Brian Williams Signs Off MSNBC With Stark Warning About America’s Future
By Isabel Van Brugen December 10, 2021
Longtime news anchor and MSNBC host Brian Williams has left the network after nearly three decades, signing off on the final episode of his popular nightly political talk program The 11th Hour with a stark warning about America’s future.
Williams, 62, first announced his plans to leave in November, saying “following much reflection,” he chose to step down upon the completion of his contract. He said in a memo to colleagues at the time that in his 28 years with NBC, he had covered eight Olympic Games and seven presidential elections.
“What a ride it’s been,” said Williams in a three-minute farewell speech on Thursday night, as he thanked his friends, family, co-workers and viewers.
“After 28 years of peacock logos on much of what I own, it is my choice now to jump without a net into the great unknown,” he said.
He concluded his final The 11th Hour broadcast by saying that his “biggest worry” is for future of the United States.
“The truth is, I’m not a liberal or a conservative, I’m an institutionalist,” Williams told his viewers. “I believe in this place and in my love of country I yield to no one, but the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods, it’s now at the local bar and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store, and it must be acknowledged and answered for.”
Williams continued by criticizing elected officials “who swore an oath to our Constitution” who he believes have “decided to join the mob and become something they are not, while hoping we somehow forget who they were.”
“They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside—that should scare you to no end, as much as it scares an aging volunteer fireman,” he said.
The state of the nation is “unrecognizable to those who came before us and fought to protect it—which is what you [viewers] must do now,” Williams added.
He also took the opportunity to reflect on his time at the network, saying “it has been and remains a wonderful life.”
“Where else, how else, was a kid like me going to meet presidents and kings, and the occasional rock star?”
Williams’ The 11th Hour debuted at the height of the 2016 presidential election. Prior to that, he was the anchor of the NBC Nightly News program, but was suspended for six months in 2015 without pay after it was found he exaggerated a story about a helicopter ride in Iraq.
Williams, who hasn’t yet publicly talked about his future plans, suggested that it won’t be long before he returns to the industry.
“I will probably find it impossible to be silent and stay away from you and lights and cameras,” he said. “After I experiment with relaxation and find out what I’ve missed and what’s out there.”
“Every weeknight for decades now, I’ve said some version of the same thing: ‘Thank you for being here with us,'” Williams concluded. “Us, meaning the people who produce this broadcast for you. And you…Well, without you, there is no us.
“I’ll show myself out until we meet again. That is our broadcast for this Thursday night. Thank you for being here with us. And for all my colleagues at the networks of NBC News, goodnight.”
Three Myths About Renewable Energy and the Grid, Debunked
Yale Environment 360, Yale School of the Environment
Renewable energy skeptics argue that because of their variability, wind and solar cannot be the foundation of a dependable electricity grid. But the expansion of renewables and new methods of energy management and storage can lead to a grid that is reliable and clean.
By Amory B. Lovins, M.V. Ramana December 9, 2021
Wind turbines and solar panels in Bavaria, Germany. FRANK BIENEWALD / LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
As wind and solar power have become dramatically cheaper, and their share of electricity generation grows, skeptics of these technologies are propagating several myths about renewable energy and the electrical grid. The myths boil down to this: Relying on renewable sources of energy will make the electricity supply undependable.
Last summer, some commentators argued that blackouts in California were due to the “intermittency” of renewable energy sources, when in fact the chief causes were a combination of an extreme heat wave probably induced by climate change, faulty planning, and the lack of flexible generation sources and sufficient electricity storage. During a brutal Texas cold snap last winter, Gov. Greg Abbott wrongly blamed wind and solar power for the state’s massive grid failure, which was vastly larger than California’s. In fact, renewables outperformed the grid operator’s forecast during 90 percent of the blackout, and in the rest, fell short by at most one-fifteenth as much as gas plants. Instead, other causes — such as inadequately weatherized power plants and natural gas shutting down because of frozen equipment — led to most of the state’s electricity shortages.
In Europe, the usual target is Germany, in part because of its Energiewende (energy transformation) policies shifting from fossil fuels and nuclear energy to efficient use and renewables. The newly elected German government plans to accelerate the former and complete the latter, but some critics have warned that Germany is running “up against the limits of renewables.”
In reality, it is entirely possible to sustain a reliable electricity system based on renewable energy sources plus a combination of other means, including improved methods of energy management and storage. A clearer understanding of how to dependably manage electricity supply is vital because climate threats require a rapid shift to renewable sources like solar and wind power. This transition has been sped by plummeting costs —Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that solar and wind are the cheapest source for 91 percent of the world’s electricity — but is being held back by misinformation and myths.
Myth No. 1: A grid that increasingly relies on renewable energy is an unreliable grid.
Going by the cliché, “In God we trust; all others bring data,” it’s worth looking at the statistics on grid reliability in countries with high levels of renewables. The indicator most often used to describe grid reliability is the average power outage duration experienced by each customer in a year, a metric known by the tongue-tying name of “System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI). Based on this metric, Germany — where renewables supply nearly half of the country’s electricity — boasts a grid that is one of the most reliable in Europe and the world. In 2020, SAIDI was just 0.25 hours in Germany. Only Liechtenstein (0.08 hours), and Finland and Switzerland (0.2 hours), did better in Europe, where 2020 electricity generation was 38 percent renewable (ahead of the world’s 29 percent). Countries like France (0.35 hours) and Sweden (0.61 hours) — both far more reliant on nuclear power — did worse, for various reasons.
The United States, where renewable energy and nuclear power each provide roughly 20 percent of electricity, had five times Germany’s outage rate — 1.28 hours in 2020. Since 2006, Germany’s renewable share of electricity generation has nearly quadrupled, while its power outage rate was nearly halved. Similarly, the Texas grid became more stable as its wind capacity sextupled from 2007 to 2020. Today, Texas generates more wind power — about a fifth of its total electricity — than any other state in the U.S.
Myth No. 2: Countries like Germany must continue to rely on fossil fuels to stabilize the grid and back up variable wind and solar power.
Again, the official data say otherwise. Between 2010 — the year before the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan — and 2020, Germany’s generation from fossil fuels declined by 130.9 terawatt-hours and nuclear generation by 76.3 terawatt hours. These were more than offset by increased generation from renewables (149.5 terawatt hours) and energy savings that decreased consumption by 38 terawatt hours in 2019, before the pandemic cut economic activity, too. By 2020, Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions had declined by 42.3 percent below its 1990 levels, beating the target of 40 percent set in 2007. Emissions of carbon dioxide from just the power sector declined from 315 million tons in 2010 to 185 million tons in 2020.
So as the percentage of electricity generated by renewables in Germany steadily grew, its grid reliability improved, and its coal burning and greenhouse gas emissions substantially decreased.
In Japan, following the multiple reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, more than 40 nuclear reactors closed permanently or indefinitely without materially raising fossil-fueled generation or greenhouse gas emissions; electricity savings and renewable energy offset virtually the whole loss, despite policies that suppressed renewables.
Myth No. 3: Because solar and wind energy can be generated only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, they cannot be the basis of a grid that has to provide electricity 24/7, year-round.
While variable output is a challenge, it is neither new nor especially hard to manage. No kind of power plant runs 24/7, 365 days a year, and operating a grid always involves managing variability of demand at all times. Even with no solar and wind power (which tend to work dependably at different times and seasons, making shortfalls less likely), all electricity supply varies.
Seasonal variations in water availability and, increasingly, drought reduce electricity output from hydroelectric dams. Nuclear plants must be shut down for refueling or maintenance, and big fossil and nuclear plants are typically out of action roughly 7 percent to 12 percent of the time, some much more. A coal plant’s fuel supply might be interrupted by the derailment of a train or failure of a bridge. A nuclear plant or fleet might unexpectedly have to be shut down for safety reasons, as was Japan’s biggest plant from 2007 to 2009. Every French nuclear plant was, on average, shut down for 96.2 days in 2019 due to “planned” or “forced unavailability.” That rose to 115.5 days in 2020, when French nuclear plants generated less than 65 percent of the electricity they theoretically could have produced. Comparing expected with actual performance, one might even say that nuclear power was France’s most intermittent 2020 source of electricity.
Climate- and weather-related factors have caused multiple nuclear plant interruptions, which have become seven times more frequent in the past decade. Even normally steady nuclear output can fail abruptly and lastingly, as in Japan after the Fukushima disaster, or in the northeastern U.S. after the 2003 regional blackout, which triggered abrupt shutdowns that caused nine reactors to produce almost no power for several days and take nearly two weeks to return to full output.
The Bungala Solar Farm in South Australia, where the grid has run almost exclusively on renewables for days on end. LINCOLN FOWLER / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Thus all sources of power will be unavailable sometime or other. Managing a grid has to deal with that reality, just as much as with fluctuating demand. The influx of larger amounts of renewable energy does not change that reality, even if the ways they deal with variability and uncertainty are changing. Modern grid operators emphasize diversity and flexibility rather than nominally steady but less flexible “baseload” generation sources. Diversified renewable portfolios don’t fail as massively, lastingly, or unpredictably as big thermal power stations.
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The purpose of an electric grid is not just to transmit and distribute electricity as demand fluctuates, but also to back up non-functional plants with working plants: that is, to manage the intermittency of traditional fossil and nuclear plants. In the same way, but more easily and often at lower cost, the grid can rapidly back up wind and solar photovoltaics’ predictable variations with other renewables, of other kinds or in other places or both.This has become easier with today’s far more accurate forecasting of weather and wind speeds, thus allowing better prediction of the output of variable renewables. Local or onsite renewables are even more resilient because they largely or wholly bypass the grid, where nearly all power failures begin. And modern power electronics have reliably run the billion-watt South Australian grid on just sun and wind for days on end, with no coal, no hydro, no nuclear, and at most the 4.4-percent natural-gas generation currently required by the grid regulator.
Most discussions of renewables focus on batteries and other electric storage technologies to mitigate variability. This is not surprising because batteries are rapidly becoming cheaper and widely deployed. At the same time, new storage technologies with diverse attributes continue to emerge; the U.S. Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database lists 30 kinds already deployed or under construction. Meanwhile, many other and less expensive carbon-free ways exist to deal with variable renewables besides giant batteries.
Many less expensive and carbon-free ways exist to deal with variable renewables besides giant batteries.
The first and foremost is energy efficiency, which reduces demand, especially during periods of peak use. Buildings that are more efficient need less heating or cooling and change their temperature more slowly, so they can coast longer on their own thermal capacity and thus sustain comfort with less energy, especially during peak-load periods.
A second option is demand flexibility or demand response, wherein utilities compensate electricity customers that lower their use when asked — often automatically and imperceptibly — helping balance supply and demand. One recent study found that the U.S. has 200 gigawatts of cost-effective load flexibility potential that could be realized by 2030 if effective demand response is actively pursued. Indeed, the biggest lesson from recent shortages in California might be the greater appreciation of the need for demand response. Following the challenges of the past two summers, the California Public Utilities Commission has instituted the Emergency Load Reduction Program to build on earlier demand response efforts.
Some evidence suggests an even larger potential: An hourly simulation of the 2050 Texas grid found that eight types of demand response could eliminate the steep ramp of early-evening power demand as solar output wanes and household loads spike. For example, currently available ice-storage technology freezes water using lower-cost electricity and cooler air, usually at night, and then uses the ice to cool buildings during hot days. This reduces electricity demand from air conditioning, and saves money, partly because storage capacity for heating or cooling is far cheaper than storing electricity to deliver them. Likewise, without changing driving patterns, many electric vehicles can be intelligently charged when electricity is more abundant, affordable, and renewable.
The top graph shows daily solar power output (yellow line) and demand from various household uses. The bottom graph shows how to align demand with supply, running devices in the middle of the day when solar output is highest. ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE
A third option for stabilizing the grid as renewable energy generation increases is diversity, both of geography and of technology — onshore wind, offshore wind, solar panels, solar thermal power, geothermal, hydropower, burning municipal or industrial or agricultural wastes. The idea is simple: If one of these sources, at one location, is not generating electricity at a given time, odds are that some others will be.
Finally, some forms of storage, such as electric vehicle batteries, are already economical today. Simulations show that ice-storage air conditioning in buildings, plus smart charging to and from the grid of electric cars, which are parked 96 percent of the time, could enable Texas in 2050 to use 100 percent renewable electricity without needing giant batteries.
To pick a much tougher case, the “dark doldrums” of European winters are often claimed to need many months of battery storage for an all-renewable electrical grid. Yet top German and Belgian grid operators find Europe would need only one to two weeks of renewably derived backup fuel, providing just 6 percent of winter output — not a huge challenge.
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The bottom line is simple. Electrical grids can deal with much larger fractions of renewable energy at zero or modest cost, and this has been known for quite a while. Some European countries with little or no hydropower already get about half to three-fourths of their electricity from renewables with grid reliability better than in the U.S. It is time to get past the myths.
Amory B. Lovins is an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and co-founder and chairman emeritus of Rocky Mountain Institute. M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
‘Top editors and reporters want to be accepted into the circles of the powerful – because such acceptance is psychologically seductive.’ Photograph: Sarah Silbiger/EPA
I’m often asked how I keep up with the news. Obviously, I avoid the unhinged rightwing outlets pushing misinformation, disinformation and poisonous lies.
But I’ve also grown wary of the mainstream media – not because it peddles “fake news” but because of three more subtle biases.
First, it often favors the status quo. Mainstream journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy rip into progressives for the costs of their proposals, but never ask self-styled “moderates” how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or doing too little about the same problems.
A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about the climate crisis will almost certainly cost far more. Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s cruel and dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere.
Second, it fails to report critical public choices. Any day now, the Senate will approve giving $778bn to the military for this fiscal year. That’s billions more than the Pentagon sought. It’s four times the size of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which comes to around $175bn a year. But where’s the reporting on the effects of this spending on the national debt, or on inflation, or whether it’s even necessary?
