If I didn't read Greenwald's material, I'd never know that all of the news
about the police officer being killed by a Trump supporter, demonstrators
carrying zip ties in order to handcuff legislators, and the threats on the
lives of Pence and Pelosi, weren't true. I have wondered about why the
continued reports of possible destructive demonstrations have continued and
why, even now, the plan is to keep the National Guard in place in
Washington. I suspect that we'll never hear Greenwald interviewed on
Democracy Now again. I wonder how long Substack will be permitted to
continue without being censored or completely shut down.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Friday, March 5, 2021 2:41 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats
Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever
As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More
Desperately Than Ever If the threat of "armed insurrectionists" and
"domestic terrorists" is as great as some claim, why do they have to keep
lying and peddling crude media fictions about it?
Glenn Greenwald
Mar 5
Assistant Director of FBI Counterterrorism Division Jill Sanborn takes her
seat prior to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs/Rules
and Administration hearing to examine the January 6, 2021 attack on the US
Capitol on Capitol Hill on March 3, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by SHAWN
THEW/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were
issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type
of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both
times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove
utterly baseless.
First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur
at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. "Law enforcement and state
officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up
to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others
temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday's ceremony," announced CNN. In an even
scarier formulation, NPR intoned that "the FBI is warning of protests and
potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe
Biden's inauguration."
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The resulting clampdowns were as extreme as the dire warnings. Washington,
D.C. was militarized more than at any point since the 9/11 attack. The
military was highly visible on the streets. And, described The Washington
Post, "state capitols nationwide locked down, with windows boarded up,
National Guard troops deployed and states of emergency preemptively declared
as authorities braced for potential violence Sunday mimicking the Jan. 6
attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump rioters." All of this, said
the paper, "reflected the anxious state of the country ahead of planned
demonstrations."
But none of that happened - not even close. The Washington Post acknowledged
three weeks later:
Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering
of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation's statehouses. In
Tallahassee, just five armed men wearing the garb of the boogaloo movement -
a loose collection of anti-government groups that say the country is heading
for civil war - showed up. Police and National Guard personnel mostly
ignored them.
All over the country it was the same story. "But at the moment that Biden
was taking the oath of office in Washington, the total number of protesters
on the Capitol grounds in Topeka stood at five - two men supporting Trump
and two men and a boy ridin' with Biden," reported The Wichita Eagle ("With
Kansas Capitol in lockdown mode, Inauguration Day protest fizzles). "The
protests fizzled out after not many people showed up," reported the local
Florida affiliate in Tallahassee. "The large security efforts dwarfed the
protests that materialized by Wednesday evening," said CNN, as "state
capitols and other cities remained largely calm."
Indeed, the only politically-motivated violence on Inauguration Day was
carried out by Antifa and anarchist groups in Portland and Seattle, which
caused some minor property damage as part of anti-Biden protests while they
"scuffled with police." CNN, which spent a full week excitedly hyping the
likely violence coming to state capitols by right-wing Trump supporters, was
forced to acknowledge in its article about their non-existence that "one
exception was Portland, where left-wing protesters damaged the Democratic
Party of Oregon building during one of several planned demonstrations."
Completely undeterred by that debacle, Democrats and their media
spokespeople returned with a new set of frightening warnings for this week.
The date of March 4 has taken on a virtually religious significance for the
Q-Anon movement, announced NBC News' Ben Collins, who was heard on NPR on
Thursday speaking through actual, literal journalistic tears as he recounted
all the times he called Facebook to plead with them to remove dangerous
right-wing extremists on their platform (tears commence at roughly 7:00
mark). Valiantly holding back full-on sobbing, Collins explained that he
proved to be so right but it pains and sorrows him to admit this. With his
self-proclaimed oracle status fully in place, he prophesized that March 4
had taken on special dangers because Q-Anon followers concluded that this is
when Trump would be inaugurated.
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This is how apocalyptic cult leaders always function. When the end of the
world did not materialize on January 6, Collins insisted that January 20 was
the day of the violent reckoning. When nothing happened on that day, he
moved the Doomsday Date to March 4. The flock cannot remain in a state of
confusion for too long about why the world has not ended as promised by the
prophet, so a new date must quickly be provided with an explanation for why
this is serious business this time.
This March 4 paranoia was not confined to NBC's resident millennial hall
monitor and censorship advocate. On March 3, The New York Times warned that
"the Capitol Police force is preparing for another assault on the Capitol
building on Thursday after obtaining intelligence of a potential plot by a
militia group." All this, said the Paper of Record, because "intelligence
analysts had spent weeks tracking online chatter by some QAnon adherents who
have latched on to March 4 - the original inauguration date set in the
Constitution - as the day Donald J. Trump would be restored to the
presidency and renew his crusade against America's enemies."
