Trump’s message

The New Neo Posted on by

President Trump issued a short speech (transcript here):

…As I have said, the incursion of the US Capitol struck at the very heart of our Republic. It angered and appalled millions of Americans across the political spectrum. I want to be very clear, I unequivocally condemn the violence that we saw last week. Violence and vandalism have absolutely no place in our country and no place in our movement.

Making America Great Again has always been about defending the rule of law, supporting the men and women of law enforcement and upholding our nation’s most sacred traditions and values. Mob violence goes against everything I believe in and everything our movement stands for. No true supporter of mine could ever endorse political violence…

Tragically, over the course of the past year made so difficult because of COVID-19, we have seen political violence spiral out of control. We have seen too many riots, too many mobs, too many acts of intimidation and destruction. It must stop. Whether you are on the right or on the left, a Democrat or a Republican, there is never a justification for violence, no excuses, no exceptions. America is a nation of laws. Those who engaged in the attacks last week will be brought to justice.

Now I am asking everyone who has ever believed in our agenda to be thinking of ways to ease tensions, calm tempers, and help to promote peace in our country…

I also want to say a few words about the unprecedented assault on free speech we have seen in recent days. These are tense and difficult times. The efforts to censor, cancel and blacklist our fellow citizens are wrong and they are dangerous. What is needed now is for us to listen to one another, not to silence one another. ..

Much more at the link.

But of course, we know that this diabolical guy really means the opposite.

The message had to be released on the White House Twitter account because Trump’s account is, of course, closed by our great and esteemed leaders at Twitter – who have also allowed all sorts of incendiary Twitter accounts that advocate political violence to continue to be published, as long as they aren’t from people on the right.

The House votes to impeach Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

The charge is “incitement to insurrection.” Which is appropriately Orwellian, since there was neither “incitement” (see this) nor an “insurrection” – except to the degree that any protest against the government that involves any violence at all could be labeled an insurrection. You can find the legal definition of “insurrection” here and further explanation here.

There have been countless anti-government demonstrations by the left that have resulted in violence, both at the federal level in DC and at the state level all around the country. No one has ever been charged with insurrection in connection with these events, as far as I know. Protestors from the left have occupied the Capitol and the Senate offices, have disrupted the Kavanaugh hearings, have accosted Republican senators in the halls, have clashed with police in DC and set fires, have mobbed Republican office holders and threatened them as they left the Republican National Convention. Leftist mobs have done even worse in states and cities around the country. Has anyone who did this, or who actively encouraged them in any violence, ever been charged with insurrection or incitement to insurrection? If they have been, I certainly haven’t read about it.

Nor should they be, in my opinion, because that sort of charge is a dangerous road to go down unless some very extreme conditions are met. But the left has no trouble going down it in order to try to get Trump, even though there was nothing special that distinguishes what happened at the Capitol in terms of the amount of violence (broken windows, clashes with police). In addition, although we know the aim was to protest and disrupt the vote to accept the electoral votes for Biden as president, that’s all we know. They didn’t seem to be armed with guns and there’s no indication that the vast majority of even those who were physically fighting with police were intending anything other than a disruptive protest, which has certainly occurred before. At any rate, not only did Trump not “incite” them to violence, he actually called for a peaceful demonstration.

I’ll add that what evidence we do have points to the fact that the people who entered the Capitol, with the intent at the very least to disrupt the proceedings in protest, began going there long before Trump’s talk was over:

“We developed some intelligence that a number of individuals were planning to travel to the D.C. area with intentions to cause violence,” Assistant Director Steven M. D’Antuono said. “We immediately shared that information, and action was taken.

…[T]here was pre-planning for some elements of last Wednesday’s chaos.

And the official timeline of events constructed by the New York Times through videos shows protesters began breaching the perimeter of the Capitol a full 20 minutes before Trump finished his speech.

We don’t even know if the violent ones were at the rally at all. Nor do we know exactly who they were, although I suspect it’s some combination of extremist left Antifa-types and extremist right Q-believers and/or other groups on the far far right. It’s certainly possible that the people on the right predominated over those on the left. But we simply don’t know yet. An investigation will take time to play out, and whether or not you believe such an investigation will be fair, what’s clear at this point is that Congress has no intention of waiting to discover the facts.