Third, it indulges in false equivalence, claiming that certain Republican and Democratic lawmakers are emerging as “troublemakers” within their parties or that extremists “on both sides” are “radicalizing each other”.
These reports equate Republican lawmakers who are actively promoting Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen with Democratic lawmakers who are fighting to protect voting rights. These are not equivalent. Trump’s big lie is a direct challenge to American democracy.
In the looming fight over whether to preserve the Senate filibuster, the mainstream media gives equal weight to both sides’ claims of radicalism. But ask yourself which is more radical – abolishing the filibuster to save American democracy or destroying American democracy to save the filibuster?
The old labels “left” versus “right” are fast becoming outdated. Today, it’s democracy versus authoritarianism. Equating them is misleading and dangerous.
Why doesn’t the mainstream media see this? Not just because of its dependence on corporate money. I think the source of the bias is more subtle.
Top editors and reporters, usually based in New York and Washington, want to be accepted into the circles of the powerful – not only for sources of news but also because such acceptance is psychologically seductive. It confers a degree of success. But once accepted, they can’t help but begin to see the world through the eyes of the powerful.
I follow the mainstream media, but I don’t limit myself to it. And I don’t rely on it to educate the public about bold, progressive ideas that would make America and the world fairer and stronger.
Key revelations from the new book by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows
Dylan Stableford and Caitlin Dickson December 7, 2021
Then-President Donald Trump was so weak during his bout with COVID-19 last fall that he couldn’t carry his briefcase on the walk from the White House to the helicopter that would airlift him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he spent three days being treated for a blood oxygen level that was “dangerously low.”
That’s according to “The Chief’s Chief,” a new memoir by Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, which was published on Tuesday.
Below are some of the key revelations from the book, which Trump wrote a cover blurb for but has since reportedly been fuming about.
Trump’s condition was far more grave than previously known
Then-President Donald Trump and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows arrive at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Oct. 2, 2020. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
On Oct. 2, 2020 — the day Trump announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus — Meadows writes that the president’s blood oxygen level was about 86 percent, or roughly 10 points below what would be considered normal.
Trump was given supplemental oxygen as well as a monoclonal antibody therapy made by Regeneron, administered intravenously, that Meadows had arranged to be secretly delivered to the White House.
“We’d rigged the four-poster bed in the president’s room so that he could recline and take the drug while he was still alert and giving orders,” Meadows writes.
But Trump’s health had deteriorated so much that Dr. Sean Conley, the then White House doctor, felt the president needed to be hospitalized, and it was up to Meadows to convince him to go.
Meadows recalls that when he walked into Trump’s private residence, the president was sitting up in bed in a T-shirt with red streaks in his eyes.
“It was the first time I had seen him in anything other than a golf shirt or a suit jacket,” Meadows writes. “His hair was a mess from the hours he’d spent getting Regeneron in bed.”
Trump was initially resistant to the idea of going to the hospital, according to Meadows, but the chief of staff pleaded with him.
“It’s better that you walk out of here today under your own strength, your own power, than for me to have to carry you out on a gurney in two days,” Meadows recalls telling him.
Trump relented. But when he went to walk to the helicopter that would transport him to Walter Reed, he could not hold a briefcase, the weight of which was “too much for him,” according to Meadows.
“He looked at me, almost surprised he had to put it down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I — I just can’t carry that out there,’” Meadows writes.
Trump tested positive for COVID-19 three days before first debate
Trump during the first presidential debate against Joe Biden in Cleveland, Sept. 29, 2020. (Morry Gash/Pool/Getty Images)
Trump first tested positive for the coronavirus on Sept. 26, 2020, three days before his first debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland, and appeared to be symptomatic, according to Meadows. (Trump was tested again and received a negative result, according to Meadows.)
But Trump participated in the debate, and other events, despite allegedly knowing he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“Nothing was going to stop him from going out there,” Meadows writes, adding: “We’ll probably never know whether President Trump was positive that evening.”
Last week, after the Guardian published an excerpt of Meadows’s book containing that revelation, Trump denied the claim.
“The story of me having COVID prior to, or during, the first debate is Fake News,” Trump said in a statement. “In fact, a test revealed that I did not have COVID prior to the debate.” He issued another statement on Monday repeating his denial.
Meadows says he was informed of Trump’s first positive test by Conley while the president was en route to a rally in Pennsylvania.
Meadows then relayed the news to Trump, who had called him from Air Force One.
“Oh s***, you’ve got to be f***ing kidding me,” Trump replied, according to Meadows.
The test, the former chief of staff writes, was conducted with “an old model kit.”
A second test — using the “Binax system” — was performed and came back negative, which, according to Meadows, Trump took as “full permission to press on as if nothing had happened.”
The next day, Sept. 27, Trump played golf in Virginia and appeared maskless alongside first lady Melania Trump at an event for Gold Star families. He would later suggest that he contracted the virus through his interactions with those families.
Trump was rushed to an underground bunker during George Floyd protests
Protesters face off with Secret Service officers outside the White House, May 29, 2020. (Eric Thayer/Reuters)
In the book, Meadows confirms reports that Trump did, in fact, retreat to an underground bunker at the White House on May 29, 2020, as a nighttime protest outside the executive mansion over the death of George Floyd intensified.
“He didn’t have a choice,” Meadows writes. “When the Secret Service asked President Trump to head downstairs to the White House bunkers, he complied. He knew he could go to the bunker with a few agents by his side, or he could go on their shoulders kicking and screaming. For everyone’s sake, the first option was better.”
The New York Times later reported that Secret Service agents rushed Trump to the underground bunker. (“To this day, I do not know how this information got out,” Meadows writes. “I have no doubt it was leaked by someone intent on hurting the president.”)
Trump denied the report, claiming he “went down during the day” for “an inspection.”
“It was a false report. I wasn’t down,” Trump said on Fox News Radio. “I was there for a tiny, little, short period of time.”
Meadows blames a ‘handful of fanatics’ for the Jan. 6 insurrection
A mob of Trump supporters clashes with police outside the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Elsewhere in the book, Meadows seems to try to downplay the then president’s role in the events of Jan. 6, when hundreds of Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers and delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win.
Though more than 700 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, according to Meadows, “no one would [focus] on the actions of … those supporters of President Trump who came [to Washington on Jan. 6] without hate in their hearts or any bad intentions.” Instead, he writes, “they would laser in on the actions of a handful of fanatics across town.”
Meadows also disputes critics who have accused Trump of encouraging his supporters to engage in violence at a rally shortly before the riot unfolded. He writes that Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, when he told supporters to “fight like hell,” was “more subdued than usual,” and claims that the then president was “speaking metaphorically” when he said he would join the crowd in marching on the Capitol to “cheer on” Republicans objecting to the Electoral College results.
Trump “knew as well as anyone that we couldn’t organize a trip like that on such short notice,” Meadows says. Some of the rioters have said they decided to march on the Capitol in part because of Trump’s pledge to go with them.
The revelations about that day were of particular interest to members of the House Jan. 6 committee, which issued a subpoena to the former chief of staff in September seeking seeking documents and testimony regarding his role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and stop the certification of Biden’s win. Last week, the committee revealed that Meadows had agreed to cooperate with the panel and would soon appear for an initial deposition. But on Tuesday morning, a lawyer for Meadows told Fox News that he would no longer be engaging with the Jan. 6 probe, citing an inability to reach an understanding with lawmakers on whether certain pieces of information could be covered by executive privilege.
‘Don’t let them give up on me’: Heartbreaking last text anti-vaxxer bodybuilder, 42, sent to his twin sister as he was induced into coma shortly before Covid killed him
Father of one John Eyers, from Southport, Merseyside, died in July, aged 42
His twin sister Jenny McCann described him as a ‘staunch anti-vaxxer’
His last message was sent on July 11, more than two weeks before he died
Mr Eyers thought he would only have a ‘mild illness’ if he caught Covid-19
He died after suffering from infection and organ failure, leaving behind daughter
By Stephen Wynn – Davies December 7, 2021
A fit and healthy 42-year-old father with a love of rock climbing and bodybuilding sent a message to his twin sister saying ‘don’t let them give up on me’ shortly before he died after contracting coronavirus.
John Eyers, a construction expert from Southport, Merseyside, had been climbing the Welsh mountains and wild camping one month before his death in July, which came exactly four weeks after he tested positive.
His twin sister Jenny McCann from London said he was the ‘fittest, healthiest person I know’ and had thought he would only have a ‘mild illness’ if he contracted coronavirus, adding that he had a ‘belief in his own immortality’. Mrs McCann said that Mr Eyers had ‘no underlying health conditions’ but did also state that he had asthma. ‘Completely shattered and in disbelief’: Bob Saget’s widow Kelly Rizzo admits she’s struggling following his shocking death at 65 as friends including John Mayer and Full House stars John Stamos and Candace Bure arrive at her home to offer comfort, and other top stories from January 11, 2022.
Before going onto a ventilator in hospital, Mr Eyers told his consultant that he wished he had been vaccinated – and died in intensive care after suffering from an infection and organ failure, leaving behind a daughter aged 19.
Mr Eyers’ condition got progressively worse and, on the morning of July 27, his family was told he was dying.
He died later that day, moments before his family arrived at his bedside.
John Eyers, 42, had been climbing the Welsh mountains and wild camping one month before his death from Covid in July this year
Before going onto a ventilator in hospital, Mr Eyers told his consultant that he wished he had been vaccinated, his sister said
In May, his sister Jenny McCann had tweeted a selfie after getting her first jab, saying: ‘Full on tears after getting Covid jab’
Mrs McCann, of Pinner, North West London, who got her first vaccine jab on May 10, described her brother as a ‘staunch anti-vaxxer’. She added that the family had ‘all fallen out with him over his stance’.
The mother-of-two posted a series of tweets about Mr Eyers in August, a week after he died, saying: ‘My 42-year-old old twin brother died in ITU (intensive treatment unit) of Covid-19 last week. He died exactly four weeks after testing positive.
Matthew Keenan told friends that he ‘wished he had his jab’
A self-confessed vaccine sceptic who said ‘if he could turn back time he would’ after he was admitted to hospital last month with Covid-19 died with the virus aged 34.
Matthew Keenan told friends that he ‘wished he had his jab’ after he was hospitalised at Bradford Royal Infirmary and placed in an induced coma in a bid to save his life just two weeks ago.
Dr Leanne Cheyne, a respiratory consultant at the hospital, shared a photo of him in an oxygen mask and hooked up to a ventilator as he fought for his life.
Glenn Barratt told nurses that he wished he had been jabbed
A 51-year-old man who chose not to be jabbed died with Covid-19, with his final words to bedside nurses and doctors being: ‘I wish I had.’
Glenn Barratt, from Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, is thought to have caught coronavirus while watching England v Croatia at a venue in June during Euro 2020.
All over 50s had been offered a jab by mid-April, but he chose not to have it and died in hospital after fighting the virus for weeks.
‘He was the fittest, healthiest person I know. He was climbing Welsh mountains and wild camping four weeks before his death. The only pre-existing health condition he had was the belief in his own immortality.
‘He thought if he contracted Covid-19 he would be OK. He thought he would have a mild illness. He didn’t want to put a vaccine on his body. His was pumped full of every drug in the hospital. They threw everything at him.
‘But eventually the bedfellow of Covid-19, infection and organ failure, claimed his life. Before he was ventilated he told his consultant that he wished he had been vaccinated. That he wished he had listened. His death is a tragedy.
‘It shouldn’t have happened. He leaves a mum and dad, a sister (me), and a 19-year-old daughter. My two children have lost their fun uncle. The Uncle who would always play with them.
‘The uncle that dressed up as Father Christmas on Christmas Day. My mum has lost her baby boy. My niece, her much loved and needed Dad.
‘This shouldn’t have happened. My mum wants people to know about John. For his story to save someone’s life. For pain and loss to drive people to get a vaccine.’
Back on May 10, Mrs McCann had tweeted a selfie of her with her vaccine card after getting her first jab, saying: ‘Full on tears after getting Covid jab. Really shows the collective weight we’ve all been carrying. So grateful to the NHS.’
Then on July 3, Mrs McCann wrote: ‘To all anti-vaxxers, my staunch, anti vaxxer, non-mask wearing, 42-year-old twin, is now in hospital with Covid and pneumonia. Rushed in an ambulance as struggled to breathe. Quite simply, if he’d had the vaccine, he wouldn’t be. Get the vaccine.’
Mr Eyers worked as a senior management and technical specification professional within the construction industry for chemical manufacturing company Kerakoll.
After his death, tributes poured in from friends, with Lisa Hames saying: ‘I am still in utter shock after hearing such heartbreaking news last week about my incredible friend, John Eyers.
‘I first met John when we studied together at Southport College, which then lead on to us working together and for over 25 years we have still remained great friends.
‘John most certainly was one in a million, a true gentleman and will be truly missed by so many. My thoughts are with all his family & his friends.’
Charlie Garforth added: ‘John Eyers was a great guy who I had a lot of time for. This is tragic for the family.
‘But also a wake up call because because it feels very close to home. He had a lifestyle and the health most of us wish for in our early 40s.’
Construction expert Mr Eyers was described by his sister Jenny McCann as the ‘fittest, healthiest person I know’42-year-old John Eyers seen adventuring.
Mr Eyers, of Southport, Merseyside, leaves behind his parents and a daughter aged 19 as well as his twin sister Jenny
Linda Rowney said: ‘John was a very dear colleague, and friend of mine. To say I am extremely upset it an understatement. Please get vaccinated, it might save your life.’
