Wednesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

Today is the second full day of Trump 2.0, and the whirlwind of activity is already exhausting. Trump is trying to reverse everything Joe Biden accomplished over the past 4 years. He has issued hundreds of pardons to the January 6 rioters and other criminals. He is beginning to enact the policies laid out in “Project 2025.” And he has begun his campaign of revenge and retribution against anyone he perceives as criticizing him or opposing his wishes. I can’t possibly touch on everything that has happened, so I’ll just share commentary on two stories that I think are important: Trump’s pardons of the January 6 criminals and Elon Musk’s public performance of the Nazi salute.

First, in one fell swoop, Trump has destroyed the hard work of hundreds of prosecutors, judges, investigators, and members of the public who worked tirelessly to track down the criminals who attacked and trashed the Capitol and threatened the lives of legislators, law enforcement officers, and Trump’s own Vice President on January 6, 2021. We were assured by VP J.D. Vance, and multiple Republican politicians that Trump would only free non-violent offenders from that day, but it was all a lie. He released them all back into society where they can do whatever they want–no paroles, no supervision of any kind. In my opinion, Trump sees these criminals as his defenders. They can now organize and act as his private army. 

Kelly Rissman at The Independent: ‘F*** it, release em all:’: Inside Trump’s decision to issue blanket Jan 6 pardons.

In one of the first acts of his second administration, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly all of the January 6 criminals and new details reveal the spur-of-the-moment decision to release 1,500 people charged.

“Trump just said: ‘F*** it: Release ‘em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told the Axios.

On the campaign trail, Trump flirted with pardoning who he describes as the “J6 hostages,” and on Monday decided to issue pardons to most of the people charged in connection to the riot and effort to overturn the 2020 election. That ended their prison sentence and allowed those convicted to walk out of prison.

In one of the first acts of his second administration, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly all of the January 6 criminals and new details reveal the spur-of-the-moment decision to release 1,500 people charged.

“Trump just said: ‘F*** it: Release ‘em all,’” an adviser familiar with the discussions told the Axios.

On the campaign trail, Trump flirted with pardoning who he describes as the “J6 hostages,” and on Monday decided to issue pardons to most of the people charged in connection to the riot and effort to overturn the 2020 election. That ended their prison sentence and allowed those convicted to walk out of prison.

Trump had fluctuated on whether to grant clemency to either some or all rioters convicted of January 6-related crimes. Ultimately, the decision was made in the spur of the moment, White House advisers told Axios.

Trump’s pardons were made in defiance of JD Vance’s advice that convicts who committed violence during the Capitol attack shouldn’t be granted clemency. He told Fox News last week: “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

The president’s move also came as a surprise to some Republicans, who have said they don’t agree with his move.

“Well, I think I agree with the vice president,” Sen. Mitch McConnell told Semafor. “No one should excuse violence. And particularly violence against police officers.”

But Trump not only excuses violence that he perceives as supportive of him; he also celebrates it. Again and again, he has said that the January 5 attack was a “day of love.”

Rachel Leingang at The Guardian: Trump rewrites the violence of January 6 and ‘legitimates future ones.’

Donald Trump spent the four years after the January 6 insurrection attempting to rewrite the violence and chaos he inspired as his supporters stormed the US Capitol.

On the first day of his second term as president, he took the rewriting to its final step by issuing pardons and reducing sentences for those involved in the insurrection, including the leaders of far-right militias and those who battled with police that day.

If the criminal charges were meant to deter future acts of political violence, the pardons of more than 1,500 people do the opposite, experts said.

“This is going beyond rewriting what January 6 was,” said Robert Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago who has studied January 6 defendants. “This is about legitimating future January 6ths.”

A procession of Proud Boys marched in Washington on Monday, carrying a banner that congratulated Trump on his victory, a visible representation of the welcome the far right is receiving from the new administration, and their former national chairperson, Enrique Tarrio, received a full pardon. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia group, had his sentence commuted.

“This will have powerful future consequences for normalizing political violence, because many of those he has granted clemency to are an ongoing threat for political violence in the future,” Pape said.

Even those who didn’t themselves participate in violence on January 6 may have played a part in violence. Pape’s research shows that nearly 500 people convicted of low-level non-violent misdemeanors were “knowing and willing participants in the violent aspects of the Capitol siege, and that without the participation of this vast group, the siege would likely have never happened or been quickly ended by the police”….

Trump also directed the justice department to drop the charges in ongoing cases, ending the years of work by the department to find and prosecute the Capitol rioters. Trump named Ed Martin, a conservative lawyer who was involved in the Stop the Steal movement and supported January 6 causes the interim US attorney for Washington DC, putting him in charge of the January 6 prosecutions, NBC News reported.