So any legal niceties are irrelevant to members of the House bent on their relentless pursuit of Trump and anyone who ever supported him. They sense that their prey is gravely wounded, and they plan to wound him further, whether he actually incited this or not. And certainly they’re not interested in the meaning of the words they use, such as “incitement.”

As for the ten Republicans who voted for impeachment today, that’s 10 out of 207. The rest voted against it. And yet I see a lot of comments at the LI post I linked earlier (and no doubt all around the conservative blogosphere) that the entire Republican Party is awful and there is no difference between the two parties.

Here are the ten Republicans who voted for impeachment: Liz Cheney, WY: Tony Gonzalez, OH; Jaime Herrera-Beutler, WA; John Katko, NY; Adam Kinzinger, IL; Peter Meijer, MI; Dan Newhouse, WA; Tom Rice, SC; Fred Upton, MI; David Valadao, CA. But 10 votes out of 207 is around 5%, when last I checked. I have said before and I continue to say that the impulse to turn on everyone in the GOP is a reaction that will only further benefit the left.

Chuck Schumer is determined, once the new Senate session begins, to try Trump:

Leader Schumer: “Donald Trump has deservedly become the first president in American history to bear the stain of impeachment twice over. The Senate is required to act and will proceed with his trial and hold a vote on his conviction.”

Note that remark about being impeached twice. I mentioned in this post yesterday that being able to claim Trump was the only president to have been impeached twice was one of the left’s goals, and there it is straight from Schumer.

Note, also, that not a single Democrat House member defected. Not one. And I predict that no Democrat in the Senate will, either, whatever evidence is presented to exonerate Trump, and that some Republicans will join them. As William Jacobson points out:

…[T]he likelihood SCOTUS would issue an injunction halting a Senate trial is significantly less than SCOTUS making a ruling once Trump has been convicted (if that happens) and suffers some concrete harm. So the Senate could have its trial, but whether the result stands would be the issue.

In the past, there were several checks on this sort of thing. One was that the American public hadn’t yet experienced the Gramscian takeover of education and the press (as well as other institutions) by the left, and so public sentiment would have risen up against it on both sides as being a vindictive and dangerous overreach. Another was that in the past even the left feared that such tactics would be used against the left when the right came to power. But now the left thinks it can arrange things so that the right never comes to power again.

That is what all of this is about. That is why I’ve had a terrible feeling in my gut and some trouble sleeping for at least several months now, probably even since the COVID stuff started back in March because it was becoming apparent that it all would add to the left’s power. It’s been clear for years now that this was their goal, and it was one of the main reasons I was happy that Clinton was defeated in 2016. It was always clear that the Trump presidency was a temporary gamble, and that the gamble might ultimately be lost.

I can’t see the future. I don’t know for certain what will happen. Surprises, black swans, turns of events, even a backlash from the American public that will end up mattering – all are possible. But I feel an increased dread about what’s happening now, all the more awful because it was easily foreseeable (and foreseen) but not easily preventable – and perhaps not preventable at all, unless we were to go back about a hundred years with perfect foresight. Maybe not even then.

Impeachment of Trump and demonization of his supporters have been the left’s goals from the start

The New Neo Posted on by

I came across two older posts of mine yesterday, and decided they are worth revisiting in light of recent events. The first is from December 12, 2016, about a month after Trump’s election. Here are some selected quotes from it:

I was at a social occasion last week where about ten women I know were present. Most, not all, were liberals, with one leftist thrown into the mix. The talk turned to politics and Trump, and most of the ones doing the talking (maybe five or six of them, that is) were expressing a fear—and not just a fear; almost a certainty — that his election would result in so much racism that we’d be back in Jim Crow days or worse. They made it clear that they believed that Trump himself and most or all of his supporters were racists of the worst kind, and now they were in the driver’s seat.

These women were not talking about some white supremacist fringe of the alt-right who supported Trump’s presidency; they were talking about Trump himself, his appointees, and all his supporters. And in this astounding point of view they have been egged on by a great many people in the press, so it really shouldn’t be surprising that they believe it.

