By Steven Yates
December 23, 2022
They’ve done it!
On Monday, December 19, the January 6 (Un)Select Committee recommended that not two, not three, but four criminal referrals against former president Donald Trump be sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The charges referred to the DOJ are immersed — totally — in official narratives about Election 2020 and its aftermath, leading up to what happened on January 6, 2021. No early-morning vote spikes (a statistically impossible all-at-once deluge of hundreds of votes for Biden being recorded all at once) scrubbed from the Internet within days, no electronically altered votes, no illegal ballot harvesting, no dead people voting (well, in Georgia, two), nothing. All memory-holed.
Aggregating that early evidence would have been crucial! This needed to be done in a couple of days if not hours! Without it, there is indeed no hard evidence of fraud! I have no idea if it was attempted or not. (How I wish I’d thought to take screenshots!) Patrick Byrne’s book is very suggestive of what happened, and his apparent invisibility to the Committee might well be significant. He had Trump’s ear. But Trump listened to Rudy Giuliani, not Byrne, and the effort to rescue his presidency went down in flames.
Not that this matters now. Powerful people wanted Trump gone. They got what they wanted. There is no reversing this. Ever. Period.
The Committee’s Executive Summary begins:
In the Committee’s hearings, we presented evidence of what ultimately became a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. That evidence has led to an overriding and straight-forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.
What follows is an account of how Trump was urged by those around him to concede the election. He refused. By the time the Electoral College had met, however (December 14), the evidence was gone. Possibly a computer engineer could have retrieved the images I saw; I don’t know. Since they only came from one location in one state, they would not have been sufficient. The point is, it was too late.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, moreover, but as far as I can tell, an eleventh-hour refusal by Mike Pence to count electoral votes from certain states on January 6 would indeed have been illegal. A vice president simply doesn’t have the Constitutionally-grounded authority to make that kind of unilateral call. I’d concluded that long before reading the Committee’s report. Would any of us have wanted Al Gore to have it back in 2001? Or Kamala Harris to have it in 2025?!
The confrontation, however, came to a head anyway.
Here is a summation of the Committee’s accusations:
- Obstruction of an official proceeding of the U.S. Congress: because Trump urged Pence (on the advice of one John Eastman) to refuse to certify the election; and is accused of then sending his supporters to the Capitol to disrupt the electoral vote count.
- Conspiracy to defraud the United States: because he and others told and retold what Democrats and corporate media have labeled “the Big Lie” and tried to have state officials, e.g., in Georgia, “find” him votes; this includes that idea that Pence could act unilaterally in the way described above. The accusation goes beyond just this. The Committee contends that this was premeditated: that Trump thought through the idea of stealing an election in advance of the election itself.
- Conspiracy to make a false statement: because among other things Trump called for separate slates of electors in states Biden “won” to replace the official ones.
- “Inciting” or “assisting,” or giving “aid and comfort” to an insurrection — because, so the charge goes, Trump watched events that afternoon unfold on television and did nothing to try and stop the violence. This allegation would enable the DOJ to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent Trump from ever holding office again, his announcement of his candidacy for the GOP nomination for 2024 last month notwithstanding.
Trump had tweeted this:
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, we are the party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in blue! Thank you!
Not quite memory-holed, or I wouldn’t have been able to retrieve it.
Ignored by the Committee.
Others are getting criminal referrals as well, such as Eastman, the attorney who believed Pence could act unilaterally; and of course Rudy Giuliani (who, if we can believe Byrne’s book, was plastered most of the time).
What we have just seen is, of course, unprecedented. Not once in U.S. history has a former president been accused of federal crimes committed while in office. This sort of thing happens in second world banana republics. Although in backhanded fairness, the U.S. is looking more and more like a second world banana republic with each passing day.
We should note that the Committee’s recommendations don’t have the force of law. The DOJ can do as it pleases. One can be sure, given the present environment and the DOJ’s being politicized under the Bidenistas, they will consider this carefully. They have their own separate investigation going on, headed by special counsel Jack Smith. The DOJ will be under pressure, even after the Committee disbands at the end of the year. As member Jamie Raskin (D-Md) noted, realizing that over 900 people have been incarcerated for their actions that day: “Ours is not a system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.”
