I generally try to keep from writing and posting diaries in the middle of the night, but as a writer I know that the urge to write, that demand from the subconscious, is one to heed, despite the contents of the clock.
The last few days have been chockablock about the newly disclosed PowerPoint and even more newly disclosed text messages between Mark Meadows and associates. Here’s what I want us to remember:
- What we’re learning this week was operative for the Trump team nearly an entire year ago. They have had weeks upon weeks, months upon months in the meantime to move their piece forward on our Democracy: Yay or Nay? board. We are way behind.
- Please keep in mind that part of the reason we are so behind in piecing this together is because some of the principal players in the intrigue are involved in broadcast media and they kept their involvement from us, the public. I am not willing to let us collectively turn a blind eye to this. Their complicity-after-the-fact makes them accessories to the murder of democracy, especially as they gear up to use the First Amendment as a shield for their furtiveness and secrecy.
- Next, keep in mind we still are trying to get the scope of this thing. Someone in passing noted the discrepancy between the supposed expertise of Philip Waldron, a man trained in psychological operations, and the apparent lack of fizz in that operation (plus the subsequent leak of this expert guidance). This discrepancy: please, someone, drill down on it, because there is a possibility that Meadows’ coquettish behavior with the Select Committee was a deliberate cat and mouse game (except, in psyop style, the mouse would have given the cat—us—a decoy and would be watching us bat at it). He may have pretended to cooperate with the Committee at first, gave up these incriminating documents “carelessly”, and now has conveniently withdrawn his cooperation, leaving us with this rather rudimentary, poorly produced PowerPoint. (To be sure, the PowerPoint is, by all appearances, backed up by at least two internal memos by Waldron and John Eastman, so I’m not sure how far the speculation can be carried here, but I think it’s important to employ the thought experiment, because we now know that an expert in psychological operations was part of Team Trump. What did he contribute?)
- Lastly, remember also that we know many of the suspected contacts of the higher-ups used burner phones to hide their correspondences. There is just as much reason to believe that the higher-ups used them, too, for communications that were too hot. Why did DJT JR communicate to his father via Mark Meadows’ phone? Maybe because he wanted to establish what DJT JR would officially say, under his own name that could definitely be traced back to his Twitter account. What he may have said unofficially will remain as anonymous and unknown as those burner phones. I would bet. Can’t prove a negative, but I would personally love if one of the lower functionaries let slip that these folks were communicating on the sly.
Just some things poking about in my mind at an ungodly hour. Officer (later Captain) Ivanova, in Babylon 5, referred to this time of night as the Hour of the Wolf.
(If you’ve never seen the show, I highly, highly recommend it.)
Speculation, trying to put pieces together in an unconventional way so as to maybe make sense of the whole. I try not to get too far afield. I will say that in mid-October, I very tentatively suggested that Trump basically put out a casting call for January 6, and that he was now running on the insurrection as his campaign. What I meant to imply was that he means to use the resulting footage in his campaign materials (whether these will be official commercials remains to be seen—you know, however much more warped and devolved our media culture gets in the interim). I’m even more inclined to make that prediction now, more boldly (but still we don’t have the receipts on that score, so I can’t say for certain).
Also, below were my contemplations back in April, when the GOP really began to display how unmoored they were becoming, post-Trump presidency. I was trying to figure out what the right-wing mediaverse was up to with three main stories (first, self-explanatory; the second, January 6; and third, the Chauvin verdict):
I wrote this [diary] yesterday [April 26] in order to try to organize my thoughts. If this still reads somewhat jumbled, I apologize. I even wrestled with whether to post this publicly, especially here, where much of the sentiment I express might be interpreted as being CT. I don’t mean for this to read that way. I feel it’s more speculation, more trying to puzzle out where these actions are leading or are likely to lead. I do not believe these newly minted tenets of the conservative movement (Big Lie, False Flag, Mob Justice) are being adopted scattershot by the Republican power structure. Whether they are building to some cryptic crescendo or standing for these postures reflexively, the result is that in many concrete ways these conservative personalities are crafting a deepfake reality, brick by pixelated brick.