My post also contained a link to a discussion of a Slate article that compared Trump’s ideas to those of Dylan Roof, the racist mass murderer in a Charleston church. In another part of my post, I mention the following [emphasis mine]:

The attempt is to invalidate Trump’s presidency in many people’s eyes before it even begins, as well as to brand him with many labels, but most particularly “racist.”…

And of course, you can see for yourself the amazing amount of furor over the possible Russian hacking that we’ve known about for months, which almost certainly did not affect the election and which Wikileaks’ Assange says Russia was not involved in anyway…

I think it’s important to emphasize how early the template was set to taint Trump and all his supporters as evil. It was clear from the start; only the details were unknown. I also make a passing reference towards the end of that post to efforts on the left to keep Trump from even being inaugurated. Here’s a link to some of what happened on Inauguration Day, 2017:

Six police officers were injured and 217 protesters arrested Friday after a morning of peaceful protests and coordinated disruptions of Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony gave way to ugly street clashes in downtown Washington…

Bursts of chaos erupted on 12th and K streets as black-clad “antifascist” protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police lined up in an eastbound crosswalk. Officers responded by launching smoke and flash-bang devices, which could be heard from blocks away, into the street to disperse the crowds.

“Pepper spray and other control devices were used to control the criminal actors and protect persons and property,” police said.

Now let’s go to another post of mine, this time from March 7, 2017. Just about six weeks after Trump’s inauguration. The title is “Impeachment, now and forever.” Excerpts:

Donald Trump is the only president I’m aware of who was the subject of a great deal of impeachment talk even before he took office.

And I’ve noticed that nearly everything he’s done since then has been met with a significant number of cries of “impeachment.” Here’s just the most recent iteration: “Trump’s Wiretap Tweets Raise Risk of Impeachment”:

“…[I]f [Trump’s] allegation is not true and is unsupported by evidence, that too should be a scandal on a major scale. This is the kind of accusation that, taken as part of a broader course of conduct, could get the current president impeached. We shouldn’t care that the allegation was made early on a Saturday morning on Twitter.”

The article goes on and on attempting to explain why this is so.

I’ll make a prediction right now, which is that the drumbeat of “impeachment” cries will not let up for Trump’s entire presidency, but they will be in response to a successive and nearly-inclusive series of things that he does.

It’s more a technique for rallying the troops than for anything else. It would take something quite egregious for the GOP-majority Senate to go along with a conviction, or even for the GOP-majority House to impeach in the first place…

Impeachment has become the background noise of politics these days…

I will say this, however: there is more chance of the GOP turning on Trump than there ever was of the Democrats turning on Obama. I don’t think it will happen, though, barring something far more serious than anything that’s happened so far.

So, all of this was known just a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration: they would be trying to impeach him for everything he did, and it was possible (although unlikely) that Republicans would end up turning on him and make a conviction possible. I find it ironic but not the least bit surprising that the first grounds for impeachment mentioned was Trump’s charge that he’d been wiretapped, which of course was completely true (although technically speaking “wiretap” was an anachronism). The press and Democrats not only thought it was untrue (or pretended to think so), but they thought if the charge was false it could/should be grounds for impeachment.

One thing you can admire about the left is their dogged persistence. They certainly have succeeded in demonizing all Trump supporters to the point that corporations are doing their bidding and waging war on half of America – although at this point, most of those corporations are run and staffed by the left, so they’re in agreement and their arms don’t have to be twisted.

For those having difficulties with certain comments being disappeared

The New Neo Posted on by

A few people have noted that more comments are being filtered out lately. I just found a bunch in the trash and reinstated them. I may not have gotten them all, but I think I got the bulk of them.

Given the current climate, it’s certainly possible that the filters are being tightened up in some way. However, I’ve also noticed this sort of thing happening periodically in the past. So it might just be a glitch.

Let me know if the problem continues.

Can Congress impeach and convict a president after the person has left office?

The New Neo Posted on by

Common sense would dictate that the answer is “of course not.” Impeachment and conviction is a remedy with the purpose of removing someone from office.

However, one can find a lawyer to argue whatever is expedient. And so it is no problem at all to find legal backing for the preposterous claim that, even though there simply isn’t enough time left in Trump’s term to have a Senate trial to remove him, it can still be done later:

The Constitution would allow an impeachment trial to happen after a president’s term ends, says Jessica Levinson, law professor at Loyola Law School. That’s partly because a consequence of being convicted is you can’t run for office again.

“Impeachment is not just about removal. Because obviously once a president’s term is over, people could say, ‘What’s the point?’ The point would be to say, ‘You can’t run in 2024. And you can’t raise money. You can’t use the benefit of the campaign finance rubric to try and run again in 2024,’” Levinson explains.

