Prickly City by Scott Stantis for January 26, 2021

First step is prosecuting the traitors that stormed the Capitol and the traitors enabling them. 100 plus congress critters, the senators and the biggest traitor of them all, trump.

“I can’t believe that happened! You know, ‘that,’ the event I cannot actually describe, and which just ‘happened,’ instead of being actively planned, incited, and committed.”

Stantis, have you counted up the number of Republican legislators who participated in inciting the insurrection, some even providing reconnaissance?

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#TraitorTrump

Accountability first. Then we will put things back together and move forward.

“I never hold a grudge. As soon as I get even with the son-of-a bitch, I forget it.” -W.C. Fields

That includes anyone elected to Congress who will put their own seat and party above country.

“The way they were” was a corpse those maggots grew in…

Its really heartwarming, how so many on this comments section, who, over last 4 years, looked the other way, even called for and redefining “Defund the Police”, who encouraged and applauded execution of police , the burning of cities, the deaths of Ametican citizens, and the cheering of politicians that incited such actions. Today suddenly in favor of law and order. Go ahead defend yourselves, you know who you are.

Please start the Patriot Party………………pretty please!

Gotta keep it vague, or else the you-know-who will do you-know-what, and that would be something something something.

Forget status quo ante.

Settle for status quo achievable.

FYI re Washington Examiner:

“Overall, we rate the Washington Examiner Right Biased based on editorial positions that almost exclusively favor the right and Mixed for factual reporting due to several failed fact checks.”

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-examiner/

Are we ever going to fix the flaws and loopholes in our government OR is our dysfunctional political system content with being able to exploit those flaws and loopholes when it’s their turn to hold office?

Will America ever be progressive again?

Will both parties continue on a conservative/conservative-lite, status-quo, downward spiral … until we become a third world nation?

Thought-provoking article in Vox on Trump and authoritarianism vs fascism — and which one is more typical of America. https://www.vox.com/22225472/fascism-definition-trump-fascist-examples

But I’m still not convinced fascism is the best comparison class. Fascism is not just a term, it’s an analogy to a specific moment in European history. And arguably the antidemocratic forces in America right now bear a slimmer resemblance to that moment than they do to previous instances of white supremacist politics in America.

The gang that attacked the Capitol, as Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow has noted, looked an awful lot like a lynch mob, more than they did a group of well-organized brownshirts. There’s a decentralized, carnival-like atmosphere to their violence that recalls the loosely coordinated nature of historic anti-Black violence in America, like the Red Shirts who helped bring down Reconstruction. The writer John Ganz has rightfully pointed to Klan figures like David Duke, and “Old Right” racists like Pat Buchanan, as important American progenitors of Trumpism.

America also provides important precedents for the authoritarianism of the modern right, too.

As University of Michigan political scientist Robert Mickey has written, a whole region of the United States — the former Confederacy — was under authoritarian rule from the 1890s until the slow collapse of Jim Crow in the 1940s through the 1980s. That could provide more useful lessons for modern anti-authoritarians than the experience of European authoritarianism around the same time.

There is nothing stopping a thoughtful observer from drawing on both the American and European traditions of authoritarianism in describing Trump. But my hope is that the urge to call him a fascist does not detract unduly from the non-fascist, but strongly racist and authoritarian, origins of his politics right here at home.

“The word “fascist” too often precedes anti-historical histrionics. But the term is useful in deconstructing the devolution of Republicanism into the minoritarian-authoritarian saboteur of pluralist democracy.

“Trump relentlessly exploited a sense of decline, humiliation, and victimization among marginalized whites, even as he evoked America’s loss of strength and purity. His supporters’ “redemptive violence” at our capital was preceded in Michigan, as one example, by armed incursion the state legislature and an abortive effort to kidnap and execute the governor. While claiming to protect democracy, the GOP persistently undermines the right of disfavored groups to vote.

“Perhaps most salient is the attack on reality itself. “Post-truth,” writes Timothy Snyder, “is pre-fascism.” Hitler castigated the media as “enemies of the people”; so does Trump and, often, his party. Like the avatars of fascism, Republicans increasingly trumpet mendacious propaganda—including about voter fraud.

“Classical fascism conditions its followers to accept “the big lie” which unifies their discontents and justifies their leaders’ actions. So, in 2020, did the GOP.

“In their collective mind, the GOP was cheated by perfidious forces, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. The dangerous myth of political dispossession is now embedded in the Republican narrative.

“Polling shows that a full one-third of Trump supporters feel that the mob represented their grievances. More broadly, half of the party’s electorate believes that GOP lawmakers did not go far enough in attempting to overturn the election.

https://thebulwark.com/the-gops-pre-fascist-dna/

“Put everthing back the way it was.” ? Depends on where “was” is, if I want to or not.