This also undercuts Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi, who said she planned to evaluate these releases case by case. A bit more from The Guardian:

Perhaps the most visible face of the rioters, Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon shaman”, wrote on Twitter/X that he had just received the news from his lawyer that he was pardoned. “NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!

Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman

Several of those who have publicly discussed their cases have books scheduled to be released about their involvement on January 6 or intend to do speaking engagements about it. Others have started organizations to support those who were involved in the January 6 attack.

Those involved and their supporters were also looking for ways to seek retribution for what they believed was a system rigged against them for their political views.

They could bring civil lawsuits against the government seeking redress or reparations for the charges or time spent in prison, using the language in Trump’s pardon as proof they were overcharged. The pardons call the charges a “grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years”.

Dean Obeidallah writes at The Dean’s Report: Trump’s pardon of the J6 Terrorists is about encouraging future MAGA violence.

I hope your blood is boiling after Donald Trump’s pardon of approximately 1,500 terrorists who attacked our Capitol on Jan. 6. And yes, Trump’s own hand-picked FBI Director testified before Congress that Jan. 6 was an “act of domestic terrorism.” So those people Trump has now pardoned—which includes those in the video below you can see brutally attacking police officers—are terrorists. This is akin to Bin Laden pardoning those involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Overall, the pardons covered more than 600 rioters who had been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement officers at the Capitol. Approximately, 175 of these Trump allies used deadly or dangerous weapons in the attack–including toxic sprays, baseball bats, two-by-fours, crutches, hockey sticks and broken wooden table legs.

Those Trump pardoned include people like Julian Khater, who pled guilty to “assaulting law enforcement officers with pepper spray,” including Officer Brian Sicknick, who died the following day. And Ronald Colton McAbee, a former sheriff’s deputy who was sentenced to nearly six years in prison for assaulting police officers. As DOJ detailed, McAbee held down a police officer who had been “knocked to the ground, kicked, and stripped of his baton by other rioters” enabling the crowd to viciously beat him. As a result, “the officer sustained physical injuries, including a head laceration, concussion, elbow injury, bruising, and bodily abrasions.”

Daniel Joseph “DJ” Rodriguez who used a stun gun on Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone and was sentenced to 12.5 years for his bevy of crimes. And David Dempsey who prosecutors called “one of the most violent” Jan. 6 attackers—who assaulted and injured numerous police officers by spraying then with pepper spray and hitting them with various items including a metal crutch, chairs and a long wooden pole. He pled guilty and was sentenced to two decades in prison.

Then there are the leaders of the militant groups the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been convicted of “Seditious Conspiracy”—which is almost as serious as Treason. As DOJ noted, the Oath Keepers leaders “plotted to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power” and then came to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 “with paramilitary gear and supplies including firearms, tactical vests with plates, helmets, and radio equipment.” Yet Trump freed them from prison despite their sentences of nearly 20 years.

These are violent and dangerous people—including many with military experience and tactical planning skills–who Trump pardoned and released from jail. Why? Trump—like any other aspiring dictators—wants to make a public showing that if you commit crimes and violence on his behalf, he will have your back.

However, there is also an even more sinister reason for Trump’s pardons of the most violent attackers. Trump wants to incentivize others in MAGA to do the same in the future—with the implicit promise being “I will pardon you like I did the Jan. 6 terrorists.”

That is not just my view. That what authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained to me last year when I interviewed her about Trump’s praise of the Jan. 6 attackers and vow to pardon them. She first shared that Trump—like other fascist leaders—is trying “to change the perception of violence. To get people to see that violence is not negative.” Trump is thereby conditioning his supporters to believe that. “Violence is sometimes morally necessary and even righteous, and even patriotic.”

As to Trump’s promise of pardons, Ben-Ghiat explained, “All authoritarians use pardons because why do you want people sitting in jail–the worst people in the world–who are for you the best people and could serve your goals?”

We’ll find out if it worked for Trump when and if people publicly protest his decisions and actions. 

The Washington Post: Clemency for Oath Keepers, Proud Boys fuels extremism threat, experts say.

President Donald Trump defended his decision to free all of roughly 1,600 Jan. 6 riot defendants on Tuesday as the leaders of two extremist groups who played outsize roles in the Capitol attack walked out of federal prisons after serving a fraction of their sentences for seditious conspiracy. Trump called the conspirators’ sentences “ridiculous and excessive,” saying he pardoned “people that were treated unbelievably poorly.”

But counterterrorism experts say the pardons could further embolden fringe groups and hamper the Justice Department’s fight against political violence.

Former Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was headed home to Miami from a Louisiana prison and expected to address the media Tuesday at the airport, his lawyer said, freed from the longest sentence in the riot — 22 years — for mobilizing his right-wing group as an “army” to keep Trump in power as Congress met to confirm the 2020 election.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years, was released shortly after midnight in Cumberland, Maryland, his lawyer said, and emerged later Tuesday outside the D.C. jail to await release of those held on Jan. 6 charges. Rhodes was found guilty of urging Trump to use paramilitary groups to hold the White House and bringing armed followers to Washington ready for “civil war.”

