Agents of chaos and criminality

Where did they find these people? Roger Stone. Paul Manafort. Sidney Powell. John Eastman.

How is it that any of these people could ever be at the elbow of the most powerful man on the planet?

We know where they found Rudy Giuliani: begging for pizza crust and publicity on the sidewalks of New York.

And someone made a deep dive into the sewer where Steve Bannon dwells.

How did any in this police lineup gain entrance to the White House?

They were there at the behest of the former president who, if "justice" is more than a seven-letter world, will wear numbers on his chest for his next portrait.

So much to digest from Republicans inside the administration who appeared live and videotaped in the public hearings of the Jan. 6 Committee:

Team Crazy knew Donald Trump lost bigly, knew the courts wouldn't help him, ran into "deep state" resistance on seizing voting machines and appointing a special counsel (Powell) to declare the election stolen.

What was the final option for a pack of political thieves?

Chaos. That's what.

This is what Bannon was referring to in a podcast a few days before the 2020 election.

"What Trump's gonna do is just declare victory, right? He's gonna declare victory. But that doesn't mean he's a winner. He's just gonna say he's a winner."

This, he said, would create a "firestorm."

Bannon knew of what he was speaking. Chaos is what the man is all about, and why Trump so values his opinion.

Chaos – to disrupt the electoral count and cause discord in the streets with the hope of sending all of it back to pliant Republican-controlled legislatures.

"This is about Trump pushing for uncertainty in our country." That's not some liberal MSNBC talker venting. It's former campaign manager Brad Parscale in a text exchange expressing deep regret for having served "a sitting president asking for civil war."

Mike Pence's former chief counsel Greg Jacob testified to the committee that the whole idea – fake electors and all -- was to create a violence-inducing "constitutional jump ball" to create rage and confusion, with a void to be filled by the loser who wouldn't leave.

This is a criminal conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, plain and simple. People died, and democracy was gravely wounded.

Speaking of fraud, that's what the Department of Justice said Bannon did, claiming in 2020 that he siphoned from a fund ostensibly to raise private dollars to build a border wall. He got a Trump pardon, and returned to being one of America's loudest voices for political chaos.

If one wants a "smoking gun" on Donald Trump's intentions for Jan. 6, it comes from the caldron of chaos that is Bannon's own mouth.

After two phone calls Jan. 5 with the president, Bannon broadcast, "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It's all converging and now we're on the point of attack."

Attack? The attack on democracy.

Again, where did they find these goons? Before he became editor of Breitbart, the online MAGA mouthpiece, Bannon was involved in a deep-data exploitation operation called Cambridge Analytica.

The now-defunct company, a client of the Trump campaign (after having helped Ted Cruz in his losing bid for the GOP nomination) dug into online activities of millions of average Americans on Facebook and then used targeted fake social media posts, pure disinformation, to influence them in advance of the 2016 election.

Read about it in the book "Mindf*ck" by former Cambridge Analytica insider Christopher Wylie.

          In particular, posts were meant to discourage Black Americans from voting at all. It was cunningly evil. No bloc was more crucial to Donald Trump's victory than those who didn't vote.

      So, how in the world did Trump and Bannon end up in a position to blow up the democracy that's the envy of the world? Apathy and disinformation, that's how.

        Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. 

 

Now, Coach will lead us in satanic verses

When my son was in fifth grade in Texas, he found himself a pawn in a morality play. Literally.

His teacher, Mrs. Thrasher, had scripted a performance about early settlers taming the land. It was pastoral. Literally.

Central to the plot was the felling of trees and the milling of wood, presumably to build a cabin, or North America's first Starbucks.

The audience presumed wrong. The communal quest was fulfilled when the lumber was erected – into a cross.

My wife and I later would refer to the play as "Deforestation for Christ."

It was a stunning imposition of the teacher's religion not only on the class but on an audience.

This was just one wrinkle of an unabashedly evangelical quest for a person whose position of authority was granted by taxpayers.

Parents later learned that Mrs. Thrasher was leaning on her students to join a campus Bible club she was forming.

To the school district's great credit – this was Texas, after all -- she was fired for refusing to acknowledge that as a representative of the state her job was not to push her religion on captive audiences.

This made her a local folk hero among others who believe this to be a "Christian nation" and who think that the government's role is to make you, me and that guy on the corner more holy.

They say the worst thing that ever happened to schools is the end of organized school prayer. They call it "God removed from our schools." That's as much of a lie and deceit as "pro-life" for those who would engage the state of Texas in each woman's reproductive cycle.

Rest assured, for them it was "Praise Jesus" time when the Supreme Court ruled on behalf of a Bremerton, Wash., football coach who decided his calling is to make his religiosity a 50-yard-line spectacle.