Katie Halton wrote: T’he perfect gentleman, charismatic, kind, a heart of gold, the greatest friend, and the best napkin rose maker around. John Eyers, loved by everyone. You will be so missed.’
And Mo Jabbar said: ‘So many adventures we will no longer see, but I am truly grateful for the ones we shared.
‘The camps, the climbs, and the life chats on the way up to the Hangar. The laughs, the last minute trips to the Lakes and the freezing cold days on a ridge.
‘We were the mountain men. John, you were one of a kind, a true gent. You will be sorely missed. My heart bleeds for your family. They and you will be forever in my prayers.’
Mrs McCann was also praised on social media for sharing her story, with Newcastle-based GP Dr Alison George saying: ‘That is absolutely heartbreaking Jenny.
‘I can only imagine the pain you must all feel right now. Those spreading and believing Covid disinformation need to know the cruel realities of what Covid can do. My thoughts are with you and your family.’
Mrs McCann replied: ‘Thanks Sara. Your lovely voice on the radio is a firm favourite/balm to our soul in our house, and don’t even get me started on Between the Covers. My brother would be over the moon to know that he has caught your eye.’
Mr Eyers took part in bodybuilding and had thought he would only have a ‘mild illness’ if he contracted coronavirus
Another Twitter user called Saurav said under Mrs McCann’s posts about her brother: ‘I can ratify this. I’m a marathoner and a power lifter, and I too had this belief that Covid can’t do anything to me.
‘The two days after I contracted were the worst days of my life. Luckily I immediately sought help, and we bought the symptoms under control by day four.’
Another Twitter user called Emma said: ‘As an A&E nurse this is something I am hearing a lot of lately. Unvaccinated younger adults ranging from 18-40 coming to hospital seriously unwell relying on oxygen therapy to help them survive. All with one thing in common. They all vow to take the vaccine once they recover.’
But among the condolences, Mrs McCann was targeted by anti-vaxxers. One refusenik said: ‘Sorry for your loss, but hard pass on getting the vax. Already had Covid so my antibodies work better… I’m sure there is an underlying condition he had that you are leaving out so you can push the vax.’
Another added: ‘Cute story. Not buying it. But I will tell you about my fully vaccinated coworker currently in ICU.’
And a third said: ‘She is been paid by the Government and NHS to say all this – do not listen, it’s fake.’
January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.
“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.
Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.
As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.
Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.
Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace. Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today the few GOP dissenters are being cast out. “2 down, 8 to go!” Trump gloated at the retirement announcement of Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans to vote for his second impeachment.
Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.
At the edge of the Capitol grounds, just west of the reflecting pool, a striking figure stands in spit-shined shoes and a 10-button uniform coat. He is 6 foot 4, 61 years old, with chiseled good looks and an aura of command that is undimmed by retirement. Once, according to the silver bars on his collar, he held the rank of captain in the New York Fire Department. He is not supposed to wear the old uniform at political events, but he pays that rule no mind today. The uniform tells the world that he is a man of substance, a man who has saved lives and held authority. Richard C. Patterson needs every shred of that authority for this occasion. He has come to speak on behalf of an urgent cause. “Pelosi’s political prisoners,” he tells me, have been unjustly jailed.
Patterson is talking about the men and women held on criminal charges after invading the Capitol on January 6. He does not at all approve of the word insurrection.
“It wasn’t an insurrection,” he says at a September 18 rally called “Justice for January 6.” “None of our countrymen and -women who are currently being held are charged with insurrection. They’re charged with misdemeanor charges.”Like so many others, Patterson is doing his best to parse a torrent of political information, and he is failing. His failures leave him, nearly always, with the worldview expounded by Trump.
Patterson is misinformed on that latter point. Of the more than 600 defendants, 78 are in custody when we speak. Most of those awaiting trial in jail are charged with serious crimes such as assault on a police officer, violence with a deadly weapon, conspiracy, or unlawful possession of firearms or explosives. Jeffrey McKellop of Virginia, for instance, is alleged to have hurled a flagpole like a spear into an officer’s face. (McKellop has pleaded not guilty.)
Patterson was not in Washington on January 6, but he is fluent in the revisionist narratives spread by fabulists and trolls on social media. He knows those stories verse by verse, the ones about January 6 and the ones about the election rigged against Trump. His convictions are worth examining because he and the millions of Americans who think as he does are the primary source of Trump’s power to corrupt the next election. With a sufficient dose of truth serum, most Republican politicians would likely confess that Biden won in 2020, but the great mass of lumpen Trumpers, who believe the Big Lie with unshakable force, oblige them to pretend otherwise. Like so many others, Patterson is doing his best to parse a torrential flow of political information, and he is failing. His failures leave him, nearly always, with the worldview expounded by Trump.
We fall into a long conversation in the sweltering heat, then continue it for weeks by phone and email. I want to plumb the depths of his beliefs, and understand what lies behind his commitment to them. He is prepared to grant me the status of “fellow truth-seeker.”
“The ‘Stop the Steal’ rally for election integrity was peaceful,” he says. “I think the big takeaway is when Old Glory made its way into the Rotunda on January 6, our fearless public officials dove for cover at the sight of the American flag.”
What about the violence? The crowds battling police?
“The police were seen on video in uniform allowing people past the bicycle-rack barricades and into the building,” he replies. “I mean, that’s established. The unarmed crowd did not overpower the officers in body armor. That doesn’t happen. They were allowed in.”
Surely he has seen other video, though. Shaky, handheld footage, taken by the rioters themselves, of police officers falling under blows from a baseball bat, a hockey stick, a fire extinguisher, a length of pipe. A crowd crushing Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, shouting “Heave! Ho!”
Does Patterson know that January 6 was among the worst days for law-enforcement casualties since September 11, 2001? That at least 151 officers from the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, chemical burns, and a Taser-induced heart attack?
Patterson has not heard these things. Abruptly, he shifts gears. Maybe there was violence, but the patriots were not to blame.
In the mayhem of January 6, at least 151 police officers suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, and chemical burns. Above: A law-enforcement officer is attacked. (Mel D. Cole)
“There were people there deliberately to make it look worse than what it was,” he explains. “A handful of ill-behaved, potentially, possibly agents provocateur.” He repeats the phrase: “Agents provocateur, I have on information, were in the crowd … They were there for nefarious means. Doing the bidding of whom? I have no idea.”
“‘On information’?” I ask. What information?
“You can look up this name,” he says. “Retired three-star Air Force General McInerney. You got to find him on Rumble. They took him off YouTube.”
Sure enough, there on Rumble (and still on YouTube) I find a video of Lieutenant General Thomas G. McInerney, 84, three decades gone from the Air Force. His story takes a long time to tell, because the plot includes an Italian satellite and Pakistan’s intelligence service and former FBI Director James Comey selling secret U.S. cyberweapons to China. Eventually it emerges that “Special Forces mixed with antifa” combined to invade the seat of Congress on January 6 and then blame the invasion on Trump supporters, with the collusion of Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In a further wrinkle, Pelosi, by McInerney’s account, became “frantic” soon afterward when she discovered that her own false-flag operation had captured a laptop filled with evidence of her treason. McInerney had just come from the White House, he says in his monologue, recorded two days after the Capitol riot. Trump was about to release the Pelosi evidence. McInerney had seen the laptop with his own eyes.
It shook me that Patterson took this video for proof. If my house had caught fire 10 years before, my life might have depended on his discernment and clarity of thought. He was an Eagle Scout. He earned a college degree. He keeps current on the news. And yet he has wandered off from the empirical world, placing his faith in fantastic tales that lack any basis in fact or explicable logic.
McInerney’s tale had spread widely on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and propaganda sites like We Love Trump and InfoWars. It joined the January 6 denialist canon and lodged firmly in Patterson’s head. I reached the general by phone and asked about evidence for his claims. He mentioned a source, whose name he couldn’t reveal, who had heard some people saying “We are playing antifa today.” McInerney believed they were special operators because “they looked like SOF people.” He believed that one of them had Pelosi’s laptop, because his source had seen something bulky and square under the suspect’s raincoat. He conceded that even if it was a laptop, he couldn’t know whose it was or what was on it. For most of his story, McInerney did not even claim to have proof. He was putting two and two together. It stood to reason. In truth, prosecutors had caught and charged a neo-Nazi sympathizer who had videotaped herself taking the laptop from Pelosi’s office and bragged about it on Discord. She was a home health aide, not a special operator. (As of this writing, she has not yet entered a plea.)
The general’s son, Thomas G. McInerney Jr., a technology investor, learned that I had been talking with his father and asked for a private word with me. He was torn between conflicting obligations of filial loyalty, and took a while to figure out what he wanted to say.
“He has a distinguished service record,” he told me after an otherwise off-the-record conversation. “He wants what’s best for the nation and he speaks with a sense of authority, but I have concerns at his age that his judgment is impaired. The older he’s gotten, the stranger things have gotten in terms of what he’s saying.”
I tell all of this and more to Patterson. McInerney, the Military Times reported, “went off the rails” after a successful Air Force career. For a while during the Obama years he was a prominent birther and appeared a lot on Fox News, before being fired as a Fox commentator in 2018 for making a baseless claim about John McCain. Last November, he told the WVW Broadcast Network that the CIA operated a computer-server farm in Germany that had helped rig the presidential vote for Biden, and that five Special Forces soldiers had just died trying to seize the evidence. The Army and U.S. Special Operations Command put out dutiful statements that no such mission and no such casualties had taken place.
Of course, Patterson wrote to me sarcastically, “governments would NEVER lie to their OWN citizens.” He did not trust the Pentagon’s denials. There are seldom words or time enough to lay a conspiracy theory to rest. Each rebuttal is met with a fresh round of delusions.
Patterson is admirably eager for a civil exchange of views. He portrays himself as a man who “may be wrong, and if I am I admit it,” and he does indeed concede on small points. But a deep rage seems to fuel his convictions. I asked him the first time we met if we could talk “about what’s happening in the country, not the election itself.”
His smile faded. His voice rose.
“There ain’t no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020,” he said. “That is not going to fucking happen. That’s not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.”
He had many proofs. All he really needed, though, was arithmetic. “The record indicates 141 [million] of us were registered to vote and cast a ballot on November 3,” he said. “Trump is credited with 74 million votes out of 141 million. That leaves 67 million for Joe; that doesn’t leave any more than that. Where do these 14 million votes come from?”
Patterson did not recall where he had heard those figures. He did not think he had read Gateway Pundit, which was the first site to advance the garbled statistics. Possibly he saw Trump amplify the claim on Twitter or television, or some other stop along the story’s cascading route across the right-wing mediaverse. Reuters did a good job debunking the phony math, which got the total number of voters wrong.
Richard Patterson, a retired firefighter, in the Bronx. Like tens of millions of other Trump supporters, Patterson firmly believes that the 2020 election was stolen. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
I was interested in something else: the worldview that guided Patterson through the statistics. It appeared to him (incorrectly) that not enough votes had been cast to account for the official results. Patterson assumed that only fraud could explain the discrepancy, that all of Trump’s votes were valid, and that the invalid votes must therefore belong to Biden.
“Why don’t you say Joe Biden got 81 million and there’s only 60 million left for Trump?” I asked.
Patterson was astonished.
“It’s not disputed, the 74 million vote count that was credited to President Trump’s reelection effort,” he replied, baffled at my ignorance. “It’s not in dispute … Have you heard that President Trump engaged in cheating and fraudulent practices and crooked machines?”
Biden was the one accused of rigging the vote. Everybody said so. And for reasons unspoken, Patterson wanted to be carried away by that story.
Robert a. pape, a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence, watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on January 6. A name came unbidden to his mind: Slobodan Milošević.
Back in June 1989, Pape had been a postdoctoral fellow in political science when the late president of Serbia delivered a notorious speech. Milošević compared Muslims in the former Yugoslavia to Ottomans who had enslaved the Serbs six centuries before. He fomented years of genocidal war that destroyed the hope for a multiethnic democracy, casting Serbs as defenders against a Muslim onslaught on “European culture, religion, and European society in general.”
By the time Trump unleashed the angry crowd on Congress, Pape, who is 61, had become a leading scholar on the intersection of warfare and politics. He saw an essential similarity between Milošević and Trump—one that suggested disturbing hypotheses about Trump’s most fervent supporters. Pape, who directs the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, called a staff meeting two days after the Capitol attack. “I talked to my research team and told them we were going to reorient everything we were doing,” he told me.
Milošević, Pape said, inspired bloodshed by appealing to fears that Serbs were losing their dominant place to upstart minorities. “What he is arguing” in the 1989 speech “is that Muslims in Kosovo and generally throughout the former Yugoslavia are essentially waging genocide on the Serbs,” Pape said. “And really, he doesn’t use the word replaced. But this is what the modern term would be.”
Pape was alluding to a theory called the “Great Replacement.” The term itself has its origins in Europe. But the theory is the latest incarnation of a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants, and the rise of nonwhite citizens, to take power from white Christian people of European stock. When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”
Trump borrowed periodically from the rhetorical canon of replacement. His remarks on January 6 were more disciplined than usual for a president who typically spoke in tangents and unfinished thoughts. Pape shared with me an analysis he had made of the text that Trump read from his prompter.
“Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period,” Trump told the crowd. “You’re the real people. You’re the people that built this nation.” He famously added, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Just like Milošević, Trump had skillfully deployed three classic themes of mobilization to violence, Pape wrote: “The survival of a way of life is at stake. The fate of the nation is being determined now. Only genuine brave patriots can save the country.”
Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening.
When the Biden administration published a new homeland-security strategy in June, it described the assault on the Capitol as a product of “domestic violent extremists,” and invoked an intelligence assessment that said attacks by such extremists come primarily from lone wolves or small cells. Pape and his colleagues doubted that this captured what had happened on January 6. They set about seeking systematic answers to two basic questions: Who were the insurgents, in demographic terms? And what political beliefs animated them and their sympathizers?