A trial would be the cleanest way to do this, she adds. “The president still could be subject to federal charges, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he would be prevented from running. … If he is inside a jail or prison, that would obviously make it difficult to run for president as well.”

Thanks for your assistance, Jessica. So glad you’re molding minds at Loyola Law School. Let me add, though, that the goal of stopping Trump from running again doesn’t mean that such an impeachment/conviction would be constitutional. Of course, the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say it couldn’t happen – that’s probably because constitutions can’t foresee every bizarre use that future generations will make of their words. The Founders were pretty good at trying to protect against future tyranny, but they weren’t magicians, and they knew that if future US citizens and the representatives of those citizens wanted to become tyrannical, there was nothing in the Constitution that could totally prevent it.

Future attempts at tyranny actually came rather early in American history. For example, there were the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The especially troublesome portion was the “sedition” part [and please note the passage I’ve bolded]:

Even as the bitter debates between the two fledgling political parties were being played out in rival newspapers and other publications, the new law outlawed any “false, scandalous and malicious writing” against Congress or the president, and made it illegal to conspire “to oppose any measure or measures of the government.”

The Republican minority in Congress complained that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment to the Constitution, which protected freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But the Federalist majority pushed it through, arguing that English and American courts had long punished seditious libel under common law, and that freedom of speech must be balanced with an individual’s responsibility for false statements.

Adams signed the Sedition Act into law on July 14, 1798. It was set to expire on March 3, 1801, the last day of his term in office.

The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were passed by the legislatures of their respective states in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. James Madison authored the Virginia Resolution in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson, who also authored the Kentucky Resolution. Both argued that the federal government did not have the authority to enact laws not specified in the constitution. Jefferson wrote: “[T]he several states who formed that instrument [the Constitution], being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those [states], of all unauthorized acts….is the rightful remedy.”

Matthew Lyon, a Republican congressman from Vermont, became the first person tried under the new law in October 1798. A grand jury indicted Lyon for publishing letters in Republican newspapers during his reelection campaign that showed “intent and design” to defame the government and President Adams, among other charges. Lyon acted as his own attorney, and defended himself by claiming the Sedition Act was unconstitutional, and that he had not intended to damage the government.

He was convicted, and the judge sentenced him to four months in prison and a fine of $1,000. Lyon won reelection while sitting in jail, and would later defeat a Federalist attempt to kick him out of the House.

Another individual famously prosecuted under the Sedition Act was the Republican-friendly journalist James Callender. Sentenced to nine months in prison for his “false, scandalous, and malicious writing, against the said President of the United States,” Callender wrote articles from jail supporting Jefferson’s campaign for president in 1800.

After Jefferson won, Callender demanded a government post in return for his service. When he failed to get one, he retaliated by revealing the first public allegations of Jefferson’s long-rumored relationship with a slave woman, Sally Hemings, in a series of newspaper articles.

All told, between 1798 and 1801, U.S. federal courts prosecuted at least 26 individuals under the Sedition Act; many were editors of Republican newspapers, and all opposed the Adams administration. The prosecutions fueled furious debate over the meaning of a free press and the rights that should be afforded to political opposition parties in the United States.

In the end, widespread anger over the Alien and Sedition Acts fueled Jefferson’s victory over Adams in the bitterly contested 1800 presidential election, and their passage is widely considered to be one of the biggest mistakes of Adams’ presidency.

By 1802, all of the Alien and Sedition Acts had been repealed or expired, save for the Alien Enemies Act, which has stayed on the books.

If a president is impeached and convicted after the fact, does this really prevent him from running for office? I don’t see why, and the case of Matthew Lyon indicates the answer might be “no.” (I don’t think Trump would run for office in 2024 anyway, but my predictive powers are far from perfect.) This article claims that even a conviction would not be a bar to a 2024 run, although the Senate could have an additional vote after conviction that could ban a rerun.

There’s also the need for a 2/3 majority to convict; impeachment without conviction is essentially meaningless except as a PR stunt. I assume the Democrats plan to do it anyway, to be able to say that Trump is the only president to have been impeached twice.

But could they get enough Republicans in the next Congressional session to acquiesce in a conviction? I doubt it, but it’s certainly possible if the Republicans are scared enough and intimidated enough. It really just depends how far advanced the Democrat push towards tyranny and fear has become by that time. Presently, I think they’re on the Blitzkrieg schedule.

