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Many people are responsible for the riots on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. One of them is Donald Trump. Loose lips sink ships, as they say. Trump talked too much. There’s a reason why politicians speak out of both sides of their mouth – with forked tongue, as Native Americans say – they’re afraid to say anything definitive that voters may take literally. Trump bucked this trend and we can now see the danger of extemporaneously speaking your mind.
The public, for all their talk of wanting direct, honest politicians, can’t handle the truth. Somewhere between the rehearsed platitudes of Obama and the unscripted bluntness of Trump is the rhetorical ideal, but you need a Churchill to marry the necessary gravitas and spontaneity. Other people, though, smiling assassins, as they’re known in the vernacular, are also responsible for the chaos in Washington. As the Bible says: ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap’. The Republicans and the Democrats are reaping what they sowed.
The catalyst for the protest on January 6, the day the Senate ratified the Electoral College, was the presidential election in early November, but the causes of the protest go back to the day Trump announced his candidacy to become president. From that day forward, the Establishment acted in every way to undermine, frustrate, and destroy his presidency. It’s one of the most extraordinary stories in modern American political history. And while the ‘resistance’ or the Establishment — it’s hard to tell which is which in this ill-begotten tale — performed their deeds in plain sight, they also gaslighted the whole world. Then, with the chutzpah of chutzpahs, they denied prima facie evidence of their own malfeasance and corruption, and described anyone who questioned their narrative and tactics as insane or stupid. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. Although some of their followers, to be fair, are so stupid they gaslighted themselves.
The larger question, though, is what did people expect when a democratically elected president is subject to a torrent of abuse, of unrelenting mainstream media lies, false accusations of collusion with Russia, and an impeachment based on a gossamer-thin excuse to remove him from office? Did they expect that nobody would become enraged at what many people viewed as the Establishment thwarting a democratic mandate? Did people really believe that nobody would notice the groundbreaking hypocrisy of the elites or the fact that the establishment was closing ranks against an outsider, one who was viewed by many voters as a tribune of the people? What did people expect when they witnessed Democratic Party politicians defending Antifa and Black Lives Matter, with Joe Biden, for example, refusing to condemn the burning of American cities, saying that Antifa is just “an ‘idea”, all the while blithely ignoring the wanton destruction? What did people expect when Kamala Harris urged people to donate to the legal funds of the rioters? What should people think when Nancy Pelosi said there was ‘no question’ that the 2016 election was ‘hijacked’? Were people to take them at their word or ignore what they said because it was a ‘debate’, as Kamala Harris excused herself after calling Joe Biden a racist and then signing on as his vice-presidential pick? What did people expect when the Democrats said that the Russians had manipulated the voting machines to ensure Trump won the election? What did people expect when there is evidence that the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, among others – the security apparatus of America, in other words – were involved in a plot to undermine Trump’s presidency, and which even Barack Obama discussed in the Oval Office?
It’s not whether anything illegal happened, it’s the perception of criminal acts that matters here. (The Durham Report into this possible scandal is expected later this year. One member of the FBI has already been jailed for altering a document that was used to obtain a FISA warrant which authorised phone taps on Trump associates). What did people expect when Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused of rape and where the evidence of his guilt relied on a vague ‘believe all women’ mantra — except when Joe Biden was accused of sexual impropriety and suddenly all women were not to be believed? What did people expect when the mainstream media relinquished any standards of objectivity and repeatedly published stores that were lies, like the hit piece, which has become a self-evident truth it’s been told that often, that Trump praised both sides at Charlottesville, when he did no such thing, or that he encouraged people to drink bleach? What did people expect when weaponised accusations of misogyny, racism and classism were hurled at Trump without any evidence to prove their accuracy? All of which were rationalised by new and politicised definitions of normal behaviour and psychological traits that have been hardwired into human beings over aeons of evolutionary time. If Trump is guilty of these sins then everybody you’ve ever met is guilty of them too, including your father and your grandmother. What did people expect when the Big Tech’s Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google censored and shadow banned news stories favourable to Trump? What did people expect when Twitter blocked the New York Post from using its service to promote stories about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, just before the election, stories which showed Hunter Biden trading on his family name and giving a cut of the profits to the ‘big guy’? Polls after the election proved that man voters were unaware of the story, and that if enough voters knew about Hunter Biden’s corruption before the election, Trump would have won.