Pape’s three-bedroom house, half an hour’s drive south of Chicago, became the pandemic headquarters of a virtual group of seven research professionals, supported by two dozen University of Chicago undergraduates. The CPOST researchers gathered court documents, public records, and news reports to compile a group profile of the insurgents.
“The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.
Then there were economic anomalies. Over the previous decade, one in four violent extremists arrested by the FBI had been unemployed. But only 7 percent of the January 6 insurgents were jobless, and more than half of the group had a white-collar job or owned their own business. There were doctors, architects, a Google field-operations specialist, the CEO of a marketing firm, a State Department official. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told me.
Yet these insurgents were not, by and large, affiliated with known extremist groups. Several dozen did have connections with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the Three Percenters militia, but a larger number—six out of every seven who were charged with crimes—had no ties like that at all.
Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and co-editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy, says it is no surprise that extremist groups were in the minority. “January 6 wasn’t designed as a mass-casualty attack, but rather as a recruitment action” aimed at mobilizing the general population, she told me. “For radicalized Trump supporters … I think it was a protest event that became something bigger.”
Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.
Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.
Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.
The CPOST team decided to run a national opinion survey in March, based on themes it had gleaned from the social-media posts of insurgents and the statements they’d made to the FBI under questioning. The researchers first looked to identify people who said they “don’t trust the election results” and were prepared to join a protest “even if I thought the protest might turn violent.” The survey found that 4 percent of Americans agreed with both statements, a relatively small fraction that nonetheless corresponds to 10 million American adults.
In June, the researchers sharpened the questions. This brought another surprise. In the new poll, they looked for people who not only distrusted the election results but agreed with the stark assertion that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” And instead of asking whether survey subjects would join a protest that “might” turn violent, they looked for people who affirmed that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
“Stop the Steal” protesters in Detroit on November 6, 2020. Republican county authorities later attempted to rescind their votes to certify Detroit’s election results. (Philip Montgomery)
Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive language. “The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me.
Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of respondents who endorsed them. In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.” (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)“This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” Pape told me. He drew an analogy to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, at the dawn of the Troubles.
Why such a large increase? Pape believed that Trump supporters simply preferred the harsher language, but “we cannot rule out that attitudes hardened” between the first and second surveys. Either interpretation is troubling. The latter, Pape said, “would be even more concerning since over time we would normally think passions would cool.”
In the CPOST polls, only one other statement won overwhelming support among the 21 million committed insurrectionists. Almost two-thirds of them agreed that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.” Slicing the data another way: Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president.
The committed insurrectionists, Pape judged, were genuinely dangerous. There were not many militia members among them, but more than one in four said the country needed groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. One-third of them owned guns, and 15 percent had served in the military. All had easy access to the organizing power of the internet.
What Pape was seeing in these results did not fit the government model of lone wolves and small groups of extremists. “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” he told me. “This is collective political violence.”
Pape drew an analogy to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, at the dawn of the Troubles. “In 1968, 13 percent of Catholics in Northern Ireland said that the use of force for Irish nationalism was justified,” he said. “The Provisional IRA was created shortly thereafter with only a few hundred members.” Decades of bloody violence followed. And 13 percent support was more than enough, in those early years, to sustain it.
“It’s the community’s support that is creating a mantle of legitimacy—a mandate, if you would, that justifies the violence” of a smaller, more committed group, Pape said. “I’m very concerned it could happen again, because what we’re seeing in our surveys … is 21 million people in the United States who are essentially a mass of kindling or a mass of dry wood that, if married to a spark, could in fact ignite.”
The story of Richard Patterson, once you delve into it, is consonant with Pape’s research. Trump appealed to him as an “in-your-face, brash ‘America First’ guy who has the interest of ‘We the People.’ ” But there was more. Decades of personal and political grudges infuse Patterson’s understanding of what counts as “America” and who counts as “we.”
Where Patterson lives, in the Bronx, there were 20,413 fewer non-Hispanic white people in the 2020 census than in 2010. The borough had reconfigured from 11 percent white to 9 percent.
Patterson came from Northern Irish stock and grew up in coastal Northern California. He was a “lifetime C student” who found ambition at age 14 when he began to hang around at a local fire station. As soon as he finished high school he took the test to join the Oakland fire department, earning, he said, outstanding scores.
“But in those days,” he recalled, “Oakland was just beginning to diversify and hire females. So no job for the big white kid.” The position went to “this little woman … who I know failed the test.”
Patterson tried again in San Francisco, but found the department operating under a consent decree. Women and people of color, long excluded, had to be accepted in the incoming cohort. “So, again, the big white kid is told, ‘Fuck you, we got a whole fire department of guys that look just like you. We want the department to look different because diversity is all about an optic.’ ” The department could hire “the Black applicant instead of myself.”
Patterson bought a one-way ticket to New York, earned a bachelor’s degree in fire science, and won an offer to join New York’s Bravest. But desegregation had come to New York, too, and Patterson found himself seething.
In 1982, a plaintiff named Brenda Berkman had won a lawsuit that opened the door to women in the FDNY. A few years later, the department scheduled training sessions “to assist male firefighters in coming to terms with the assimilation of females into their ranks.” Patterson’s session did not go well. He was suspended without pay for 10 days after a judge found that he had called the trainer a scumbag and a Communist and chased him out of the room, yelling, “Why don’t you fuck Brenda Berkman and I hope you both die of AIDS.” The judge found that the trainer had “reasonably feared for his safety.” Patterson continues to maintain his innocence.
Later, as a lieutenant, Patterson came across a line on a routine form that asked for his gender and ethnicity. He resented that. “There was no box for ‘Fuck off,’ so I wrote in ‘Fuck off,’ ” he said. “So they jammed me up for that”—this time a 30-day suspension without pay.
Even while Patterson rose through the ranks, he kept on finding examples of how the world was stacked against people like him. “I look at the 2020 election as sort of an example on steroids of affirmative action. The straight white guy won, but it was stolen from him and given to somebody else.”
Wait. Wasn’t this a contest between two straight white guys?
Not really, Patterson said, pointing to Vice President Kamala Harris: “Everybody touts the gal behind the president, who is currently, I think, illegitimately in our White House. It is, quote, a woman of color, like this is some—like this is supposed to mean something.” And do not forget, he added, that Biden said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”
What to do about all this injustice? Patterson did not want to say, but he alluded to an answer: “Constitutionally, the head of the executive branch can’t tell an American citizen what the fuck to do. Constitutionally, all the power rests with the people. That’s you and me, bro. And Mao is right that all the power emanates from the barrel of a gun.”
Did he own a gun himself? “My Second Amendment rights, like my medical history, are my own business,” he replied.
Many of Patterson’s fellow travelers at the “Justice for January 6” protest were more direct about their intentions. One of them was a middle-aged man who gave his name as Phil. The former Coast Guard rescue diver from Kentucky had joined the crowd at the Capitol on January 6 but said he has not heard from law enforcement. Civil war is coming, he told me, and “I would fight for my country.”
Was he speaking metaphorically?
“No, I’m not,” he said. “Oh Lord, I think we’re heading for it. I don’t think it’ll stop. I truly believe it. I believe the criminals—Nancy Pelosi and her criminal cabal up there—is forcing a civil war. They’re forcing the people who love the Constitution, who will give their lives to defend the Constitution—the Democrats are forcing them to take up arms against them, and God help us all.”
Gregory Dooner, who was selling flags at the protest, said he had been just outside the Capitol on January 6 as well. He used to sell ads for AT&T Advertising Solutions, and now, in retirement, he peddles MAGA gear: $10 for a small flag, $20 for a big one.
Violent political conflict, he told me, was inevitable, because Trump’s opponents “want actual war here in America. That’s what they want.” He added a slogan of the Three Percenters militia: “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.” The Declaration of Independence, which said something like that, was talking about King George III. If taken seriously today, the slogan calls for a war of liberation against the U.S. government.
“Yo, hey—hey,” Dooner called out to a customer who had just unfurled one of his banners. “I want to read him the flag.”
Protesters rally in Michigan in the days after the election. (Philip Montgomery)
He recited the words inscribed on the Stars and Stripes: “A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”
“George Washington wrote that,” he said. “That’s where we’re at, gentlemen.”
Over the course of Trump’s presidency, one of the running debates about the man boiled down to: menace or clown? Threat to the republic, or authoritarian wannabe who had no real chance of breaking democracy’s restraints? Many observers rejected the dichotomy—the essayist Andrew Sullivan, for instance, described the former president as “both farcical and deeply dangerous.” But during the interregnum between November 3 and Inauguration Day, the political consensus leaned at first toward farce. Biden had won. Trump was breaking every norm by refusing to concede, but his made-up claims of fraud were getting him nowhere.
In a column headlined “There Will Be No Trump Coup,” the New York Times writer Ross Douthat had predicted, shortly before Election Day, that “any attempt to cling to power illegitimately will be a theater of the absurd.” He was responding in part to my warning in these pages that Trump could wreak great harm in such an attempt.
One year later, Douthat looked back. In scores of lawsuits, “a variety of conservative lawyers delivered laughable arguments to skeptical judges and were ultimately swatted down,” he wrote, and state election officials warded off Trump’s corrupt demands. My own article, Douthat wrote, had anticipated what Trump tried to do. “But at every level he was rebuffed, often embarrassingly, and by the end his plotting consisted of listening to charlatans and cranks proposing last-ditch ideas” that could never succeed.
Douthat also looked ahead, with guarded optimism, to the coming presidential election. There are risks of foul play, he wrote, but “Trump in 2024 will have none of the presidential powers, legal and practical, that he enjoyed in 2020 but failed to use effectively in any shape or form.” And “you can’t assess Trump’s potential to overturn an election from outside the Oval Office unless you acknowledge his inability to effectively employ the powers of that office when he had them.”
That, I submit respectfully, is a profound misunderstanding of what mattered in the coup attempt a year ago. It is also a dangerous underestimate of the threat in 2024—which is larger, not smaller, than it was in 2020.
It is true that Trump tried and failed to wield his authority as commander in chief and chief law-enforcement officer on behalf of the Big Lie. But Trump did not need the instruments of office to sabotage the electoral machinery. It was citizen Trump—as litigant, as candidate, as dominant party leader, as gifted demagogue, and as commander of a vast propaganda army—who launched the insurrection and brought the peaceful transfer of power to the brink of failure.
All of these roles are still Trump’s for the taking. In nearly every battle space of the war to control the count of the next election—statehouses, state election authorities, courthouses, Congress, and the Republican Party apparatus—Trump’s position has improved since a year ago.
To understand the threat today, you have to see with clear eyes what happened, what is still happening, after the 2020 election. The charlatans and cranks who filed lawsuits and led public spectacles on Trump’s behalf were sideshows. They distracted from the main event: a systematic effort to nullify the election results and then reverse them. As milestones passed—individual certification by states, the meeting of the Electoral College on December 14—Trump’s hand grew weaker. But he played it strategically throughout. The more we learn about January 6, the clearer the conclusion becomes that it was the last gambit in a soundly conceived campaign—one that provides a blueprint for 2024.
The strategic objective of nearly every move by the Trump team after the networks called the election for Joe Biden on November 7 was to induce Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to seize control of the results and appoint Trump electors instead. Every other objective—in courtrooms, on state election panels, in the Justice Department, and in the office of the vice president—was instrumental to that end.
Electors are the currency in a presidential contest and, under the Constitution, state legislators control the rules for choosing them. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the 19th century, every state has ceded the choice to its voters, automatically certifying electors who support the victor at the polls, but in Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court affirmed that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” No court has ever said that a state could do that after its citizens have already voted, but that was the heart of Trump’s plan.
Every path to stealing the election required GOP legislatures in at least three states to repudiate the election results and substitute presidential electors for Trump. That act alone would not have ensured Trump’s victory. Congress would have had to accept the substitute electors when it counted the votes, and the Supreme Court might have had a say. But without the state legislatures, Trump had no way to overturn the verdict of the voters.
Trump needed 38 electors to reverse Biden’s victory, or 37 for a tie that would throw the contest to the House of Representatives. For all his improvisation and flailing in the postelection period, Trump never lost sight of that goal. He and his team focused on obtaining the required sum from among the 79 electoral votes in Arizona (11), Georgia (16), Michigan (16), Nevada (6), Pennsylvania (20), and Wisconsin (10).Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before. Even Confederates recognized Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost.
Trump had many tactical setbacks. He and his advocates lost 64 of 65 challenges to election results in court, and many of them were indeed comically inept. His intimidation of state officials, though it also failed in the end, was less comical. Trump was too late, barely, to strong-arm Republican county authorities into rejecting Detroit’s election tally (they tried and failed to rescind their “yes” votes after the fact), and Aaron Van Langevelde, the crucial Republican vote on Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, stood up to Trump’s pressure to block certification of the statewide results. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused the president’s request to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump after two recounts confirming Biden’s win. Two Republican governors, in Georgia and Arizona, signed certificates of Biden’s victory; the latter did so even as a telephone call from Trump rang unanswered in his pocket. The acting attorney general stared down Trump’s plan to replace him with a subordinate, Jeffrey B. Clark, who was prepared to send a letter advising the Georgia House and Senate to reconsider their state’s election results.
Had Trump succeeded in any of these efforts, he would have given Republican state legislators a credible excuse to meddle; one success might have led to a cascade. Trump used judges, county boards, state officials, and even his own Justice Department as stepping-stones to his ultimate target: Republican legislators in swing states. No one else could give him what he wanted.
