Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

The answer, as horrifying as it sounds, is this: Maintaining white supremacy.
A minority, a white, conservative to far-right minority, wants to turn back the clock. To maintain white supremacy in the ethnic-sociologically changing USA. The fact that this — strong — minority succeeds in asserting itself in this way is due to the following two critical factors:

the US electoral system

2. the determination of right-wing conservatives.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the bestseller How Democracies Die, said this in 2020:

Today the American parties are starkly divided along urban-rural lines: the Democrats are concentrated in the metropolitan centers, while the Republicans are increasingly concentrated in sparsely populated areas that have their base. That gives Republicans an advantage in the Electoral College (which favors sparsely populated states in presidential elections), the Senate, and the Supreme Court (which Trump was able to fill with three ultra-conservatives during his presidency).

The two authors state that there is a “minority rule” in the USA. Although a majority of Americans support abortion and stricter gun laws, a right-wing and motivated minority continues to prevail. Moderate conservatives currently have little to say, while important observers now regard the Republicans as a whole as authoritarian and anti-democratic. And what are the left and liberals doing? The Democratic Party? Joe Biden? Too little and sometimes the wrong thing.

Coming to the conclusion about the minority rule of diehard white supremacists, the electoral college, the right-wing fervor — that’s nothing new. There really is no excuse this has continued and manifested itself to such a degree. The thing is: now and going forward, everyone outside this group of radicals must come up with a plan to bring the United States back into the 21st century as a functioning democracy. Because as it stands now? Not so good and pretty much doomed. Fall of the empire scenario — doomed.
Meanwhile...

Death from guns was and still is the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. In 2020 it was 4,386 deaths. The umpteenth school massacre, this time in Uvalde, Texas, will have little impact on America’s absurd gun laws. The Supreme Court will soon rule on whether to lift the ban on concealed carry in New York. With possible consequences for the whole country.

And of course, it is expected that the Supreme Court will soon open the door for draconian bans on abortion. As well as possibly lifting the ban on minority protection measures (“affirmative action”). Gay rights, including same-sex marriage, are also on the line. Ultra-conservative forces are going about this with fervor.

The congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol by far-right groups is uncovering more and more details about Donald Trump’s role as the instigator. But Republicans have labeled the de facto attempted coup, designed to prevent Congress from confirming Joe Biden’s election victory, as “legitimate political discourse.”

Trump continues to tell the Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. His party and too many Americans largely follow him. A year ago, around 53 percent of Republicans and thus 25 percent of Americans believed in the Big Lie. Trump supporters seem onboard with civil war.

What’s wrong with the US? Has the world’s most important democracy gone insane? Transatlantic has become a dirty word in Europe, but anyone with a shred of realism knows that without a truly democratic US, Europe stands little chance against Vladimir Putin’s war and dominance plans.

Stay tuned.

A noteworthy remark I heard from Trevor Noah: He explained the difference between South African Racism and US racism: South African racists are openly racist, proclaiming it for all to see, giving the opposition a clearly defined enemy. In the United States, these ultra-right-wing assholes all pretend they’re not racist, that they see everyone as equals. Watch. It’s awesome.

Coming to the conclusion about the minority rule of diehard white supremacists, the electoral college, the right-wing fervor — that’s nothing new. There really is no excuse this has continued and manifested itself to such a degree. The thing is: now and going forward, everyone outside this group of radicals must come up with a plan to bring the United States back into the 21st century as a functioning democracy. Because as it stands now? Not so good and pretty much doomed. Fall of the empire scenario — doomed.

The Republicans are basically treading water in expectation of sweeping both houses in the midterms and getting a MAGAtard elected president in 2024. It's our institutions which are failing us – having assumed that, with our vaunted Constitution, we had achieved political perfection, we've been loath to take the steps necessary to modernize the document and its interpretation. The 2nd Amendment is a great example. It was obsolete following the War of 1812! The Electoral College is another example, as is the "two senators for each state" provision. I feel there's very little we can do to turn it around at the national level.

Fox News announced on Monday that Fox News Channel won’t be airing the House Jan. 6 Committee’s public hearing during primetime on Thursday. The primetime programs will only cover the hearings “as news warrants,” according to the press release.

That means when the hearing starts at 8 p.m. ET, Fox News viewers can instead watch Tucker Carlson rant about how fake the hearing is and how the Jan. 6 panel’s out to get red-blooded patriots and was it really that big a deal that Trump’s supporters violently stormed the Capitol?
Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum will be shifted over to Fox Business Network to cover the hearing live over there, per Fox’s press release. FBN has fewer than 100,000 viewers tuning in at 8 p.m. ET on average, while Fox News has more than three million viewers, CNN media analyst Brian Stelter notes.

