~ We Should Not Forget ~

Rachel Maddow on her show; Monday, 28 August, 2023:

“If winning the election is [Donald Trump’s] plan to stay out of prison, what happens if and when he does not win it? Does that kind of election end with a graceful concession to a fair and square re-elected President Biden?”

“I mean, if Trump and his supporters see the stakes as losing and going to prison or winning and being president and probably president for life, how should we expect that he and the Republican Party and Republican officials in swing states are going to handle the conduct of that election that Trump may very well lose?”

“And because we are prone to forget, we have to say out loud that we would be remiss.”

“We would be willfully naive to ask that question as if our politics exists in a vacuum. Somewhere outside the rest of our news. As if the politics pages are totally different than the crime pages, right?”

“As if we are not in a moment where far-right politics is coinciding with far-right violence, with regular shows of force from paramilitary extreme-right groups, and with acts of violence by people who are explicitly and admittedly motivated by far-right eliminationist political ideas.”

“We are prone to forget, but we do not have to forget.”

(Sourced from the Rachel Maddow Show and CrooksAndLiars.com)

~

~ WBW ~

The General’s Warning

United States And Weimar: Two Republics, One Failed One Failing

Posted here 2021-07-16

One week after Election Day 2020, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley took a call from “an old friend” warning him that Trump and his cadre of sycophants were trying to “overturn the [newly elected] government”. The old friend was deadly serious.

Already on alert over Trump’s firing of the Secretary of Defense a day earlier, Milley responded to his friend’s threat assessment with what might be called his own DEFCON-1 warning: “They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with guns.”

In the midst of increasing chaos in November, with supporters fueled by Trump’s weaponised lies about a stolen election getting more threatening and violent, Milley was becoming more uneasy. A student of history, Milley could recognise the similarities between what he was seeing on the ground in the U.S. and what happened to Germany in the early 1930s.

Milley called Trump’s radicalised supporters “Brownshirts in the streets”. Read more