Extremism researchers raised concerns over the message their freedom sends to armed militia-style groups or others with violent anti-government views. If those convicted of plotting such violence against the government walked free with support from the nation’s commander in chief,would others be energized to take up more action?

“Those groups of course are going to see the return of battle-hardened leaders, who in addition to having a kind of real-life legitimacy due to having actually fought the government, will also have a strong sense of victimhood and martyrdom, which will further radicalize and fuel recruitment platforms,” said Jacob Ware, a Council on Foreign Relations research fellow. “This move is going to make combating terrorism far more difficult, not just over the next four years as groups feel like they have an ally in the White House, but beyond that as well.”

Ware called the pardons “a pretty catastrophic moment for domestic counterterrorism.”

The Proud Boys and especially the Oath Keepers “have been relatively dormant for several years now,” hit very hard and deterred by the seditious conspiracy cases, he said.

“In the past when individuals were acquitted of this crime, recognized as among the most serious in a democracy, it incontrovertibly breathed new life into far-right violent extremism in the United States,” said Bruce Hoffman, a veteran counterterrorism and homeland security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 1988 a jury in Fort Smith, Arkansas, acquitted 14 white supremacists of seditious conspiracy, revitalizing an anti-government militia movement that spurred the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City five years later, Hoffman said.

I guess we’ll find out soon enough if these predictions are accurate.

I’m sure you’ve seen the Nazi salute that Elon Musk performed during a speech at Trump’s inaugural “parade.” Personally, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the salute was genuine and intended to shock, but some observers are trying to minimize it.

Some commentary:

Martin Pengelly at The Guardian: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally.

Elon Musk waded into controversy on Monday when he gave back-to-back fascist-style salutes during celebrations of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.

“I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” the owner of SpaceX, X and Tesla, the richest person on earth and a major Trump donor and adviser, told Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington.

Musk then slapped his right hand into his chest, fingers splayed, before shooting out his right arm on an upwards diagonal, fingers together and palm facing down.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which campaigns against antisemitism, defines the Nazi salute as “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down”.

As the crowd roared, Musk turned and saluted again, his arm and hand slightly lower.

“My heart goes out to you,” Musk said, striking himself on the chest again. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured. Thanks to you. We’re gonna have safe cities, finally safe cities. Secure borders, sensible spending. Basic stuff. And we’re gonna take ‘Doge’ to Mars.” [….]

Social media users expressed shock at Musk’s gesture. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, said: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute and a very belligerent one too.”

Musk did not immediately comment, though he did repost footage of his remarks that included the second salute and endorsed memes seeking to turn footage of his salutes into jokes.

One X user wrote: “Can we please retire the calling people a Nazi thing?”

Musk wrote: “Yeah exactly” and added a “yawning” emoji.

Nonetheless, Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, described Musk delivering “a Roman salute, a fascist salute most commonly associated with Nazi Germany”.

The ADL, meanwhile, says that in Germany between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi salute “was often accompanied by chanting or shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ or ‘Sieg Heil.’ Since world war two, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have continued to use the salute, making it the most common white supremacist hand sign in the world.”

Kate Connolly at The Guardian: ‘The gesture speaks for itself’: Germans respond to Musk’s apparent Nazi salute.

There were angry reactions across Europe to Elon Musk’s apparent use of a salute banned for its Nazi links in Germany, where some condemned it as malicious provocation or an outreach of solidarity to far-right groups.

Michel Friedman, a prominent German-French publicist and former deputy chair of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, described Musk’s actions – at an event after Donald Trump’s swearing in as US president – as a disgrace and said Musk had shown that a “dangerous point for the entire free world” had been reached.

Friedman, who descends from a family of Polish Jews, hardly any of whom survived the Holocaust, told the daily Tagesspiegel he had been shocked when watching the inauguration live on television, adding that as far as he was concerned Musk had unambiguously performed the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute, despite attempts to downplay it.

“I thought to myself, the breaking of taboos is reaching a point that is dangerous for the entire free world. The brutalisation, the dehumanisation, Auschwitz, all of that is Hitler. A mass murderer, a warmonger, a person for whom people were nothing more than numbers – fair game, not worth mentioning,” Friedman said.

Charlotte Knobloch, the president of the Jewish community in Munich and Upper Bavaria, described the gesture as “highly disconcerting”. But she said it was not as significant as Musk’s recent attempts to meddle in German politics, where he has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland ahead of next month’s federal election.