Even as these efforts foundered, the Trump team achieved something crucial and enduring by convincing tens of millions of angry supporters, including a catastrophic 68 percent of all Republicans in a November PRRI poll, that the election had been stolen from Trump. Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before. Even Confederates recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost. Delegitimating Biden’s victory was a strategic win for Trump—then and now—because the Big Lie became the driving passion of the voters who controlled the fate of Republican legislators, and Trump’s fate was in the legislators’ hands.
A woman bears a flag inscribed with the Second Amendment at a gun-rights rally in Virginia in 2020. (Philip Montgomery)
Even so, three strategic points of failure left Trump in dire straits in the days before January 6.
First, although Trump won broad rhetorical support from state legislators for his fictitious claims of voter fraud, they were reluctant to take the radical, concrete step of nullifying the votes of their own citizens. Despite enormous pressure, none of the six contested states put forward an alternate slate of electors for Trump. Only later, as Congress prepared to count the electoral votes, did legislators in some of those states begin talking unofficially about “decertifying” the Biden electors.
The second strategic point of failure for Trump was Congress, which had the normally ceremonial role of counting the electoral votes. In the absence of action by state legislatures, the Trump team had made a weak attempt at a fallback, arranging for Republicans in each of the six states to appoint themselves “electors” and transmit their “ballots” for Trump to the president of the Senate. Trump would have needed both chambers of Congress to approve his faux electors and hand him the presidency. Republicans controlled only the Senate, but that might have enabled Trump to create an impasse in the count. The trouble there was that fewer than a dozen Republican senators were on board.
Trump’s third strategic setback was his inability, despite all expectations, to induce his loyal No. 2 to go along. Vice President Mike Pence would preside over the Joint Session of Congress to count the electoral votes, and in a memo distributed in early January, Trump’s legal adviser John Eastman claimed, on “very solid legal authority,” that Pence himself “does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes … and all the Members of Congress can do is watch.” If Congress would not crown Trump president, in other words, Pence could do it himself. And if Pence would not do that, he could simply disregard the time limits for debate under the Electoral Count Act and allow Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz to filibuster. “That creates a stalemate,” Eastman wrote, “that would give the state legislatures more time.”
Time. The clock was ticking. Several of Trump’s advisers, Rudy Giuliani among them, told allies that friendly legislatures were on the brink of convening special sessions to replace their Biden electors. The Trump conspiracy had made nowhere near that much progress, in fact, but Giuliani was saying it could be done in “five to 10 days.” If Congress went ahead with the count on January 6, it would be too late.
On the afternoon of January 5, Sidney Powell—she of the “Kraken” lawsuits, for which she would later be sanctioned in one court and sued in another—prepared an emergency motion addressed to Justice Samuel Alito. The motion, entered into the Supreme Court docket the next day, would go largely unnoticed by the media and the public amid the violence of January 6; few have heard of it even now. But it was Plan A to buy Trump some time.
Alito was the circuit justice for the Fifth Circuit, where Powell, on behalf of Representative Louie Gohmert, had sued to compel Mike Pence to take charge of validating electors, disregarding the statutory role of Congress. The vice president had “exclusive authority and sole discretion as to which set of electors to count or even whether to count no set of electors,” Powell wrote. The Electoral Count Act, which says quite otherwise, was unconstitutional.
Powell did not expect Alito to rule on the merits immediately. She asked him to enter an emergency stay of the electoral count and schedule briefs on the constitutional claim. If Alito granted the stay, the clock on the election would stop and Trump would gain time to twist more arms in state legislatures.
Late in the same afternoon, January 5, Steve Bannon sat behind a microphone for his live War Room show, backswept gray hair spilling from his headphones to the epaulets on a khaki field jacket. He was talking, not very guardedly, about Trump’s Plan B to buy time the next day.
“The state legislatures are the center of gravity” of the fight, he said, because “people are going back to the original interpretation of the Constitution.”
And there was big news: The Republican leaders of the Pennsylvania Senate, who had resisted pressure from Trump to nullify Biden’s victory, had just signed their names to a letter averring that the commonwealth’s election results “should not have been certified by our Secretary of State.” (Bannon thanked his viewers for staging protests at those legislators’ homes in recent days.) The letter, addressed to Republican leaders in Congress, went on to “ask that you delay certification of the Electoral College to allow due process as we pursue election integrity in our Commonwealth.”
For weeks, Rudy Giuliani had starred in spurious “fraud” hearings in states where Biden had won narrowly. “After all these hearings,” Bannon exulted on air, “we finally have a state legislature … that is moving.” More states, the Trump team hoped, would follow Pennsylvania’s lead.
This was a lawless plan on multiple grounds. While the Constitution gives state legislatures the power to select electors, it does not provide for “decertifying” electors after they have cast their ballots in the Electoral College, which had happened weeks before. Even if Republicans had acted earlier, they could not have dismissed electors by writing a letter. Vanishingly few legal scholars believed that a legislature could appoint substitute electors by any means after voters had made their choice. And the governing statute, the Electoral Count Act, had no provision for delay past January 6, emergency or otherwise. Trump’s team was improvising at this point, hoping that it could make new law in court, or that legal niceties would be overwhelmed by events. If Pence or the Republican-controlled Senate had fully backed Trump’s maneuver, there is a chance that they might in fact have produced a legal stalemate that the incumbent could have exploited to stay in power.
Above all else, Bannon knew that Trump had to stop the count, which was set to begin at 1 p.m. the next day. If Pence would not stop it and Alito did not come through, another way would have to be found.
“Tomorrow morning, look, what’s going to happen, we’re going to have at the Ellipse—President Trump speaks at 11,” Bannon said, summoning his posse to turn up when the gates opened at 7 a.m. Bannon would be back on air in the morning with “a lot more news and analysis of exactly what’s going to go on through the day.”
Then a knowing smile crossed Bannon’s face. He swept a palm in front of him, and he said the words that would capture attention, months later, from a congressional select committee.
“I’ll tell you this,” Bannon said. “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. Okay, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in.” Earlier the same day, he had predicted, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
Bannon signed off at 6:58 p.m. Later that night he turned up in another war room, this one a suite at the Willard Hotel, across the street from the White House. He and others in Trump’s close orbit, including Eastman and Giuliani, had been meeting there for days. Congressional investigators have been deploying subpoenas and the threat of criminal sanctions—Bannon has been indicted for contempt of Congress—to discover whether they were in direct contact with the “Stop the Steal” rally organizers and, if so, what they planned together.
Shortly after bannon signed off, a 6-foot-3-inch mixed martial artist named Scott Fairlamb responded to his call. Fairlamb, who fought under the nickname “Wildman,” reposted Bannon’s war cry to Facebook: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, after driving before dawn from New Jersey to Washington, he posted again: “How far are you willing to go to defend our Constitution?” Fairlamb, then 43, answered the question for his own part a few hours later at the leading edge of a melee on the West Terrace of the Capitol—seizing a police baton and later punching an officer in the face. “What patriots do? We fuckin’ disarm them and then we storm the fuckin’ Capitol!” he screamed at fellow insurgents.
Less than an hour earlier, at 1:10 p.m., Trump had finished speaking and directed the crowd toward the Capitol. The first rioters breached the building at 2:11 p.m. through a window they shattered with a length of lumber and a stolen police shield. About one minute later, Fairlamb burst through the Senate Wing Door brandishing the baton, a teeming mob behind him. (Fairlamb pleaded guilty to assaulting an officer and other charges.)
Another minute passed, and then without warning, at 2:13, a Secret Service detail pulled Pence away from the Senate podium, hustling him out through a side door and down a short stretch of hallway.
Pause for a moment to consider the choreography. Hundreds of angry men and women are swarming through the halls of the Capitol. They are fresh from victory in hand-to-hand combat with an outnumbered force of Metropolitan and Capitol Police. Many have knives or bear spray or baseball bats or improvised cudgels. A few have thought to carry zip-tie wrist restraints. Some are shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” Others call out hated Democrats by name.At 2:26, the Secret Service agents told Pence again that he had to move. “The third time they came in,” the vice president’s chief of staff told me, “it wasn’t really a choice.”
These hundreds of rioters are fanning out, intent on finding another group of roughly comparable size: 100 senators and 435 members of the House, in addition to the vice president. How long can the one group roam freely without meeting the other? Nothing short of stunning good luck, with an allowance for determined police and sound evacuation plans, prevented a direct encounter.
The vice president reached Room S-214, his ceremonial Senate office, at about 2:14 p.m. No sooner had his entourage closed the door, which is made of opaque white glass, than the leading edge of the mob reached a marble landing 100 feet away. Had the rioters arrived half a minute earlier, they could not have failed to spot the vice president and his escorts speed-walking out of the Senate chamber.
Ten minutes later, at 2:24, Trump egged on the hunt. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” he tweeted.
Two minutes after that, at 2:26, the Secret Service agents told Pence again what they had already said twice before: He had to move.
“The third time they came in, it wasn’t really a choice,” Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, told me. “It was ‘We cannot protect you here, because all that we have between us is a glass door.’ ” When Pence refused to leave the Capitol, the agents guided him down a staircase to a shelter under the visitors’ center.
In another part of the Capitol, at about the same time, a 40-year-old businessman from Miami named Gabriel A. Garcia turned a smartphone camera toward his face to narrate the insurrection in progress. He was a first-generation Cuban American, a retired U.S. Army captain, the owner of an aluminum-roofing company, and a member of the Miami chapter of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a penchant for street brawls. (In an August interview, Garcia described the Proud Boys as a drinking club with a passion for free speech.)
In his Facebook Live Video, Garcia wore a thick beard and a MAGA cap as he gripped a metal flagpole. “We just went ahead and stormed the Capitol. It’s about to get ugly,” he said. He weaved his way to the front of a crowd that was pressing against outnumbered police in the Crypt, beneath the Rotunda. “You fucking traitors!” he screamed in their faces. When officers detained another man who tried to break through their line, Garcia dropped his flagpole and shouted “Grab him!” during a skirmish to free the detainee. “U.S.A.!” he chanted. “Storm this shit!”
Then, in an ominous singsong voice, Garcia called out, “Nancy, come out and play!” Garcia was paraphrasing a villain in the 1979 urban-apocalypse film The Warriors. That line, in the movie, precedes a brawl with switchblades, lead pipes, and baseball bats. (Garcia, who faces six criminal charges including civil disorder, has pleaded not guilty to all counts.)
“It’s not like I threatened her life,” Garcia said in the interview, adding that he might not even have been talking about the speaker of the House. “I said ‘Nancy.’ Like I told my lawyer, that could mean any Nancy.”
Garcia had explanations for everything on the video. “Storm this shit” meant “bring more people [to] voice their opinion.” And “‘get ugly’ is ‘we’re getting a lot of people coming behind.’ ”
But the most revealing exegesis had to do with “fucking traitors.”
“At that point, I wasn’t meaning the Capitol Police,” he said. “I was looking at them. But … I was talking about Congress.” He “wasn’t there to stop the certification of Biden becoming president,” he said, but to delay it. “I was there to support Ted Cruz. Senator Ted Cruz was asking for a 10-day investigation.”
Delay. Buy time. Garcia knew what the mission was.
Late into the afternoon, as the violence died down and authorities regained control of the Capitol, Sidney Powell must have watched reports of the insurgency with anxious eyes on the clock. If Congress stayed out of session, there was a chance that Justice Alito might come through.
He did not. The Supreme Court denied Powell’s application the next day, after Congress completed the electoral count in the early-morning hours. Plan A and Plan B had both failed. Powell later expressed regret that Congress had been able to reconvene so quickly, mooting her request.
For a few short weeks, Republicans recoiled at the insurrection and distanced themselves from Trump. That would not last.
Ballroom a at the Treasure Island Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is packed with college Republicans. There is a surfeit of red ties, vested suits, and pocket squares. A lot more young men than women. Two Black faces in a sea of white. No face masks at all. None of the students I ask has received a COVID vaccine.
The students have gathered to talk about the Second Amendment, the job market, and “how to attack your campus for their vaccine mandates,” as incoming Chair Will Donahue tells the crowd. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, a featured speaker, has another topic in mind.
“Let’s talk about January 6,” he proposes, and then, without further preamble: “Release the tapes!”
There is a scattering of applause, quickly extinguished. The students do not seem to know what he is talking about.
“The 14,000-plus hours,” Gosar says. “Let’s find out who actually—who caused the turmoil. Let’s hold accountable. But let’s also make sure that the people who are innocently charged are set free. But let’s also hold those responsible for what happened accountable.”
Gosar is not a natural orator, and it is often difficult to parse what he is saying. He bends at the waist and swings his head as he speaks, swallowing words and garbling syntax. No one in the Las Vegas audience seems to be following his train of thought. He moves on.
“We’re in the middle of a verbal and cultural war,” he says. “Very much like a civil war, where it’s brother against brother … We are the light. They are the darkness. Don’t shy away from that.”
A little sleuthing afterward reveals that 14,000 hours is the sum of footage preserved from the Capitol’s closed-circuit video cameras between the hours of noon and 8 p.m. on January 6. The Capitol Police, according to an affidavit from their general counsel, have shared the footage with Congress and the FBI but want to keep it out of public view because the images reveal, among other sensitive information, the Capitol’s “layout, vulnerabilities and security weaknesses.”
Gosar, like a few fellow conservatives, has reasoned from this that the Biden administration is concealing “exculpatory evidence” about the insurrectionists. The January 6 defendants, as Gosar portrays them in a tweet, are guilty of no more than a “stroll through statuary hall during non-business hours.” Another day he tweets, baselessly, “The violence was instigated by FBI assets.”
This is the same Paul Gosar who, in November, tweeted an anime video, prepared by his staff, depicting him in mortal combat with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In it he raises a sword and kills her with a blow to the neck. For incitement of violence against a colleague, the House voted to censure Gosar and stripped him of his committee assignments. Gosar, unrepentant, compared himself to Alexander Hamilton.
