that the plutocrats backing the Far Right fear, and which they are seeking to prevent through increasingly violent means.

Free Speech

Since the attempted coup at the Capital, Twitter and Facebook have blocked Trump, while Amazon and Apple banned Parler, temporarily shutting down the Mercer-funded network which is being used to prep Far Right insurrections. These moves are bringing up important questions around free speech that the US needs to grapple with as a society. I intend to revisit this issue in more depth in a future newsletter. I do think we must define limits to free speech, as this cartoon on the philosopher Karl Popper expresses:

We find ourselves in a complex situation: While the big tech platforms are private profit-driven enterprises, they have also become our collective medium of social interaction and expression. I also understand, as I have explored in past newsletters and in my recent book Conspiranoia, that there are a lot of reasons to fear the integration of the neoliberal agenda (represented by politicians like Biden and Obama) with “big tech” and “big finance,” forming a technocratic control system that feigns democratic participation but is ultimately autocratic in nature. This is something I will continue to explore in future essays.

Rudolf Steiner Seminar next Friday

Next Sunday, I will be giving a presentation and then leading a discussion on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, one of my favorite thinkers. Full-priced tickets are $25 but $15 if you buy them by Wednesday. Please use the code “EarlyBird” at checkout. Buy tickets here.

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