You’ll be hearing a lot about Watergate in the next several weeks, as the 50th anniversary of the infamous June 17, 1972, burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters approaches. There will be documentaries, cable-news debates, the finale of that Julia Roberts miniseries (“Gaslit”) based on the popular Watergate podcast (“Slow Burn”). I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at the Library of Congress on the anniversary itself — and you can certainly count on a few retrospectives in this very newspaper.

The scandal has great resonance at The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973 for its intrepid reporting and the courage it took to publish it. And it has particular meaning for me, because, like many others of my generation, I was first drawn into journalism by the televised Senate hearings in 1973, and I was enthralled by the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” based on the book by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Yet thinking about Watergate saddens me these days. The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.

It’s not just our politics that have changed. It’s also our radically transformed media environment.

“The national newspapers mattered in a way that is unimaginable to us today, and even the regional newspapers were incredibly strong,” Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” told me last week. I have been immersed in his nearly 800-page history — a “remarkably rich narrative,” former Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. called it in a review — which sets out to retell the story.

Graff depicts Watergate not as a singular event but as the entire mind-set of the Nixon presidency — “a shaggy umbrella of a dozen distinct scandals,” as he told me. By the time the break-in captured the attention of most Americans, they were essentially “walking into the second or third act of a play.”

Woodward and Bernstein were almost alone on the story for months. But eventually, the leading newspapers of the nation started to cover the hell out of the burgeoning scandal and the percolating questions of what — and when — the president knew about the burglary plot.

Americans read this coverage in their local papers; many cities still had two or more dailies at that point. Later, they were riveted by the proceedings of the Senate Watergate Committee, whose hearings were aired live on the three big television networks during the summer of 1973. Graff reports that the average American household watched 30 hours of the hearings, which were also rebroadcast at night by PBS. (“The best thing that has happened to public television since ‘Sesame Street,’ ” one Los Angeles Times TV critic noted.)

Still, “we forget how close Nixon came to surviving Watergate,” Graff told me. “Even at the end of the hearings, there was no guarantee that Nixon was out of office.”

What changed that? The increasing public awareness of the president’s wrongdoing and the coverup. “The sheer accumulation of the lies,” he said, “at a time when the idea that a president could lie to America was unthinkable.”

Fast-forward to today. The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection will hold hearings beginning early next month, some of which will be televised during prime-time hours. Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a prominent member, predicts that the revelations will “blow the roof off the House” — offering evidence, he promises, of an organized coup attempt involving Donald Trump, his closest allies and the supporters who attacked the Capitol as they tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

I’m willing to believe that the hearings will be dramatic. They might even change some people’s minds. But the amount of public attention they get will be minuscule compared with what happened when the folksy Sen. Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) presided over the Senate Watergate Committee.

Our media environment is far more fractured, and news organizations are far less trusted.

And, in part, we can blame the rise of a right-wing media system. At its heart is Fox News, which was founded in 1996, nearly a quarter-century after the break-in, with a purported mission to provide a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to the mainstream media. Of course, that message often manifested in relentless and damaging criticism of its news rivals. Meanwhile, Fox News and company have served as a highly effective laundry service for Trump’s lies. With that network’s help, his tens of thousands of false or misleading claims have found fertile ground among his fervent supporters — oblivious to the skillful reporting elsewhere that has called out and debunked those lies.

As Graff sees it, the growth of right-wing media has enabled many Republican members of Congress to turn a blind eye to the malfeasance of Team Trump. Not so during the Watergate investigation; after all, it was Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) who posed the immortal question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Even the stalwart conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.) was among those who, at the end, managed to convince Nixon that he must resign.

“Republican members of Congress understood that they had a unique and important role as the legislative branch to hold the abuses of the executive branch in check,” Graff said. “That freedom of action was made possible because there was no right-wing media ecosystem.”

Not everything was good about the media world of the 1970s. It was almost entirely White and male, barely open to other views or voices. This was long before the democratizing effect of the Internet, which has elevated the ideas of people of color, women and other marginalized groups.

But it was a time when we had a news media that commanded the trust of the general public, a necessity in helping bring Nixon to justice. That, at least during his presidency, was never possible with Trump.

As we remember Watergate, we ought to remember how very unlikely its righteous conclusion would be today.

Richard M. Nixon’s presidency would have survived.

Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as rioters tried to breach the House chamber.

Kevin D. Greeson died of a heart attack, collapsing on the sidewalk west of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Rosanne Boyland appeared to have been crushed in a stampede of fellow rioters as they surged against the police.

Benjamin Philips, the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo, died of a stroke.

The Reign of Terror resulted in an estimated 40,000 executions, primarily landed nobility, courtiers and clergy.

First of all, there wasn't a "violent storming of the capital" .

All part of the plan, isn't it