Welcome to The Insurrection: Part II
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | February 23, 2023
The Trump-led insurrection that culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol did not end with the certification of Joe Biden as President.
Welcome to The Insurrection: Part II.
The goal is the same – ensure that former President Donald Trump or a Trump-like candidate becomes President regardless of the choice of the voters.
The House of Representatives is Ground Zero of the election deniers movement and Republican Members are currently the power behind this second insurrection wave.
Approximately two-thirds of House Republicans and a majority of House Republican Committee Chairs are election deniers. The House Republicans are controlled by the extreme wing of the party and led by a seriously weakened Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
In just the first few weeks of this new Congress, they have made their mission clear: to attack President Biden, attack the government, especially law enforcement and intelligence agencies, discredit and attack the findings of the Jan. 6 investigations and the likely upcoming indictments, and do everything they can to undermine the public’s confidence in our democracy and in any election results that don’t go their way.
Here’s one dangerous example:
This week we learned that House Speaker McCarthy turned over more than 40,000 hours of internal U.S. Capitol footage from January 6 exclusively to noted conspiracy theorist and propagandist Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
This move is extraordinarily irresponsible.
Carlson falsely labeled the vicious mob attack on the Capitol as “a footnote” in history and “forgettably minor.”
He elevated Trump’s lies about a stolen election and voter fraud in 2020. And, he’s been doing it ever since.
New revelations from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News revealed emails from Carlson and other Fox News hosts that showed that they knowingly had guests on their shows, including Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and allowed them to make false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote in one email to a colleague. Yet, he continued to use his show to spread the wild and false claims of Trump’s supporters.
It’s pretty clear what Carlson will do with the Jan. 6 footage. He will manipulate it, take portions out of context, and present misleading videos to try to discredit the Jan. 6 investigators and absolve Trump and the insurrectionists.
He will be feeding Trump’s followers with blatant propaganda and rewarding the election deniers in the House who pressured McCarthy to turn the tapes over to Carlson.
And, here’s another example from the “weaponized” House of Representatives:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly empowered House Member, used President’s Day to call for a separation of blue states and red states, saying: “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.”
Really? Everyone you talk to says this?
Greene is an extremist, know-nothing politician who has become a close advisor to Speaker McCarthy. Her idea of a non-military civil war tells you all you need to know about the extremist wing of the Republican Party.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney shot down Greene’s idea stating, “I think Abraham Lincoln dealt with that kind of insanity. We’re not going to divide the country. It’s united we stand and divided we fall.”
But, that kind of “insanity” from a Member of Congress is no joke and it continues to stir the insurrectionist movement in Washington and around the country. And, that is dangerous.
Last week, the Republican-dominated Idaho House of Representatives approved a resolution to begin talks with Oregon about annexing the eastern half of Oregon. Known as the Greater Idaho movement, a number of counties in this rural, conservative part of Oregon have approved initiatives to explore the idea, although for many in Oregon this is viewed as a crazy idea.
These efforts are not likely to succeed but they and Rep. Greene show that there are active forces out there who aim to destroy our constitutional system of government.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