Which brings me to the presidential election. Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done. This is where most commentators, both honest and blindly partisan, are wrong in their analysis of the riots in the Capitol building. The issue was not whether fraud was widespread in the election, the issue was how government officials and relevant institutions dealt with legal challenges to the election result. The answer is they didn’t. Every lawsuit brought by Trump, by multiple states, or by people who were concerned about the election was rejected on procedural grounds and not on any evaluation of the evidence. What is important is not whether American democratic institutions worked, they did, as anyone with a shred of intelligence knew they would, but the perception among the public that something was suspect about the elites’ reaction to citizens exercising their democratic rights. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for a minority of Trump supporters, those who disgraced the Capitol by rioting in its sacred halls. The rioters believed that their democratic rights had been quashed by the establishment’s antipathy to Trump.
Breaking democratic norms, or, as Barack Obama says, ‘constitutional norms’, comes in many forms. Trump has broken many shibboleths about the role and behaviour of government, but the establishment opposition’s breaking of constitutional norms make Trump look like a rank amateur. Even committed liberal democrats like myself became suspicious when the pattern of disingenuous behaviour by the Establishment was so overwhelming in its ferocity and magnitude that it became impossible to ignore.
Trump has earned a place on the tumbril, but he is not alone. Many of his detractors should be standing beside him. Or, at the very least, they should remember their own behaviour and rhetoric before advertising their hypocrisy.
To put this in perspective, using their own logic that ‘riots are the voice of the unheard’, what did the left-wing cultural hegemonic Establishment think would happen when they broke, while posing as moral arbiters of the great unwashed, every constitutional and democratic norm over the four years of Trump’s presidency? What we’ve witnessed from the Establishment is the greatest rejection of democratic rights in modern political history. As the Bible says: ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’.
I wish someone would tel me, or show me, when, where, and how Trump suggested violence.
Congress is called the “People’s house”. Trump supported did nothing but visit teh “People’s House”.
It was the four busloads of mercenaries from Antifa that did any damage. It was Trump supporters that prvented them from following “burn it down” demands.
As Alinsky said, always accuse your opponent of those things that you do.
“Every lawsuit brought by Trump, by multiple states, or by people who were concerned about the election was rejected on procedural grounds and not on any evaluation of the evidence.”
Absolute baloney. An infantile falsehood, actually. There wasn’t any evidence to evaluate.
Something needs to be done to stop the rise of “Trumpism” in Australia. Such was the message of Sally Sara’s World Today program on ABC Radio National today featuring Tim Soupcon. Tim expressed his concern that we are in a “post-truth age” in which people are regrettably allowed to publish “conspiracy theories”. Sally revealed that she too is worried about the rise of “misinformation”. Tim opined that only facts should be allowed to be aired on social media. All they omitted to mention was the method by which they proposed to determine what was a fact.
Perhaps the ABC Fact Checker could be useful here? It could publish a daily list of current facts about coronavirus, US election processes, climate change and so on. That way nobody else would need to waste their time investigating about those subjects, assessing evidence and reaching their own conclusions. Tim and Sally could be assured that social media was uncontaminated by opinions that made them feel uncomfortable, or arguments that were too difficult for them to follow.
An alternative would be to get some people with intellect and moral backbone to work for the ABC and to stand for parliament, drain the swamp, and get some better facts happening.
IF, repeat, IF, “There wasn’t any evidence to evaluate”, then the statement “not on any evaluation of the evidence” is rationally indisputably correct.
Setting aside the question of whether alleged voter fraud was sufficient to overturn the election, the real question is what are the odds there was no fraud? Miniscule I would say. And if that is so and given the incessant vilification of Trump, what are the odds it was considerably more than what one might normally expect? You could bank on it.
What has transpired against Trump is probably the greatest example of Orwellianism of recent times. The Democrats are the insurrectionists and champions of violence. The online providers are more powerful than the President of the US and are the agents of the US Democratic party. Trump should stay cool- hopefully he will be back in 2024, when Biden, who will be 82- if he is still alive- certainly won’t run again. Hope to write on this for our esteemed Quadrant.
Donald Trump is a great man and was the best President in my lifetime. It is clear to me that the article was written by a Democrat trying to be “moderate”.
rod.stuart: “I wish someone would tel me, or show me, when, where, and how Trump suggested violence.”
If Trump had of actually incited violence, the media would be playing the offending clip over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.