[NOTE: It occurs to me that one goal of Democrats in pushing for impeachment now and trial in the next Congressional session – a goal I haven’t yet seen mentioned anywhere – is to force the Republicans in the Senate to declare themselves for or against Trump through this vote, and then for Democrats to use the vote of those defending him as a way to campaign against them if they’re up for re-election in 2022 and/or 2024. That would probably only be effective in swing states rather than red states.]

A particularly fine discussion of current happenings

The New Neo Posted on by

This video of lawyers David Freiheit and Robert Barnes is long. but I strongly suggest you watch about an hour and a half of it anyway – or as much as you can – from the part where I’ve cued it up to start. It’s the most informative discussion I’ve found so far of the Capitol incursion and the events it has spawned. Barnes in particular has been a pretty trustworthy source post-election on the legal issues in the election fraud case, so I’ve come to value his word on these matters.

If you’re pressed for time, you can use a technique I’ve found to speed things up for non-music videos, which is to use the “settings” button for the video to set the speed at slightly faster than normal. They’ll sound a bit frenetic as a result (and they tend to sound that way to begin with, anyway), but it means that the video will take less time to listen to:

The Democrats are wielding blacklist power with scope that Joe McCarthy could only dream of

The New Neo Posted on by

For close to seventy years the Democrats and the left have been bleating about how awful Tailgunner Joe was. The term was synonymous for “intolerant power-mad tyrant.”

But as with so many things the left claims, it turns out that the only problem they had with him is that his supposedly nefarious activities were directed against Communists. Now, with their Big Tech allies, Democrats are looking to cancel a huge swath of Americans, and putting the rest on notice that deviations from the party line will not be tolerated.

“Deplorables” was an early tell, and there was also the claim that wearing a MAGA hat was tantamount to wearing KKK robes. Hillary Clinton originally only said that half of Trump supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic” “deplorables,” and she got some flak at the time for condemning so many. But at this point, she could probably get away easily with saying “all.”

Claiming something is bad when the right does it and good when the left does it – because the aims of the latter are virtuous – is a hallmark of the left. Note that Robespierre’s bloodbath was all in the name of virtue:

“If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.”

[NOTE: Sorry for the delay in posting today. Had some personal business to attend to.]

Impeachment redux

The New Neo Posted on by

This has been the Democrats’ plan nearly from the start: to impeach Trump and even convict him if possible (see this as well as this, for example). And later, when the four-year coup a la Russiagate didn’t work to that desired end, they found a pretext in the Ukranian phone call – or rather, in the story they told about it.

There was no conviction in the Senate that time because the GOP controlled it. But the goal of the Democrats was and is to taint Trump and to disgrace him in the eyes of the public and in the history books.

Now, like sharks smelling blood in the water, they think they’ve finally gotten their prey. I keep making oceanic analogies – another one of course is to Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. Recall what happened to Ahab as he went in for the kill, though – it destroyed him, his ship, and all his crew except Ishmael. I don’t know what this current effort to impeach Trump will end up destroying, but we’ve already lost a lot.

Do the Democrats think they can convict Trump in the Senate, before his term is over? I don’t think they have enough time left to accomplish it, even if they do manage to find enough Republicans on board, but I suppose it depends on how thorough a Senate trial would be or if they’d dispense with such niceties.

This is part of the “Achilles drags Hector behind the chariot” scenario I sketched out the other day, as well. The Democrats desire the kind of extreme disgrace for Trump that means that although he won’t be dead he’ll be as good as dead, and so toxic politically that he can never run for a second term. They don’t trust that his own behavior has been alienating enough to accomplish that.

Many Republicans have been rapidly backpedaling against Trump in order to try to protect themselves from being lumped in with him or his protectors. Perhaps some also feel pent-up fury at the calumny they’ve had to endure from the left during his administration. Or perhaps it’s simple cowardice. Then again, perhaps some of them really think Trump did incite an insurrection. That’s what the articles of impeachment are supposedly about: “incitement of insurrection.”

