Contradictions and false consciousness inhabit many Trumpists and Trump voters, demanding a crypto-fascist election outcome, a sad commentary on the times. Trump himself is left with autocratic fantasies fed by his closest sycophants.
President Trump denied a report from The New York Times claiming he considered a call for martial law in the US during a "heated" meeting in the Oval Office with his top advisers. This past week, former general Mike Flynn pushed the idea of deploying the military to "rerun" the election during an appearance on conservative network Newsmax. Top Army officials, Ryan McCarthy and General McConville, said the military has "no role" in the outcome of the 2020 election.
• Trump asked about Flynn's idea to impose martial law, use military to “rerun” election
• Trump discussed appointing election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell as special counsel
• A proposal to seize voting machines
Historically across Latin America, when constitutionally elected leaders were denied their legitimate mandate, there was just one word for it: coup. Just think of the emblematic cases of Salvador Allende in Chile (1973) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) — both democratically elected leaders who were toppled by the military. In other cases, such as in Uruguay in 1973, Peru in 1992 and Venezuela in 2017, presidents decided to ignore the law and attempted to stay in power indefinitely via self-coup.
A coup against a democratic regime can be defined as any political action by state actors that aims to either maintain or take over power by unconstitutional means. In short, there is a coup when military renegades or democratically elected leaders suspend the democratic process.
This definition — and global history — is why Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat and his refusal to initiate a transition of power has alarmed so many, and led some to question whether a coup was in progress.
To be sure, Trump’s clumsy attempts to deny President-elect Joe Biden’s win already
look to be failing. But his actions — denying and attempting to overturn the results of the election and getting top Republicans and Attorney General William P. Barr to indulge these dangerous efforts — are still symptoms of the fragility of American democracy at this moment.
And this is exactly why we should be talking about the history of coups: how they happened and, most importantly, how they have been stopped. Trump’s refusal to concede is an attack on the state and democratic government. While his actions may be dismissed as merely tantrums, the history of dictators in Latin America over the past century suggests the need to take this dangerous moment seriously.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the ability of persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States to interfere in or undermine public confidence in United States elections, including through the unauthorized accessing of election and campaign infrastructure or the covert distribution of propaganda and disinformation, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Although there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election, foreign powers have historically sought to exploit America’s free and open political system. In recent years, the proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity of the threat of foreign interference, as illustrated in the 2017 Intelligence Community.
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What passes for the good news is that APT29 penetration here is reported to be confined to unclassified communication systems; moreover, classified Pentagon communications networks like SPIRNet and JWICS, which handle Secret and Top Secret communications, respectively, are reported to be unaffected by the SolarWinds breach. That may be cold comfort since the SVR can learn an awful lot from just reading the unclassified emails and messages of a bevy of federal agencies, while cyber-penetrations of those unclassified networks can sometimes enable access to classified ones.
In response, Washington is doing what it knows how to do, making statements, issuing warnings, gathering investigators, creating task forces, and circling the bureaucratic wagons until the full extent of the damage can be assessed. This week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a blunt emergency directive to start pushing back the SolarWinds breach across government and industry, while the White House stood up a Cyber Unified Coordination Group to ensure that federal agencies are cooperating adequately to ascertain, and eventually roll back, what APT29 hath wrought here. Nevertheless, it will take months, at minimum, to undo this damage, not least because the SVR presumably is watching our mitigation efforts unfold on compromised networks in real time, while counteracting them wherever the Russians can.
There can be no sugarcoating what constitutes a grave failure of cybersecurity by the United States. The rhetoric emanating from Washington over Cozy Bear’s antics is severe, even extreme. While President Donald J. Trump is being castigated for keeping mum about this debacle, high-ranking Democrats are employing sky-is-falling rhetoric about the mega-hack. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin termed it “virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States,” while his Connecticut colleague Sen. Richard Blumenthal stated that a classified briefing on the hack “left me deeply alarmed, in fact downright scared.” Their slightly more measured Delaware colleague Sen. Chris Coons explained, “It's pretty hard to distinguish this from an act of aggression that rises to the level of an attack that qualifies as war. ... [T]his is as destructive and broad scale an engagement with our military systems, our intelligence systems as has happened in my lifetime.
topsecretumbra.substack.com/...
Regarding AOC, one woman said:
"She sucks. I would headbutt the teeth out of that bitch's face, all day every day."
A new viral TikTok is breaking brains all over the internet.
Filmed at a Trump rally, it features three women urging liberal women to "get grabbed by the p*ssy" and calling liberals "hypocrites" and "garbage."
The video, which is believed to have been filmed in Washington, DC in November, resurfaced this week after being posted on several subReddits.
The third part which features the p*ssy grab comment can be seen here:
In the videos, an unidentified reporter interviewed the three women at what is believed to be a Trump rally just after the election last month.
It opens with one of the women issuing sharp criticism of an unnamed person or group—presumably liberals or Democrats.
"They make no sense, they're hypocritical, they're garbage."
The reporter then asked the three women to offer one piece of advice to young women.
One of the women says:
"Get grabbed by the p*ssy—for real. And this is why."
One of the other women then interjected:
"Stick up for yourself!"
The women also claimed that liberal women are "Me Too-ing themselves into an abyss of victimization" and that liberal women want to be victims.
They then praised what President Trump has supposedly done for women by including them in his Cabinet and having Kellyanne Conway, whose name they could not recall, "break the ceiling" by running his campaign.
The video is one part of a series of three videos in which the women, one of whom claims to be a nurse who drove all the way from Chicago for the rally, gave quotes on all kinds of issues.
www.comicsands.com/...