Unanswered would be the court's position if the marching band formed a pentagram and played "Sympathy for the Devil."

Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion said at issue was one man humbly offering "prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied."

That's a Trumpian falsehood. Video of coach Joseph Kennedy doing his thing shows a loud and zealous group activity that continued to grow in zeal.

If he's unplugged from Youtube, Justice Gorsuch could read press accounts including one in the Seattle Times of swarms of people from both sides of the field "hopping the fences and rushing to the field to be close to Kennedy before he started his prayer."

And there was no question about the coach's motives, either. He said the objective wasn't observing his faith in private but "helping these kids be better people."

In other words, he wasn't pulling a Tim Tebow. He was pulling a Billy Graham.

In the hands of this Supreme Court, the separation of church and state – and the liberties it protects -- stands to take a battering.

Yes, liberties – freedom of people of varied faiths to handle their business without imposition, interference or sponsorship from the  government.

One of the great deceits of the religious right, and of the court majority, is that restrictions on states like the prohibition on school prayer are averse to religion.

It is just the opposite. The reason the founders included the religion clause of the First Amendment was to prevent the oppression posed by piously tyrannical majorities in the homelands of America's early settlers.

Prayer isn't calisthenics. The state can tell you to run laps to keep your pads.

The state can say, "Give me 20 pushups." But it's against the spirit and intent of the First Amendment for the state to say, in the form of a full-of-himself coach, "Now, gather around to pray" -- even if a reckless court now says it's OK.

Those who represent us have no business casting anyone in their morality plays.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Trump's only defense starts with "I"

From what we've learned from the Jan. 6 Committee, Donald Trump may have to deploy a novel defense against the crime of seditious conspiracy.

Insanity.

This one must deduce from comments about the hurdle of "state of mind and intent" prosecutors would need to demonstrate to prove criminality.

To that effect, Trump World should be aggressively changing its tune in reacting to the explosive testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson.

Now, take notes, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson. You're all going to have to be on the same page if you want to keep him out of the clink. All together, now:

Of course, he assaulted a Secret Service agent and attempted to steer the limo to the Jan. 6 melee.

Of course, he threw plates of food at the White House wall.

Of course, he sought to lie and cheat his way back into the presidential residence – our residence -- he so soiled.

Of course. Of course. Of course. Why? Because he is Donald Trump. Does the law even apply to people insane with power lust?

At the risk of self-promoting, at this point I must return to something I wrote in 2019 about the first impeachable (and removable) thing a red-handed Trump was caught doing.

When first reports emerged that he sought to extort "a favor" from Ukraine's president to help facilitate a political hatchet job, I wrote this "Question to admirers of Donald Trump":

"When suspicions first were raised, did the man you helped elect sound like someone who asked the president of a foreign country to investigate the son of a political opponent?

"Ah ha. You nodded your head. Ever so slightly, you did.

"Or maybe you said, 'Hell, yeah.'"

Hell yeah. By now we know him all too well. Trump did what's alleged before the Jan. 6 committee – conspired to defraud the U.S. government (by extension you and me), raged against anything (such as truth) in his way, incited a riot, did nothing to save the lives endangered or lost, or the democracy teetering on the brink. Oh, and he fraudulently raised a lot of money doing it.

His only defense is insanity.

Tucker, Sean, Laura, "Fox & Friends": Do you want your preferred president to be gobbling up air time with collect calls from federal prison?

Then go with the insanity defense. Of course, he menaced that agent. Of course, the condiments flew.

Per today's Trump World talking point: Trying to deconstruct the case about the man's criminality into whether his fingerprints were on the agent's throat is an artful dodge about the whole mess – the conspiracy, the fraud, the violence – that these hearings are about.

But if you want to focus on those things, Team, say, "Yeah, the guy was out of his mind. He did it. Patently insane. Not guilty!"

Cassidy Hutchinson is of sound mind, and of eyes and ears. Not only that, she was down the hall. She was a birdie putt away.

Did you hear Trump say he barely knows her? Then he proceeded to rip her like, um, he knows her. Which is it? Do you know her or do you not? Don't bother. Plead state of mind.

What Trump did right there is an element of what prosecutors label "consciousness of guilt." The primary definition is concocting a "false alibi."

Wait? Did you know her? Or did you not?

Don't try to explain what Trump knew. Let the defense team take over:

"He doesn't know anything that can be held against him, your honor. He's out of his mind."

Everything we've learned since Jan. 6 fits exactly what we know of Trump – corrupt, conniving, venal and driven by self-interest, or at least what Vlad Putin deems that to be.

It's an open-and-shut case of criminality, corruption and treason. Cassidy Hutchinson had to ask, who in his right mind would have even contemplated it? The man down the hall did.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.