On the question of incitement and insurrection, here’s what Jonathan Turley, no lover of Trump, has to say on the matter:

So Congress is now seeking an impeachment for remarks covered by the First Amendment. It would create precedent for the impeachment of any president blamed for violent acts of others after using reckless language. What is worse are those few cases that would support this type of action. The most obvious is the 1918 prosecution of socialist Eugene Debs, who spoke against the draft in World War One and led figures like Woodrow Wilson to declare him a “traitor to his country.” Debs was arrested and charged with sedition, a new favorite term for Democrats to denounce Trump and Republicans who doubted the victory of Joe Biden.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for a unanimous bench in one of the most infamous decisions to issue from the Supreme Court. It dismissed the free speech rights for Debs and held it was sufficient that his words had the “natural tendency and reasonably probable effect” of deterring people from supporting the international conflict.

That decision was a disgrace, but Democrats are now arguing something even more extreme as the basis for impeachment. Under their theory, any president could be removed for rhetoric that is seen to have the “natural tendency” to encourage others to act in a riotous fashion. Even a call for supporters to protest peacefully could not be a defense. Such a standard would allow for a type of vicarious impeachment that attributes conduct of third parties to any president for the purposes of removal.

Of course, impeachment is ultimately only a quasi-judicial procedure, and although it is supposed to be for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the reality is that Congress can do anything it wants if it can get the votes for it. If it wants to turn the US into a banana republic – or if it already has done so – and it has enough votes for an impeachment and even a conviction, that is what will happen.

I don’t think the Democrats think this process will ever be turned against them. The only situation in which that could happen is if a Democrat president had a Republican Congress willing to go that far. Because the Democrats don’t expect to ever lose a national election again, they don’t think that will occur. And they intend to be the ones who write the history books.

Reacting to the “unprecedented”Capitol incursion

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, there was violence perpetrated by some of the protestors in the Capital incursion. And yes, the those people guilty of it should be identified and prosecuted.

Yes, it is also politically expedient for the left to act as though this was a full-fledged armed insurrection of unprecedented proportions, and that President Trump called for the violence and that everyone on the right is complicit in it.

Conveniently forgotten are so many actions of the left: the occupation of municipal government buildings by BLM/Antifa, the Kavanaugh protests that led to leftists accosting and harrassing Republican senators in the halls of the Capitol to the point where some senators had police escorts (read the whole article to refresh your memory), leftist protestors occupying the Senate’s Hart Building and hundreds being arrested, and the attempted assassination (almost successful, I might add) of Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and other Republicans gathered for a baseball practice. In the latter incident, the perpetrator was a leftist Sanders supporter, and the damage was limited to “only” three shot by the perp and the perp being killed by police, who were present only because Scalise had full-time security assigned to him because of his Whip position.

And perhaps worst of all we have the 1954 shooting and attempted assassinations of members of Congress perpetrated by Puerto Rican nationalists in 1954. I previously wrote at length on that incident, and it’s no accident that the context in which I took it up were the demonstrations against Kavanaugh. The 1954 shootings occurred in the House itself during debate, and five House members were shot, one seriously.

The perpetrators in the 1954 shooting were given lengthy sentences which were the equivalent of life in prison. What actually happened, though, was that in 1979 Jimmy Carter pardoned them and they returned to Puerto Rico to a heroes’ welcome. Thanks, Jimmy.

One of the reasons the incursion happened last Wednesday was inadequate security. I think the reason for the lack was a combination of factors. One was that Trump crowds are ordinarily peaceful and it was expected that this one would be. Another reason was either stupidity and/or miscommunication on the part of multiple security forces, or perhaps purposeful hampering by some. Sorting this out is quite the challenge:

[DC] City officials here said it was the Pentagon that planned to keep the presence of National Guard troops at Wednesday’s pro-Trump rally small, unarmed and distant from the Capitol. But Pentagon officials said they were merely responding to the city’s wishes to “keep things de-escalated.”

A timeline released by the Pentagon late Friday says Capitol Police twice declined help from the Defense Department in the days prior to Jan. 6. But it also shows that when the city officials and the Capitol Police requested additional National Guard troops after rioters breached the Capitol, it took four hours for those troops to arrive…

…[D]efense officials said they provided the support that the Capitol Police and the city government requested and never turned down requests from city officials.

The Pentagon released a timeline Friday that showed a Dec. 31 “written request” from Mayor Bowser and D.C. security and emergency officials Christopher Rodriguez for National Guard assistance to the city’s police and fire departments. A Dec. 31 memo from Rodriguez that was obtained by NBC News requested that “No DCNG personnel will be armed during this mission.”