Trump’s actual remarks on the morning of the rally:
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Video clip here: https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/trump-fact-check-capitol/
Patrick Buchanan:
“Nowhere in Trump’s remarks was there a call to violence or to invade the Capitol building, or to engage in the mob criminality that took place under the Capitol dome Wednesday afternoon. But the effort to disgrace and drive Trump from an office he will vacate in 10 days is only a part of the general purge that is underway against conservatives, Republicans, and Trumpists.
Twitter and Facebook—the social media megaphones Trump has used to communicate with some 80 million followers—have terminated the president’s personal accounts. Apple, Amazon, and Google have cut ties to the social media website Parler, which is popular among conservatives. The goal of Big Tech is censorship—to circumscribe Trump’s capacity to communicate with his followers, and then to cripple the capacity of the right to communicate with one another. And this is being applauded by individuals who see themselves as acolytes of the First Amendment.”
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/exploiting-the-capitol-riot-to-kill-trump/
With the Democrat-Big Tech-Woke Capital oligarchy consolidating political control, the Republicans are losing corporate donors. Sohrab Ahmari thinks this is a good thing as it will force the Republicans to become less beholden to corporate interests, more populist and more representative of the working class:
“November’s election revealed that the class realignment of our two parties is solidifying. Democrats have increasingly emerged as the party of upscale suburbs, of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and Wall Street, of the owners of capital and the professionals who service them. The GOP, meanwhile, is trending toward a multiracial working-class party, preferred by those who generally make their living by toil.
So why are conservatives fretting about corporate America cutting off the GOP, a process merely accelerated by last week’s (disgraceful) mob assault on the Capitol? Did they think building a working-class party was going to be painless? That they could mouth pro-worker rhetoric while continuing to ignore workers’ concerns on issues like immigration and wages? A country-club party with blue-collar décor?
That jig was going to be up at some point. The sooner, the better — for an underrepresented American working class and for Republicans who take the realignment seriously.”
https://nypost.com/2021/01/12/the-gop-corporate-divorce-is-a-blessing-for-the-partys-future/
Patrick Buchanan:
“Nowhere in Trump’s remarks was there a call to violence or to invade the Capitol building, or to engage in the mob criminality that took place under the Capitol dome Wednesday afternoon. But the effort to disgrace and drive Trump from an office he will vacate in 10 days is only a part of the general purge that is underway against conservatives, Republicans, and Trumpists.
Twitter and Facebook—the social media megaphones Trump has used to communicate with some 80 million followers—have terminated the president’s personal accounts. Apple, Amazon, and Google have cut ties to the social media website Parler, which is popular among conservatives. The goal of Big Tech is censorship—to circumscribe Trump’s capacity to communicate with his followers, and then to cripple the capacity of the right to communicate with one another. And this is being applauded by individuals who see themselves as acolytes of the First Amendment.”
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/exploiting-the-capitol-riot-to-kill-trump/
With the Democrat-Big Tech-Woke Capital oligarchy consolidating political control, the Republicans are losing corporate donors. Sohrab Ahmari thinks this is a good thing as it will force the Republicans to become less beholden to corporate interests, more populist and more representative of the working class:
“November’s election revealed that the class realignment of our two parties is solidifying. Democrats have increasingly emerged as the party of upscale suburbs, of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and Wall Street, of the owners of capital and the professionals who service them. The GOP, meanwhile, is trending toward a multiracial working-class party, preferred by those who generally make their living by toil.
So why are conservatives fretting about corporate America cutting off the GOP, a process merely accelerated by last week’s (disgraceful) mob assault on the Capitol? Did they think building a working-class party was going to be painless? That they could mouth pro-worker rhetoric while continuing to ignore workers’ concerns on issues like immigration and wages? A country-club party with blue-collar décor?
That jig was going to be up at some point. The sooner, the better — for an underrepresented American working class and for Republicans who take the realignment seriously.”
https://nypost.com/2021/01/12/the-gop-corporate-divorce-is-a-blessing-for-the-partys-future/
And here is the ridiculous, failed Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull cheering on Big Tech political censorship and repeating false claims that Trump “incited” violence: https://twitter.com/RealMarkLatham/status/1349271632850796544
Sindri if you really believe that there isn’t any evidence of corrupt activity in the election you need to look at this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2mH9X4jQT8
I can’t stress enough the importance that, in a Democracy, both sides have to trust the process and calmly accept the result. This can’t happen if the accusations are just dismissed out of hand. A very thorough investigation is needed by a body with the powers of an Oz Royal Commission. Without this the distrust and division will continue to simmer on the stove with an ever present risk of boiling over.