I won’t predict Trump will actually be arrested. But doubtless Bidenista Attorney General Merrick Garland is on board with those determined to prevent a second Trump term. This long ago became an end which justifies any means.
We are probably looking at the end of Trumpism, folks.
Had this gone down six months ago, I would have said that the accusations listed above would have enflamed the GOP base. Now, in the aftermath of the “red wave that didn’t happen” (except in Florida where greater voting security ensured that it did), and evidence that some who supported Trump now want to move on, I am unsure that an actual Trump arrest will provoke anything. Maybe a few demonstrations easily and safely dismissed as the work of “baseless conspiracy theorists.”
Republicans need to think about elections, whether the U.S. is really a democracy (or should be), and what it means to be a conservative.
Otherwise, they may never “win” another major election in our lifetimes. Unless, of course, they return to nominating Bush and Romney types.
Trump (as I noted the other day) appears to be self-destructing on his own, with reckless behavior and even more reckless statements including the hyperbolic suggestion that what happened in Election 2020 could justify setting aside parts of the Constitution.
In my last article I noted that Ron DeSantis seems to have become the preferred alternative to Trump. His thinking is close enough to Trump’s to qualify as “Trumpism without Trump.” He is anti-woke, moreover, putting his money where his mouth is.
He’s not said if he’s running in 2024, though, and might not say anything definite for months — according to my calendar he has well over a year to think about it.
He’ll doubtless figure out, if he hasn’t already, what he’ll be getting himself and his family into.
DeSantis might move away from Trumpism as a matter of political survival in the corporate media environment as it is, an environment in which the left-liberals who led the crusade against Trump from the get-go, parading “Trump-Russia collusion” that never happened, will on him like packs of wolves, having hypocritically promoted him over Trump all these months. Will he have the charisma Trump had, and the stamina to weather the storm the way Trump did for all those years.
The more he looks like another Bush, the better coverage he will get!
The Bushes are all globalists, of course.
Initially, Jeb Bush was the moneyed interests’ choice back in 2016, if anyone remembers. The problem was: those narratives had all collapsed. The base was not interested. They wanted someone who at least sounded like he understood their problems. Trump was that someone.
Fast forward to the present, and what we’ve learned, or should have.
Corporate media doesn’t even pretend to be objective, or honest. They’ve weaponized the language shamelessly. I see countless references to the “deadly Capitol riot” during which “five people died.” These references don’t include the fact that the only two violent deaths happened at the hands of Capitol Police. The other three were medical emergencies.
Corporate media fabricated a wild story of Officer Brian Sickwick’s death at the hands of “rioters” clubbing him over the head.
He’d had a stroke.
Neither the January 6 Committee nor any corporate media has said nothing about one Ray Epps, almost surely an agent provocateur from the FBI, on the street urging people to force their way into the Capitol, something Trump had not said to do. Trump said to march to the Capitol; he never told anyone to go inside.
Memory-holed, all of this.
The artificial “real Matrix” fake reality is falling into place, and getting harder and harder to challenge. In this “real Matrix,” Trump planned to win Election 2020 at all costs, and when the democratic vote count went against him, he set about to overturn it, ending on January 6, 2021 when he ordered his supporters to invade the Capitol never eschewing violence. In this “real Matrix,” a man who barely campaigned, falls asleep during meetings, and can barely articulate three sentences without committing a gaffe defeated by over 7 million votes a man who was able to fill arenas.
I would not be surprised if criticisms of globalism/globalists are soon demonized as a form of antisemitism, since so many prominent globalists have been Jews.
The controlled demolition of Trumpism might mean the controlled demolition of the last concerted, national-level opposition to the dystopia being developed by the globalists. This effort is still in its planning stages but moving apace. I’ve written about it elsewhere (see especially here). If Trump can be criticized, it is for having greatly underestimated what he was up against and overestimating his ability to deal with it unilaterally. The power grab of the 2020s continues. The globalists remain considerably better organized than we are, with far greater resources (some researchers place the wealth they clandestinely command as not mere billions or trillions but in hundreds of trillions). They have plenty of insouciant people at all levels of American society doing their bidding, knowingly or not, from Congress and Silicon Valley down to syndicated columnists and common Internet trolls.
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Steven Yates’s latest book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) is available here and here. His earlier Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.
While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published early next year.
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Thank you, “Joe Biden”!
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