According to the memo, the D.C. National Guard’s primary mission would be crowd management and assistance with blocking vehicles at traffic posts. There would be six crowd management teams to manage crowds at “specified Metro stations and a team to assist 30 “designated traffic posts,” Rodriguez wrote.

On Monday, Jan. 4, according to the timeline, the DoD agreed to provide 340 members of the D.C. National Guard to Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller also authorized the Army secretary to deploy a quick reaction force of 40 personnel “if additional support is requested by civilian authorities.”

The Pentagon said the city police department had requested only a supporting role for the National Guard, mainly to handle traffic checkpoints and Metro stations to free up police officers for other tasks. It also said the Capitol Police did not request assistance in the days leading up to the planned Jan. 6 protest…

During a briefing with reporters on Friday, Steven D’Antuono, FBI Washington Field Office assistant director in charge, told reporters that the bureau’s threat assessments leading up to Wednesday’s mobbing of the Capitol showed “there was no indication that there was anything other than First Amendment protected activity.”

I think it at least somewhat likely that the Pentagon simply failed to assess the threat because of past peaceful performance by Trump supporters, and that for Mayor Bowser it was okay either way: if the deomnstration was peaceful, that was fine, and if there was trouble at the hands of Trump supporters that would be to the advantage of the left and she would be able to chalk it up to failures at the Pentagon.

[NOTE: The cause of death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick is still unclear. Early reports that it was from an injury have not been confirmed, and there are some reports that he died of a medical condition. I assume that some day we’ll learn more.]

Note to grandparents: don’t even think of ever hugging your grandkids again

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s advice from CNN’s helpful medical consultant Dr. Leana Wen, who is an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

The question was about what precautions grandparents who have been vaccinated against COVID should follow when finally visiting grandchildren. My answer? Go back to the way it was before COVID ever reared its ugly head.

But it should come as no surprise, no surprise at all, that that’s not what Dr. Wen has to say, and CNN wants you to know what that is:

First, the vaccine is not 100% effective. There is still a chance that someone who has received the vaccine can get Covid-19…We don’t know if people who are vaccinated could still be carriers of the virus, even if they don’t get sick. That means you could be protected yourself if you get exposed to someone with coronavirus, but you could still be a carrier of the virus. When you get together with your loved ones, you could spread it to those who aren’t vaccinated.

If your grandkids live in the area, you could definitely safely see them outside, 6 feet apart. If you want to see them indoors, there is going to be some level of risk. That risk will be much lower than if you were not vaccinated, but the risk is still going to be there to you. And you could still be a risk to the unvaccinated members of your family, as you could be an asymptomatic carrier who transmits to them.

If you really want to spend time with the grandkids indoors, the safest way to do this is still for everyone to quarantine for at least 10 days and lower their risk during these 10 days. Quarantining for seven days and a negative test is an option too, but everyone also has to do the quarantine — a negative test alone is not enough.

Does anyone want to break it to CNN that zero risk is never possible in this world, and that the cost of recommending the indefinite extension of this sort of avoidant behavior is much higher than the infinitesimally small risk they’re talking about? But of course, I think they already know that. Many people seem to be invested in keeping us fearful and apart.

Fortunately, I think very few vaccinated people will heed advice like Dr. Wen’s. But unfortunately, some people have been emotionally crippled by what’s happened during the COVID period. And our country has been harmed, I think irrevocably.

When the 2-week “flatten the curve” period began, I supported it. Had you told me we’d be doing this for a year or more, I would have called you balmy. And yet here we are, with many states in just that situation until at least March, which would make it a year.

[NOTE: And I’m going to go on record as saying that I predict that people who have had two vaccinations are not going to be found to be COVID carriers.]

[NOTE II: I seem to recall that the last time I used the word “balmy” in the way I did in the final paragraph of this post, I got pushback from some readers who only knew the word as a weather reference and were unaware of the fourth meaning here: “crazy, foolish, eccentric.”]

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s so much news I’ve decided to handle it with a roundup.

(1) No, Trump did not incite a riot:

Under the Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedents, inflammatory speech can be punished only in narrowly defined circumstances that go beyond what happened on Wednesday. Under federal law, incitement to riot does not include “advocacy of ideas” or “expression of belief” unless it endorses violence, which Trump did not do…

…[Trump] urged his followers to “show strength” and “take back our country” by “marching over to the Capitol building” and “demand[ing] that Congress do the right thing.” The “right thing,” according to Trump, was overturning the election results by rejecting electoral votes for Biden.