It’s the same Paul Gosar who, twice in recent months, has purported to be in possession of secret intelligence about vote-rigging from a source in the “CIA fraud department,” which does not exist, and from the “security exchange fraud department,” and also from someone “from Fraud from the Department of Defense,” all of whom were somehow monitoring voting machines and all of whom telephoned to alert him to chicanery.
Gosar has become a leading voice of January 6 revisionism, and he may have more reason than most to revise. In an unguarded video on Periscope, since deleted but preserved by the Project on Government Oversight, Ali Alexander, one of the principal organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally, said, “I was the person who came up with the January 6 idea with Congressman Gosar” and two other Republican House members. “We four schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.”
A participant in a September 2020 Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, in support of Donald Trump (Philip Montgomery)
“Stop the Steal” organizers created and later tried to delete a website called Wild Protest that directed supporters to trespass on the Capitol steps, where demonstrations are illegal: “We the People must take to the US Capitol lawn and steps and tell Congress #DoNotCertify on #JAN6!” Gosar was listed on the site as a marquee name. In the final days of the Trump administration, CNN reported that Gosar (among other members of Congress) had asked Trump for a preemptive pardon for his part in the events of January 6. He did not get one. (Tom Van Flein, Gosar’s chief of staff, said in an email that both the pardon story and Alexander’s account were “categorically false.” He added, “Talking about a rally and speeches are one thing. Planning violence is another.”)
Assembled in one place, the elements of the revisionist narrative from Gosar and his allies resemble a litigator’s “argument in the alternative.” January 6 was a peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights. Or it was violent, but the violence came from antifa and FBI plants. Or the violent people, the ones charged in court, are patriots and political prisoners.
Or, perhaps, they are victims of unprovoked violence themselves. “They get down there, and they get assaulted by the law-enforcement officers,” Gabriel Pollock said in an interview from behind the counter at Rapture Guns and Knives in North Lakeland, Florida, speaking of family members who are facing criminal charges. “It was an ambush, is really what it was. All of that is going to come out in the court case.”
The most potent symbol of the revisionists is Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran and QAnon adherent who died from a gunshot wound to the left shoulder as she tried to climb through a broken glass door. The shooting came half an hour after the mob’s near-encounter with Pence, and was an even closer call. This time the insurgents could see their quarry, dozens of House members clustered in the confined space of the Speaker’s Lobby. Rioters slammed fists and feet and a helmet into the reinforced glass of the barricaded doorway, eventually creating a hole big enough for Babbitt.
Whether the shooting was warranted is debatable. Federal prosecutors cleared Lieutenant Michael Byrd of wrongdoing, and the Capitol Police exonerated him, saying, “The actions of the officer in this case potentially saved Members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters who … were steps away.” The crowd was plainly eager to follow Babbitt through the breach, but a legal analysis in Lawfare argued that the unarmed Babbitt personally would have had to pose a serious threat to justify the shooting.
Gosar helped lead the campaign to make a martyr of Babbitt, who was shot wearing a Trump flag as a cape around her neck. “Who executed Ashli Babbitt?” he asked at a House hearing in May, before Byrd’s identity was known. At another hearing, in June, he said the officer “appeared to be hiding, lying in wait, and then gave no warning before killing her.”
“Was she on the right side of history?” I asked Gosar this summer.
“History has yet to be written,” he replied. “Release the tapes, and then history can be written.”
As word spread in right-wing circles that the then-unidentified officer was Black, race quickly entered the narrative. Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, shared a Telegram message from another user that said, “This black man was waiting to execute someone on january 6th. He chose Ashli Babbitt.” An account called “Justice for January 6” tweeted that Byrd “should be in jail for the execution of Ashli Babbitt, but instead he is being lauded as a hero. The ONLY racial injustice in America today is antiwhiteism.”
The penultimate stage of the new narrative held that Democrats had seized upon false accusations of rebellion in order to unleash the “deep state” against patriotic Americans. Dylan Martin, a student leader at the Las Vegas event at which Gosar spoke, adopted that view. “The Democratic Party seems to be using [January 6] as a rallying cry to persecute and completely use the force of the federal government to clamp down on conservatives across the nation,” he told me.
Trump himself proposed the final inversion of January 6 as a political symbol: “The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!” he wrote in a statement released by his fundraising group in October.
It is difficult today to find a Republican elected official who will take issue with that proposition in public. With Trump loyalists ascendant, no room is left for dissent in a party now fully devoted to twisting the electoral system for the former president. Anyone who thinks otherwise need only glance toward Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, so recently in the party’s power elite, has been toppled from her leadership post and expelled from the state Republican Party for lèse-majesté.
In the first days of January 2021, as Trump and his legal advisers squeezed Pence to stop the electoral count, they told the vice president that state legislatures around the country were on the cusp of replacing electors who’d voted for Biden with those who would vote for Trump. They were lying, but they were trying mightily to make it true.
Marc Short, Pence’s closest adviser, did not think it would happen. “In any sort of due diligence that we did with a Senate majority leader, a House minority leader, or any of those people, it was clear that they had certified their results and there was no intention of a separate slate of electors or any sort of challenge to that certification,” he told me. Trump might have support for his maneuver from “one or two” legislators in a given state, “but that was never something that actually garnered the support of a majority of any elected body.”
The letter from wavering Pennsylvania state senators suggests that the situation wasn’t quite so black-and-white; the dams were beginning to crack. Even so, Trump’s demand—that statehouses fire their voters and hand him the votes—was so far beyond the bounds of normal politics that politicians found it difficult to conceive.
With the passage of a year, it is no longer so hard. There is precedent now for the conversation, the next time it happens, and there are competent lawyers to smooth the path. Most of all, there is the roaring tide of revanchist anger among Trump supporters, rising up against anyone who would thwart his will. Scarcely an elected Republican dares resist them, and many surf exultantly in their wake.
A year ago I asked the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse how he explained the integrity of the Republican officials who said no, under pressure, to the attempted coup in 2020 and early ’21. “I think it did depend on the personalities,” he told me. “I think you replace those officials, those judges, with ones who are more willing to follow the party line, and you get a different set of outcomes.”
Today that reads like a coup plotter’s to-do list. Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, who refused to “find” extra votes for Trump? Formally censured by his state party, primaried, and stripped of his power as chief election officer. Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, who certified Biden’s victory? Hounded off the Board of State Canvassers. Governor Doug Ducey in Arizona, who signed his state’s “certificate of ascertainment” for Biden? Trump has endorsed a former Fox 10 news anchor named Kari Lake to succeed him, predicting that she “will fight to restore Election Integrity (both past and future!).” Future, here, is the operative word. Lake says she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, and even promises to revoke it (somehow) if she wins. None of this is normal.
Arizona’s legislature, meanwhile, has passed a law forbidding Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, to take part in election lawsuits, as she did at crucial junctures last year. The legislature is also debating an extraordinary bill asserting its own prerogative, “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration,” to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election.” There was no such thing under law as a method to “decertify” electors when Trump demanded it in 2020, but state Republicans think they have invented one for 2024.
In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement.
Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board in June, told me she had been bombarded with menacing emails from Trump supporters. One email, she recalled, said, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” Another, a copy of which she provided me, said, “Tick, Tick, Tick” in the subject line and “Not long now” as the message. Nuriddin said she knows colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, excommunicated and primaried at Trump’s behest for certifying Biden’s victory, nonetheless signed a new law in March that undercuts the power of the county authorities who normally manage elections. Now a GOP-dominated state board, beholden to the legislature, may overrule and take control of voting tallies in any jurisdiction—for example, a heavily Black and Democratic one like Fulton County. The State Election Board can suspend a county board if it deems the board to be “underperforming” and replace it with a handpicked administrator. The administrator, in turn, will have final say on disqualifying voters and declaring ballots null and void. Instead of complaining about balls and strikes, Team Trump will now own the referee.
“The best-case scenario is [that in] the next session this law is overturned,” Nuriddin said. “The worst case is they start just pulling election directors across the state.”
The Justice Department has filed suit to overturn some provisions of the new Georgia law—but not to challenge the hostile takeover of election authorities. Instead, the federal lawsuit takes issue with a long list of traditional voter-suppression tactics that, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, have the intent and effect of disadvantaging Black voters. These include prohibitions and “onerous fines” that restrict the distribution of absentee ballots, limit the use of ballot drop boxes, and forbid handing out food or water to voters waiting in line. These provisions make it harder, by design, for Democrats to vote in Georgia. The provisions that Garland did not challenge make it easier for Republicans to fix the outcome. They represent danger of a whole different magnitude.
The coming midterm elections, meanwhile, could tip the balance further. Among the 36 states that will choose new governors in 2022, three are presidential battlegrounds—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—where Democratic governors until now have thwarted attempts by Republican legislatures to cancel Biden’s victory and rewrite election rules. Republican challengers in those states have pledged allegiance to the Big Lie, and the contests look to be competitive. In at least seven states, Big Lie Republicans have been vying for Trump’s endorsement for secretary of state, the office that will oversee the 2024 election. Trump has already endorsed three of them, in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan.
Down in the enlisted ranks, Trump’s army of the dispossessed is hearing language from Republican elected officials that validates an instinct for violence. Angry rhetoric comparing January 6 to 1776 (Representative Lauren Boebert) or vaccine requirements to the Holocaust (Kansas House Representative Brenda Landwehr) reliably produces death threats by the hundreds against perceived enemies—whether Democratic or Republican.
The infinite scroll of right-wing social media is relentlessly bloody-minded. One commentator on Telegram posted on January 7 that “the congress is literally begging the people to hang them.” Another replied, “Anyone who certifies a fraudulent election has commited treason punishable by death.” One week later came, “The last stand is a civil war.” In response, another user wrote, “No protests. To late for that.” The fire burns, if anything, even hotter now, a year later.
Amid all this ferment, Trump’s legal team is fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. This, too, exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an “independent state legislature” doctrine, which holds that statehouses have “plenary,” or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead.
Elections are complicated, and election administrators have to make hundreds of choices about election machinery and procedures—the time, place, and manner of voting or counting or canvassing—that the legislature has not specifically authorized. A judge or county administrator may hold polls open for an extra hour to make up for a power outage that temporarily halts voting. Precinct workers may exercise their discretion to help voters “cure” technical errors on their ballots. A judge may rule that the state constitution limits or overrides a provision of state election law.
Four justices—Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas—have already signaled support for a doctrine that disallows any such deviation from the election rules passed by a state legislature. It is an absolutist reading of legislative control over the “manner” of appointing electors under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last appointee, has never opined on the issue.
The question could arise, and Barrett’s vote could become decisive, if Trump again asks a Republican-controlled legislature to set aside a Democratic victory at the polls. Any such legislature would be able to point to multiple actions during the election that it had not specifically authorized. To repeat, that is the norm for how elections are carried out today. Discretionary procedures are baked into the cake. A Supreme Court friendly to the doctrine of independent state legislatures would have a range of remedies available to it; the justices might, for instance, simply disqualify the portion of the votes that were cast through “unauthorized” procedures. But one of those remedies would be the nuclear option: throwing out the vote altogether and allowing the state legislature to appoint electors of its choosing.
Trump is not relying on the clown-car legal team that lost nearly every court case last time. The independent-state-legislature doctrine has a Federalist Society imprimatur and attorneys from top-tier firms like BakerHostetler. A dark-money voter-suppression group that calls itself the Honest Elections Project has already featured the argument in an amicus brief.
“One of the minimal requirements for a democracy is that popular elections will determine political leadership,” Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School expert on election law, told me. “If a legislature can effectively overrule the popular vote, it turns democracy on its head.” Persily and UC Irvine’s Hasen, among other election-law scholars, fear that the Supreme Court could take an absolutist stance that would do exactly that.
One sign that legislative supremacy is more than a hypothetical construct is that it has migrated into the talking points of Republican elected officials. On ABC’s This Week, for example, while refusing to opine on whether Biden had stolen the election, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise explained in February 2021, “There were a few states that did not follow their state laws. That’s really the dispute that you’ve seen continue on.” Trump himself has absorbed enough of the argument to tell the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, “The legislatures of the states did not approve all of the things that were done for those elections. And under the Constitution of the United States, they have to do that.”
There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.
Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.
Joe Biden looked as though he might do that on the afternoon of July 13. He traveled to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which features on its facade an immense reproduction of the Preamble in 18th-century script, to deliver what was billed as a major address on democracy.
What followed was incongruous. Biden began well enough, laying out how the core problem of voting rights had changed. It was “no longer just about who gets to vote” but “who gets to count the vote.” There were “partisan actors” seizing power from independent election authorities. “To me, this is simple: This is election subversion,” he said. “They want the ability to reject the final count and ignore the will of the people if their preferred candidate loses.”
He described the means by which the next election might be stolen, though vaguely: “You vote for certain electors to vote for somebody for president” and then a “state legislator comes along … and they say, ‘No, we don’t like those electors. We’re going to appoint other electors who are going to vote for the other guy or other woman.’ ”
And he laid down a strong marker as he reached his rhetorical peak.
“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole,” he said. “I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again.
But then, having looked directly toward the threat on the horizon, Biden seemed to turn away, as if he doubted the evidence before his eyes. There was no appreciable call to action, save for the bare words themselves: “We’ve got to act.” Biden’s list of remedies was short and grossly incommensurate with the challenge. He expressed support for two bills—the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—that were dead on arrival in the Senate because Democrats had no answer to the Republican filibuster. He said the attorney general would double the Department of Justice staff devoted to voting-rights enforcement. Civil-rights groups would “stay vigilant.” Vice President Kamala Harris would lead “an all-out effort to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote, and then get the vote out.”
And then he mentioned one last plan that proved he did not accept the nature of the threat: “We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote.”
So: enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws, vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand athwart their own electoral schemes.