The recent Georgia Senate elections were illustrative of the future of the US. I predicted the results when I read, a few days prior to the supposed Election Day, that 3 million postal votes had already been received—total votes being about 4.5 million. That pesky virus is the gift that keeps on giving.
Then there’s the victory of 33 year-old Jon Ossoff, a film maker and LSE graduate (with an Australian mother, incidentally) over sitting Senator David Perdue, in an ostensibly Republican state.
The Democrats will soon turn the 60 square miles of the District of Columbia into the 51st State, and with mass immigration encouraged would be unlikely to lose even a “fair” election in the foreseeable future. Assuming, of course, that the country would still be in any condition to even pretend to democracy.
There was evidence alright, boxes of it, and to claim otherwise you have to go through and check it properly, which the Supreme Courts obviously did not do. Apparently some cases don’t need much evidence to be declared ‘credible’ anyway, just word of mouth assertion, as in the disgraceful accusations against Cardinal Pell….with no actual hard evidence in sight. President Trump, by all accounts, was coasting to victory when almost at the last minute, all the votes coming in became solidly for one candidate only, in other words they somehow changed dramatically, all, or the majority, one way. I’ve been a worker in elections in Queensland over many years, handing out at the booths, and scrutineering in the counting rooms, plus of course assiduously watching all the results, at all the relevant booths, right down to the wire, along with many others of more experience. In the free and fair secret voting, liberal democracy of Australia, at least my part of it anyway, a sudden change like that just can’t happen….it can only be put down to fraudulent manipulation somehow. Also the postal votes were an obvious give away ; to start with, who was pushing for them in the first place, they are absolutely unnecessary in a non compulsory voting regime, and as for counting them secretly…for any period of time at all is incredible, and obviously fraudulent. If you’ve got your thousands of fraudulent votes all prepared out of sight it would only take a few minutes to whip them out and replace the valid votes when the scrutineers are not there, particularly if you’ve rehearsed the exercise, and the Democrats and the left in general have been demonstrating their virulent hatred of President Trump for 4 years, plenty of time for all the rehearsals under the sun.
When you add computer voting hacking possibilities to this murky soup the election becomes fraudulent alright, and I think pretty well everyone knows it which in a way may be a blessing in disguise, because it might make Biden a sort of lame duck President, restricting his ability to reverse all the good changes President Trump has made.
PeterMax The fraudsters, baddies and marxists/communists won. God help America and the West.
Even with the intensive moderation of comments by Journalism School left-wingers employed by The Australian, the comments on all anti-Trump articles are running hot in favour of President Trump. Any comment with more than 15 likes is most likely to be one strongly supporting Trump, and some of these positive comments get up 80 or even up to 165 likes. As with here, you have to be a subscriber to comment, so it is hard to flood the commentary with paid leftism. You can safely leave that in the hands of those paid to decide which comments get up though. Reader reaction has made them pull back on biased moderation somewhat lately, from all accounts, as subscribers tear up their subscriptions.
I think with the current trajectory of American poltics we are witnessing the world wide web maturing into its inevitable role. Not as a free market of communication and financial transfers, but as a mass weapon of control utilised by uber-powerful corporations.
Elizabeth Beare, you are quite right. I noticed that as well and it also applies to the subject of the Voice, which the Australian is also promoting relentlessly.
Elizabeth Beare, I have cancelled my subscription to The Australian. My comments repeatedly vanish. They are publishing loads of ‘opinion’ that is frankly worthless, and what little actual news they offer is all readily available online from other sources.
Elizabeth Beare and Peter O’Brien and I can add my agreement. I’ve noticed this in the Australian for a few years ever since I read Melanie Phillips book ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. She mentioned how they teach journalism at Universities and calls it ‘Journalism of Attachment’ , where they are taught how to cleverly attach their own ideological message to what ever piece they’re writing ; any brief objectivity and truth would only be in there to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader. Couldn’t happen of course in the days when journalists started as cadets and learn’t on the job, at least I think it was much harder for it to happen. I always look out for it and now think I usually can spot it…..even I’m afraid in what should be the apolitical & benign subject of sport… usually in smaller doses.