These dire warnings also, quite predictably, generated serious reactions.
"House leaders on Wednesday abruptly moved a vote on policing legislation
from Thursday to Wednesday night, so lawmakers could leave town," said the
Times. We learned that there would be further militarization of the Capitol
and troop deployment in Washington indefinitely due to so-called "chatter."
NPR announced: "The House of Representatives has canceled its Thursday
session after the U.S. Capitol Police said it is aware of a threat by an
identified militia group to breach the Capitol complex that day."
Do you know what happened on March 4 when it came to violence from
right-wing extremists? The same thing that happened on January 20:
absolutely nothing. There were no attempted attacks on the Capitol, state
capitols, or any other government institution. There was violent crime
registered that day in Washington D.C. but none of it was political violence
by those whom media outlets warned posed such a grave danger that Congress
has to be closed and militarization of Washington extended indefinitely.
Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup
narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6,
those who were not referring to the riot as a "coup attempt" - as though the
hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and
militarized government in history - were required to refer to it instead as
an "armed insurrection."
This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the
Democrats' adversaries but also, as I've documented previously, because
declaring an "armed insurrection" empowers the state with virtually
unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading
Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic
mantra:
But this was completely false. As I detailed several weeks ago, so many of
the most harrowing and widespread media claims about the January 6 riot
proved to be total fabrications. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Brian
Sicknick's skull in with a fire extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties
with them as some premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two
rioters found them on a table inside). There's no evidence anyone intended
to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.
Yet the maximalist narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is
so crucial to Democrats - regardless of whether it is true - that pointing
out these facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last
week went viral among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even
though it did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than
Brian Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who
died at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known
cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone (Two FBI operatives have
since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a "suspect" who may have
engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But
nothing still is known; Sicknick's mother claims he died of a stroke while
his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away
from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob
savagely bashed his head in with a fire
extinguisher.)
What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the
Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it
arrested that day - a rather odd state of affairs for an "armed
insurrection," to put that mildly. In questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson
(R-WI) on Thursday's hearing, a senior FBI official, Jill Sanborn,
acknowledged this key fact:
(The "one lady" who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli Babbitt,
an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot point blank in
the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed Capitol Police
Officer).
The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary:
they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To
insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to
deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and
fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the
January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.
Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that
there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the
Clinton administration's attempts to seize more surveillance power after the
Oklahoma City courting bombing were not denying that some anti-government
militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and
unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama
administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim
extremists intent on committing violence.
The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being
deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both
for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in
the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the
core formula of authoritarianism - to place the population in a state of
such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security
state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to
keep everyone safe.
There is, relatedly, a massive political benefit from convincing the
population that the opponents and critics of those in power do not merely
hold a different ideology but are coup plotters, insurrectionists, domestic
terrorists. That is the same political benefit that accrued from trying to
persuade the population that adversaries of the Democratic Party were
treasonous Kremlin agents. The more you can demonize your opponents as
something monstrous, the more political power you can acquire.
And as Democrats and liberals now gear up to demand a new War on Terror,
this one domestic in nature, it should be no surprise that the rhetorical
leaders of their effort now are the same lowlife neocon and Rovian
slanderers - Bill Kristol, David Frum, Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Rick
Wilson - who demonized everyone who questioned them as part of the first War
on Terror as traitors and terrorist-lovers and subversives. It is not a
coincidence that neocons are leading the way now as liberals' favorite
propagandists: they are the most skilled and experienced in weaponizing and
exaggerating terrorism threats for political gain and authoritarian power.
Bill Kristol @BillKristol
"The House announced it was canceling its Thursday session and security
officials urged staffers who could to work from home. Meaning that domestic
terrorists have succeeded in shutting down the government again." Hard and
Soft Threats to Democracy - The BulwarkConspiracy theorists and militia
threats led the House of Representatives to abandon its work.thebulwark.com
March 4th 2021
180 Retweets604 Likes
Ultimately, if this "armed insurrection" and threat of domestic terrorism
are so grave, why do media figures and politicians in both parties - from
Adam Schiff to Liz Cheney - keep lying about it and peddling fictions?
Politicians and media figures do that only when they know that the threat,
in reality, is not nearly as menacing as they need it to be to fulfill their
objectives of political gain and coercive power.
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