Conspicuously missing from Biden’s speech was any mention even of filibuster reform, without which voting-rights legislation is doomed. Nor was there any mention of holding Trump and his minions accountable, legally, for plotting a coup. Patterson, the retired firefighter, was right to say that nobody has been charged with insurrection; the question is, why not? The Justice Department and the FBI are chasing down the foot soldiers of January 6, but there is no public sign that they are building cases against the men and women who sent them. Absent consequences, they will certainly try again. An unpunished plot is practice for the next.
Donald trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, Robert Pape’s “committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.
Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.
The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.
Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Compares Covid-19 To Cancer, Here’s The Twittersphere Response
Bruce Lee, Senior Contributor December 4, 2021
Bruce Lee, writer, journalist, professor, systems modeler, computational and digital health expert, avocado-eater, and entrepreneur, not always in that order.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) tweeted that “every single year more than 600,000 people in the … [+] GETTY IMAGES
On Saturday morning, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene compared Covid-19 and cancer in a four-tweet thread. There was at least one itty bitty problem with the thread: Covid-19 and cancer are not the same thing.
Sure Covid-19 and cancer both start with the letter “c.” But so does cummerbund and camel. They are also both health issues but so is walking corpse syndrome. Nevertheless, as you can see in the following first two tweets of the thread, Taylor Greene brought Covid-19 and cancer together like hot dogs and peanut butter.
The second line her tweet stated, “The country has never once shut down.” Ok, that’s kind of true as well. But isn’t that like saying, “The country has never once covered everyone completely in spaghetti sauce?” It’s a true statement but doesn’t seem to follow from the first statement about cancer deaths.
The third line offered a little more of the same, “Not a single school has closed.” Again, this is true. But how could closing schools help fight cancer, especially when cancer rates tend to be much lower among school-aged children. It’s not like the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) where school-aged children are very likely to carry and spread the virus to each other during school and then bring home the virus to infect their family members. Closing schools can thus prevent schools from becoming cauldrons to further fuel the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the pandemic. By contrast, closing schools because of cancer deaths would be akin to putting a stick in your eye. It would serve no purpose except cause even more problems.
Her first tweet concluded with “And every year, over 600,000 people, of all ages and all races, will continue to die from cancer.” Yes, her tweet had already said something like that. So why repeat that? Does this have anything to do with closing schools? Unless Taylor Greene is somehow suggesting that cancer spreads like the Covid-19 coronavirus, through the air and casual contact.
Yikes, airborne transmission of cancer from spending just 15 minutes with someone with cancer? If cancer were to spread as quickly as the SARS-CoV-2, our society would be in serious, serious trouble. You’d see some really serious toilet paper hoarding then. Looks like writer Thor Benson would have no problems going into lockdown mode if that were the case.
Sure, air pollution, tobacco smokes, and other airborne substances may lead to cancer. But typically that takes many months or even years of exposure. Was Taylor Greene suggesting that there could somehow be cancer superspreader events like what happened at the White House with Covid-19 in 2020?
Before you jump to conclusions about how cancer may be spread actor, Angela Belcamino reminded everyone that things with skin cancer don’t get quite that jumpy.
Many responses on Twitter to Taylor Greene emphasized that cancer is not contagious. That is in large part accurate. You are not going to get cancer by staying in the same room for an hour with a person who has cancer. To be fair, though, there are cancers that can be triggered by infectious pathogens. For example, human papilloma virus (HPV) infection can cause cervical, anal, penile, and oropharyngeal cancer. And HPV can be transmitted via sex, which by the way is not the same as sharing a bus with someone. There is no evidence that HPV can float in the air like the SARS-CoV-2.
The second tweet in Taylor Green’s thread stated that “Since #COVID19 tracking has started, 780,000+ people have died in 22 mo in the US, but more than 1 million still died of cancer. More have died in 2021 from covid than 2020 in spite of Gov mandated widespread vaccines, mass public masking, & trillions spent.”
It is true that over 780,000 people in the U.S. have already died from Covid-19. In fact, reported Covid-19 deaths are probably underestimates since not everyone is getting tested for Covid-19. Nevertheless, it’s not clear though why citing the number of cancer deaths would make the large number of Covid-19 deaths any better. Wouldn’t that be like telling a person, “don’t worry about your house being on fire because it is sitting on quicksand?”
The first half of the second line in Taylor Green’s second tweet is correct in that more people have died in 2021 than 2020 from Covid-19. However, the second half of the second tweet should prompt you to say, “hold on a second.” Deaths have been higher in 2021 probably in part because the pandemic has been going on a little longer in 2021 compared to 2020. While the pandemic didn’t really pick up in the U.S. until March 2020, this year the pandemic was already in full swing as of January 1, 2021. Moreover, people seemed a lot more diligent with social distancing and face mask wearing earlier on during the pandemic in 2020. Through much of 2021, especially after mid-May, face mask use has become less and less widespread even though the pandemic has continued.
The availability of vaccines is one big thing that’s different about 2021 compared to 2020. The Covid-19 vaccines probably have already saved numerous lives. The problem though is vaccination rates have not yet been high enough to make an even more dramatic difference. As of December 3, less than 60% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, well below the 80%-plus herd immunity thresholds that are needed to break the transmission of the virus. Coupling these too low vaccination rates with premature relaxation of other Covid-19 precautions like face mask wearing has led to the Covid-19 death situation of 2021.
Many people are remaining vaccine-hesitant perhaps because they do not fully realize the threat of the Covid-19 coronavirus and the benefits of the vaccine. Continuing with Taylor Greene’s suggestion that Covid-19 may be like cancer, the following tweet suggests that people would be quite willing to get cancer vaccine if offered one.
Now there isn’t a vaccine against most cancers. One exception is the HPV vaccine, which can in turn cut down your risk of HPV-caused cancers like cervical and anal cancer.
Taylor Greene’s third and fourth tweets in the thread were short on medical knowledge as well.
As seen above, Taylor Greene claimed that “Covid predominately targets obese & older people.” The Covid-19 coronavirus doesn’t “target” anyone in particular. It doesn’t weigh you or ask you your age before infecting you. If you have a nose or mouth and a respiratory tract, you can get infected. If you don’t have such body parts, you may be a ficus plant. While those with obesity or those who are older may be more likely to have more severe outcomes from Covid-19, everyone is at risk for Covid-19 badness.
Taylor Greene also asserted that ivermectin is saving lives without the evidence that this is the case. As I’ve covered previously for Forbes, ivermectin may help remove parasitic worms from your body, there just isn’t enough scientific support for its use against Covid-19.
In case you couldn’t tell from her cancer references, Taylor Greene is not a medical doctor or a scientist. Therefore, adapting the words of Alanis Morissette’s song, isn’t it ironic that she was tweeting that “it’s time to take a different approach based on the facts” and “stop the politically driven mass hysteria.” It is time for the U.S. to take a different approach and have politicians stop tweeting about how to deal with Covid-19. Real scientists, medical doctors, and public health experts should be leading the way and not politicians. At the very least, it should be people who can make it very clear that Covid-19 and cancer are not the same thing.
Marcus Lamb, head of televangelist network that spreads COVID misinformation, dies of COVID-19
By Li Cohen December 2, 2021
Marcus Lamb of the Daystar Christian network.DAYSTAR TELEVISION NETWORK
Marcus Lamb, the founder and president of the controversial, conservative outlet Daystar Television Network, has died after a battle with COVID-19, his network and family announced on Tuesday. He was 64.
“It’s with a heavy heart we announce that Marcus Lamb, president and founder of Daystar Television Network, went home to be with the Lord this morning,” the network tweeted on Tuesday. “The family asks that their privacy be respected as they grieve this difficult loss.”
Lamb’s son Jonathan and his wife Joni confirmed the news in a Daystar broadcast on Tuesday, saying that he had died at around 4 a.m.
“He was diagnosed with COVID and then got the COVID pneumonia. But he had pre-existing conditions,” Joni said. “He had diabetes, but he kept it in check.”
She said that they attempted numerous “protocols,” including unproven ones that the organization has touted on their broadcasts, but that they did not work. His heart eventually gave out, she added.
“It caused his blood sugar to spike and a decrease in his oxygen,” she said. “He 100% believed in everything that we’ve talked about here on Daystar… we still stand by that, obviously.”
“His life was truly well-lived and there’s no doubt that he heard ‘well done my good and faithful servant’ when he entered heaven’s gates,” Jonathan Lamb tweeted, along with photos of him and his father. “I’m going to really miss Dad. We golfed together every week for the past 15 years. He impacted me by demonstrating a righteous way to live and helped me become the man I am today.”
Last week, with his dad in the hospital, Lamb’s son Jonathan discussed his father’s COVID-19 battle. During the show, Joni Lamb called in from the hospital and said it was just “one foot in front of the other.”
“You take it day by day. Your dad is resting right now. He’s been talking and he ate a big bowl of oatmeal this morning and now he’s resting again. You know with this thing it’s kind of like riding a rollercoaster honestly.”
The Lambs and Daystar have made controversial statements regarding COVID-19 throughout the pandemic. On the November 23 episode of their Ministry Now program, Jonathan Lamb called his father’s illness a “spiritual attack from the enemy.”
“As much as my parents have gone on here to kind of inform everyone about everything going on in the pandemic and some of the ways to treat COVID, there’s no doubt that the enemy is not happy about that and he’s doing everything he can to take down my dad,” he said.
Daystar’s website offers a large amount of misinformation on COVID-19, calling the vaccines a “hidden crisis” and hinting at a “dangerous truth” about their efficacy and purpose. The network has hosted a series of videos and podcasts, including by Joni, speaking out against flu vaccines, HPV vaccines and others, and featured interviews with anti-vaccine advocates including Robert Kennedy Jr. and Simone Gold, who’s a member of the controversial group America’s Frontline Doctors.
The Lambs have also touted the use of unapproved treatments for COVID-19, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health have repeatedly warned against using these medications to treat COVID-19.
Renewables Likely Cost Less Than Previously Thought, Study Finds
EcoWatch – December 2, 2021
A wind energy park near Brandenburg, Germany. Patrick Pleul / picture alliance via Getty Images
As renewable energy technologies scale up, their cost can be hard to estimate. A new report from the University of Oxford’s Institute of New Economic Thinking notes that the cost of renewable energies may be less than previously thought.
According to the study, predicted costs for renewables have likely been overestimated, as evidenced by the true costs of these energies, such as solar power, falling short of early pricing model predictions again and again.
The World Economic Forum explains that renewable price forecasts didn’t account for infrastructure cost improvements. For example, early pricing models estimated that solar power prices would fall about 6% per year from 2010 to 2020. In reality, costs dropped 15% each year.
This is important, because the initial investments of renewable energies are often a sticking point for making the switch from fossil fuels. But as the new report shows, renewable energy prices aren’t as high as anticipated. As the technology improves and scales up, the prices will continue to drop, too.
From 2010 to 2019, solar electricity prices decreased from $378 per MWh to $68 per MWh. In the same time frame, onshore wind costs decreased by 40%, and offshore wind costs decreased by 29%. For coal, the most widely used source of electricity globally, prices fell from $111 to $109 during this time.
“More than half of the renewable capacity added in 2019 achieved lower electricity costs than new coal,” the International Renewable Energy Agency said in a separate report. “New solar and wind projects are undercutting the cheapest of existing coal-fired plants.”
The INET report authors note that rapid expansion of renewables is key to the best cost-savings. Through their research methods, they found that a fast transition to renewable energy could lead to a net savings of trillions of dollars compared to fossil fuels. If renewable energy continues to expand at the current rates for the next 10 years, the authors predict we could reach a near-net-zero-emissions energy system in 25 years.
“In response to our opening question, ‘Is there a path forward that can get us there cheaply and quickly?’ our answer is an emphatic ‘Yes!’” the study says. “The key is to maintain the current high growth rates of rapidly progressing clean energy technologies for the next decade. This is required to build up the industrial capabilities and technical know-how necessary to produce, install and operate these technologies at scale as fast as possible so that we can profit from the resulting cost reductions sooner rather than later.”
Excess fertilizer washed from Midwestern fields is slowly poisoning the Gulf of Mexico
Ignacio Calderon November 30, 2021
Located in the heart of America’s breadbasket, Champaign County, Illinois, helps feed the nation’s demand for corn and soybeans while fueling one of the more insidious impacts of climate change – fertilizer runoff.
Every year, farmers apply tons of nitrogen fertilizer to the vast swaths of crops that blanket Champaign’s flat landscape.
As rain carries unused fertilizer into the nearby Spoon River, it spurs toxic algae growth downstream.
The excess nutrients flow with the waters from the Spoon into a series of larger rivers until dumping into the Gulf of Mexico, fueling a massive dead zone where no life can survive.
The environmental devastation – increasing blooms and a consistently growing dead zone – has been well documented for decades.
But changes in the way rain falls, as explained in a yearlong USA TODAY investigation, have set the stage for things to get much worse, many scientists now believe. The warming planet is bringing more precipitation overall, and more downpours in particular, to the same U.S. regions that grow a majority of America’s fertilizer-dependent crops.
Champaign County, which has one of the nation’s top nitrogen surplus amounts, is ground zero for this impact.
USA TODAY and Investigate Midwest analyzed spring precipitation data and nitrogen levels between 2014 and 2020 in the Spoon River. The analysis found that the kinds of extreme rainfall events made more common by a warming planet cause three times as much fertilizer runoff than other rain events and contribute to an outsized share of it in the waterways.
The media outlets chose Champaign County because of its high rates of nitrogen surplus for corn crops – No. 3 in the nation – and because it’s one of relatively few places where the U.S. Geological Survey tracks watershed nitrogen concentration over a multiyear period.