I believe that Trump sincerely believes he won the election and that it happened as a result of fraud. I have supported his fight to have the evidence of that given a fair hearing in the court system, but I think he should have allowed January 6th’s events to play out without his input. Addressing the crowd in the way he did was not incitement, but it could have been foreseen that marching on the Capitol building was not going to end well, and that although Trump crowds tend to be very well behaved, there would be some elements in the group (whether they were on the right or of the Antifa persuasion) that were bent on causing trouble.

As I wrote yesterday:

I think that Trump has held up well for these four years, compared to how well the vast majority of people would have held up under the same intense pressure and attack for the same lengthy amount of time. But I still think that, since the election, he’s not been holding up well, and definitely not well enough.

No, he’s neither insane nor incompetent to finish out his term. But I think he’s exhausted and striking out impulsively

And Ann Althouse – not a Trump fan – went through the entire speech and found no incitement and no calls for violence at all.

(2) When the left takes power and aims to keep it, one of its first moves is to silence opposition. The Federalist has good coverage of what’s going on in that regard. Here are some links: Twitter bans Flynn and Powell, ABC news political director calls for “cleansing” of Trump movement, on Twitter and its power, our growing resemblance to China, Yahoo News is urged by journalists to ban Mollie Hemingway and other conservative journalists, the National Association of Realtors bans “hate speech”, Apple prepares to ban Parler from devices. That’s not all that’s happening in this regard, but I’ll stop there.

The Capitol incursion is being used as an excuse for this. But it is merely a pretext to unleash what was already in the works. I don’t have time right now to go back and find the threats I read, prior to the election and just after it, that once Trump was gone it would be time to take action against anyone who supported him. The Capitol event was either a serendipitous windfall to the left or perhaps something they partially orchestrated, but either way it is something of which they were poised to take full advantage, and if it hadn’t occurred they would have easily found another excuse.

(3) I’ve watched just a few minutes of this video, but it was recommended by a commenter and it contains a timeline of Wednesday’s Capitol events, with video clips. The timeline starts shortly after minute 10.

Now Facebook deplatforms the WalkAway group

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess left-to-right political change – the subject matter of the WalkAway group – is a no-no on Facebook. We can’t be allowed to talk about it; too dangerous; might give people ideas.

I would say that the WalkAway deplatforming is “unbelievable,” except that it’s all too believable these days. Social media companies are flexing their muscles more and more and feeling their power to shape minds and control thought. Whatever libertarian impulses that may have originally existed in these companies is no more.

It’s not a position that demonstrates a belief that your own convictions have the power of persuasion, is it? But those who run Facebook and other social media platforms have the power to ban, and that has to stand in for persuasion and logical argument.

A group such as WalkAway, whose videos and material I’ve seen, doesn’t advocate violence. In fact, many of its members are not even on the right, although they’ve walked away from the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other groups allowed to have a Facebook platform, such as the utterly mendacious – and, to use a favorite leftist media phrase, thoroughly debunked – 1619 Project. Not only do they have a page on Facebook, but there’s no warning there from Facebook about how many historians have said the 1619 Project’s message about the history of the United States’ founding and the purpose of the American Revolution is a lie.

People on the right who depend on social media to spread their message are in trouble, but that’s been true for quite some time. At least the WalkAway group appears to still have its own website as well as a YouTube presence – for now. But losing a Facebook page is obviously a blow to a group’s ability to reach people.

It occurs to me that this rampant and accelerating censorship could cause a backlash. It used to be that the vast majority of Americans valued freedom of expression and that they thought that exposure to many points of view was a vehicle for finding truth, and trusted people to evaluate what they heard and come to their own conclusions about its veracity. The left has changed that because the left is only for that principle until it gains control, at which point freedom of expression becomes a threat to the left. Now that the left feels it’s in control – although in terms of numbers it doesn’t really have a majority and its control isn’t as well consolidated as the left hopes to make it in the not-too-distant future – the left is more determined than ever to shield us from anything our insect overlords deem doubleplusungood.

[NOTE: (Hat tip: commenter “TJ”). Daniel Greenfield fact-checks the fact-checkers on that famous Stalin quote about counting the votes, and gives some interesting background on the context in which Stalin said it.]