Nitrogen in the Spoon spiked 42 times during those seven springs that the federal government tracked it. Thirty-six of the spikes came after a rainfall, when the fertilizer attaches to the soil particles and slips away from farm fields and into the river.
Sometimes, though, the rains came so fast and heavy that tens of thousands of pounds of nitrogen fertilizer poured into the river and sent levels soaring.
The three heaviest storms dumped one-third of all the nitrogen during this time period into the Spoon River.
The findings mirror a larger study conducted by several researchers that found heavy rain across the Mississippi River Basin also contributed to one-third of the nitrogen that flushed into the Gulf of Mexico. This heavy rain happens in just nine days per year.
Among the most striking consequences of fertilizer runoff, the Gulf’s dead zone spans the coasts of Louisiana and Texas and has rendered uninhabitable some 6,330 square miles of water, according to recent measurements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The floating algae bloom has expanded and contracted over the past 35 years but consistently surpasses the target set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Hypoxia Task Force. The current five-year average is nearly three times higher than the target.
But it’s not just the Gulf of Mexico. Fertilizer runoff wreaks havoc on rivers and lakes across the country. It contaminates drinking water, harms aquatic life and sickens both people and pets. It has decimated the manatee population in Florida and fouled the Chesapeake Bay in the northeast.
Certain types of algae blooms, like cyanobacterial, cause respiratory infections, gastrointestinal bleeding and vomiting and are responsible for at least 321 emergency room visits in the United States between 2017 and 2019 alone, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found. Worldwide, about 60,000 people annually are poisoned from algae blooms.
The blooms also emit methane, a greenhouse gas that exacerbates global warming. The EPA recently found the emissions from blooms could increase 30% to 90% in the next century.
‘Red tide’ toxic algae bloom kills sea life and costs Florida millions
It’s a devastating feedback loop. Algae blooms contribute to global warming, which increases rainfall, which then exacerbates fertilizer runoff.
In Illinois, the number of days with at least 2 inches of rainfall has increased about 40% over the past century, according to the state’s 2021 climate assessment. And spring – when many farmers apply fertilizer – is expected to see some of the largest gains in rainfall by the end of this century, the assessment said.
At the same time, farmers have used increasingly more fertilizer. Between 1960 and 1980, its use on the nation’s top crops tripled – from 7.5 metric tons applied annually to 23.7 million tons. Those levels have hovered around the high point ever since.
Multiply what happens in Champaign County by the hundreds of agricultural communities across the United States – and in the Mississippi River Basin in particular.
One of the “strongest signals” of climate change is the increase in precipitation intensity, said Trent Ford, Illinois’ state climatologist. And one of its biggest challenges is the increase in fertilizer runoff, he said.
Despite the problems, there is little government regulation of fertilizer application and management. Unlike with pesticides, farmers can use as much fertilizer as they want and face no fines or penalties for exceeding safe amounts.
Regulating the application of chemical fertilizers and manure would be difficult, said Richard Cruse, a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University: “You would have to police virtually every acre that’s farmed.”
Governmental attempts to do just that have been consistently opposed by agriculture groups like the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Meanwhile, voluntary measures to reduce runoff – such as planting cover crops – have been slow to take hold.
In Illinois, farmers planted a total of 1.4 million acres of cover crops in 2019, but it will take an additional 20.7 million acres in conjunction with other management practices to reach the EPA’s long-term goals of nutrient reduction, according to the state’s biennial report.
“They’re not on the order of magnitude that we need to see to actually have a change,” said Catie Gregg, an agriculture specialist at the Illinois nonprofit Prairie Rivers Network. “Then this is further complicated by climate change.”
More fertilizer, more problems
In late June, Champaign County farmer Ann Swanson looked on as the gathering rain clouds darkened the sky.
She cursed.
Swanson, who runs a 10-acre organic farm growing tomatoes, peppers and squash, knew the incoming rain spelled disaster for her crops.
The surprise soaker that fell over much of central Illinois that week spawned tornadoes and put an abrupt end to outdoor events. It also drenched the Champaign-Urbana metropolitan area with 5.1 inches of rain.
Ann Swanson, manager of Hendrick House Farms, in a field whose crops were ruined by heavy rains and flooding earlier in the growing season. (Photo by Darrell Hoemann/The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting)
That’s a half-inch above the area’s average rainfall amount for the entire month, according to the Illinois State Water Survey at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The downpour caused most of Swanson’s 2,000 tomatoes to develop bacterial spots, ending the season early.
“You just don’t expect that much rain beyond June,” Swanson said. “It was really disappointing.”
Swanson is not in the Spoon River watershed, so any excess fertilizer from her farm drains instead into the Kaskaskia River. But Swanson employs a host of farming practices to ensure nutrients stay in her soil.
At the beginning of every season, Swanson said, she samples her soil to see how many nutrients it already has and adjusts her fertilizer use accordingly. Instead of dumping it all on at the start of the growing season, she applies it little by little as her crops grow.
If the weather forecast shows heavy precipitation, she will wait until drier conditions so that the crops can take in the most nutrients.
“That’s exactly why ‘side dressing’ is generally more efficient, because you’re spoon-feeding the crop throughout the growing season, as opposed to putting on this huge lump at the start of the season or before the season even starts,” said Kelsey Griesheim, a graduate student researcher in the Department of Natural Sciences and Environmental Resources at the University of Illinois.
Swanson also uses cover crops. Planted in the off-season when fields are usually bare, cover crops can improve the soil’s structure, making it more like a “sponge,” Gregg said. They soak up excess water and nutrients and also improve the overall health of the soil.
“With cover cropping,” Swanson said, “I want to make sure I’m putting those nutrients back in the soil so I’m not constantly depleting them of nutrients year after year.”
But Swanson is an exception.
Many farmers over apply fertilizer as a hedge against heavy rain, said Cruse, the Iowa State University professor. It’s a cheap way to ensure the most from each harvest, he said, but it can exacerbate the runoff problem.
“It’s like an insurance policy,” Cruse said. “Fertilizer costs, but not having enough out there to optimize your yield costs even more.”
Corn crops in Champaign County alone had an average of 31 million pounds more nitrogen than they needed every year during the decade ending in 2019, according to data compiled by Iowa State University researchers.
That’s the nation’s third-highest nitrogen surplus amount for corn, which is one of the most fertilizer-dependent of all the crops.
Toxic and costly
Some 350 miles north of Champaign County, Erika Balza knows firsthand the toxic and costly consequences of unchecked fertilizer runoff.
When the mother of two moved into her new husband’s house in rural Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, outside Green Bay, nearly a decade ago, she remembers him warning them not to drink the water.
“You can shower with it, you can do laundry with it, run the dishwasher, but you cannot drink the water here,” she remembers him saying.
The reason: Manure used as fertilizer on nearby farm fields seeps into her family’s well after it rains, Balza said. The water has tested positive for coliform bacteria several times.
It’s an especially dangerous situation for Balza because of her compromised immune system from stage four metastatic breast cancer.
But that’s not the only problem.
One day in 2016, Balza said, she started her dishwasher before heading upstairs for bed. As she turned the faucet on to brush her teeth, the water poured out brown and smelled of manure. Testing revealed E. coli and coliform bacteria.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and a donation from a farmer covered the more than $13,000 cost of installing a new well to run water to her house. But Balza had to purchase a new $700 dishwasher herself after the incident ruined the old one.
Brown water from the faucet of Erika Balza’s home near Green Bay, Wisconsin. Balza’s well was contaminated with manure spread as fertilizer on nearby farm fields, which made her water undrinkable.
Even with the new well, she said, her water still shows evidence of coliform and E. coli bacteria, as well as high levels of nitrates.
Balza said there’s a lack of oversight for farmers who apply manure.
“He walked away with a slap on the wrist,” she said of the farmer she thinks was responsible for the runoff.
Communities’ water treatment facilities are just as at-risk as individual wells.
Just a half-hour drive east of Champaign in the neighboring county of Vermilion, the Aqua Illinois surface water treatment plant cleans the water from Lake Vermilion that’s served to around 38,000 people.
Nitrates in the supply are a seasonal problem, said the plant’s manager, David Cronk.
In the spring – when some farmers apply fertilizer and a time of the year that’s expected to see one of the greatest increases in rainfall due to climate change – the nitrate concentration can be 12 to 13 milligrams per liter before the water is treated, he said. The federal limit is 10 mg/L.
In the 1990s, when nitrate levels breached the federal limit, residents were given bottled water, Cronk said. So, in 2000, a $4 million ion exchange unit was installed to filter the water.
Cronk said his plant works with farmers so they employ the best methods to ensure nitrates aren’t getting into water.
“That’s your main defense, honestly. We are the last defense,” Cronk said. “We’re making your water safe to drink here. But what’s it doing for the rest of the Mississippi River Basin? It’s still going there.”
Another problem communities across the country face from runoff is toxic algae blooms in lakes and ponds.
McCloud Aquatics President T.J. McCloud (left) and Chris Hoffman prepare a bentonite clay solution to treat algae growth in a pond in Arlington Heights, Illinois, on Tuesday, October 19, 2021.
Ava Boswell, the environmental services manager at McCloud Aquatics, a lake management company based in Northern Illinois, said cyanobacteria, a type of toxic algae, has become more frequent in some agricultural areas or areas with a lot of urban development in Illinois.
Although regular green algae was more commonly found by the company than cyanobacteria, green algae can also deprive fish of oxygen if the lake or pond is not treated, she said.
Although the decreased water quality they have seen could be due to an overall increase in algae blooms, Boswell said it could also be attributed to increased testing frequency.
‘Feeble, unfocused, and underfunded’
Attempts to regulate fertilizer application and runoff have been met with stiff resistance from the agriculture industry.
That challenge is made even more difficult, ironically, by the 1972 Clean Water Act. Even though agriculture has long been identified as a major source of water pollution, the nation’s landmark law explicitly exempts its discharges from regulation.
As a result, efforts to address it have been “feeble, unfocused, and underfunded,” a Vanderbilt University researcher named J.B. Ruhl wrote in 2000, and intense lobbying from farm groups has kept regulations with teeth from being enacted.
That’s what happened in 2014 when the Obama administration sought to define more broadly what waters were protected by the act in a move that farmers called an overreach. They feared the government would try to regulate their irrigation ditches, ponds and even puddles.
The American Farm Bureau Federation responded by launching a #DitchtheRule campaign that framed the effort as a “land grab.”
State farm bureaus and other groups representing farmers also joined the action, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2015, the American Farm Bureau Federation spent $2.8 million lobbying on issues that included clean water rules.
The EPA fired back with its own campaign called #DitchtheMyth to combat what it called “misinformation.” Other tactics it employed, the Government Accountability Office later found, violated a law against covert propaganda.
In the end, the rule fizzled.
A few years before that battle, in 2011, the EPA had warned that half of U.S. streams had medium-to-high levels of nitrogen and that nitrate drinking water violations had doubled in the previous eight years.
The agency issued this warning in what’s known as the “Stoner memo,” and it proposed that states reduce those levels by focusing on several areas, including agricultural fertilizer use.
But a decade later, Illinois and its stakeholders are still in the process of implementing a plan to reduce runoff.
“You’re trying to affect change on about 22 million acres of cropland that’s operated by about 72,000 independent farmers, and that’s a big lift,” said Trevor Sample, who coordinates the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy Implementation for the state’s EPA.
The state EPA is one of several partners in the ongoing effort to reduce runoff. Others include the state Department of Agriculture and the Illinois Farm Bureau.
The groups took the Stoner memo to heart, said Lauren Lurkins, Illinois Farm Bureau’s director of environmental policy. “Now we’re firmly in the middle of implementation of our strategy of a very complex environmental challenge.”
Charles Meier, a Republican lawmaker, said the majority of farmers are already doing their best to leave the environment better for the next generation.
“A farmer doesn’t want to pay for fertilizer that’s gonna end up washing and leaching down into the water either,” he said. “We want to keep fertilizer in the soil.”
Taking action
There are signs some government programs are gaining traction.
In Illinois, the Fall Covers for Spring Savings program offers a $5 insurance discount for every cover crop acre enrolled. During the 2019-20 growing season, the state had funding for 50,000 acres.
The allotment was filled just one week after opening.
Last season, the allotment was met in 12 hours, with an additional 130,050 acres that had been requested, according to the state’s biennial report. Now, the program will double its acre cap, according to the state’s EPA.
Blue-Green Algae or pond scum, cyanobacteria harmful algae.
Beyond holding in fertilizer, cover crops may improve how much food a farm produces. Farms that used cover crops for at least five straight years could expect a 3% increase in corn production and about a 5% increase in soybean production, according to Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, a program supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Ann Williams, a Democratic state representative in Illinois and chair of the state’s energy and environment committee, said many in the agricultural community are adapting as they see these benefits.
“Notwithstanding the climate impacts, it has benefits to their yields, to their profits,” she said. “That’s when you really are able to make a real strong argument that implementation adoption is not just in the best interests of the community and the globe at large, but in your own, economic best interest.”
But implementing all the necessary management practices in agriculture can be expensive – about $789 million per year to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus in long-term goals, according to the state’s biennial report.
“The reality is that addressing and mitigating the damage from the climate crisis is going to take long-term, aggressive, sustained action in all levels of government,” Williams said. “I think that it’s going to take a combination of education (and) more resources allocated to the agriculture community.”
The time to act is now, said Prairie Rivers Network’s Gregg, otherwise it will be even more difficult to adapt.
“As we see the weather changing, it’s getting harder to get where we want to go,” she said. “There really isn’t a perfect time to try something new, but this is something that is getting worse.”
This story is a collaboration between USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The center is an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in Illinois offering investigative and enterprise coverage of agribusiness, Big Ag and related issues. USA TODAY is funding a fellowship at the center for expanded coverage of agribusiness and its impact on communities.