“Far more worrying are Elon Musk’s political positions, his offensive interference in the German parliamentary election campaign and his support for a party whose anti-democratic aims should be under no illusions,” she said in a statement.

The Washington Post: Musk’s straight-arm gesture embraced by right-wing extremists regardless of what he meant.

Right-wing extremists are celebrating Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture during a speech Monday, although his intention wasn’t totally clear and some hate watchdogs are saying not to read too much into it….

Many social media users noticed that the gesture looked like a Nazi salute. Musk has only fanned the flames of suspicion by not explicitly denying those claims in a dozen posts since, though he did make light of the criticism and lashed out at people making that interpretation.

“The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” Musk posted on X several hours after he left the stage.

Critics and fans alike of the Tesla CEO and world’s richest man were quick to react to the gesture.

“The White Flame will rise again,” a chapter of the white nationalist group White Lives Matter posted on Telegram.

“Maybe woke really is dead,” white nationalist Keith Woods posted on X.

“Did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler …” right-wing commentator Evan Kilgore posted on X. “We are so back.” 

Some expert commentary:

Kurt Braddock, a professor of communication at American University who studies extremism, radicalization and terrorism, said the gesture was a fascist salute and “people shouldn’t doubt what they saw.”

“I know what I saw, I know what the response to it was among elements of the extreme right including neo-Nazis, Braddock said. “And none of it is a laughing matter.”

1934: German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) giving the Nazi salute from his car whilst at the Nazi Party Congress. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Efraim Zuroff, the retired head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office and formerly the organization’s top Nazi hunter, said he also saw it as Nazi salute, and that it happened at U.S. presidential inauguration celebration made it especially shocking to see.

“It’s totally improper, and it raises all sorts of questions regarding his motivations, or his ignorance,” he said in a telephone interview from Israel. “This is America, the leader of the free world, the people who sacrificed 200,000 soldiers who died to defend Europe. He has to explain himself.”

In Europe where the fascist salute is associated with the hate, death and destruction of World War II, Musk’s arm gesture elicited outrage.

An Italian communist youth organization on Tuesday hung an effigy of Musk upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini’s body was hung upside down after he was executed during the final days of World War II. The organization, Cambiare Rotta (Change Course), noted in a Facebook post that a photo of the effigy had been removed by the social media company.

“We are correctly a little afraid, because that image is scary,’’ author Filippo Ceccarelli told Italian La7 private television.

Known as the Roman salute in Italy, the straight-arm greeting officially adopted in 1925 by the dictator Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime is banned in Italy though it is rarely prosecuted.

This post is getting too long, but I just want to share one more article by Andrew Perez, Asawin Suebsaeng at Rolling Stone: In Trump’s America, the Oligarchy Is Done Pretending to Care About You.

Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term on Monday before the world’s richest people. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg were among those seated closest to Trump as he demonized the most vulnerable members of our society, rewrote the history of his criminal prosecutions, and pledged to roll back Joe Biden’s efforts to address climate change. 

They smiled. They laughed. They thumbs-upped. They loved it. 

By the end of Inauguration Day, Trump had signed an executive order attempting to abolish “birthright citizenship,” cut off all asylum claims at the southern border, signed an order prohibiting federal recognition of transgender Americans, once again ended America’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and issued pardons to 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, including the seditionist leader of the Proud Boys. 

Not so long ago, some of the ultra-wealthy and big corporations would feign disgust with Trump. They paid lip service to social justice movements and pledged to make paltry efforts to reduce their climate impact. That’s all over now. America’s oligarchs are done pretending — there is too much money to be made and power to be amassed together. They’ll get to keep their Trump tax cuts, and can expect to receive more. The government investigations of their businesses and regulatory scrutiny will end. All they have to do is act like — or freely admit — they support Trump and his policies. Pay up, show respect, get paid, and whatever else you want. 

In the days leading up to Trump’s second inauguration, pockets of deep-blue Washington were transformed into a mecca of MAGA glitz and boozy, Trumpified access-peddling. In downtown D.C., Trump’s Sunday and Monday afternoon pageantries were quickly followed with rows of richly dressed MAGA fans and ticket-holders standing out in the cold, waiting to get into the evening’s selections of this exclusive party, sponsored by that corporate colossus, all to toast the dawn of yet another four years of reality-TV-style authoritarian decay.

Just a few short years ago, corporate America was so mad about the Jan. 6 insurrection, when Trump whipped up his supporters and they attacked the U.S. Capitol to try to block Joe Biden from becoming president. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it was “appalled by the violence at the Capitol,” and Zuckerberg, its CEO, declared on Jan. 7, 2021 that the company would block Trump from posting after its platform was used “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.” 

Zuckerberg’s concerns about the health of our democracy appear to have subsided. On Jan. 7 this year, he announced Facebook would end its fact-checking program. He also went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about how the “corporate world is pretty culturally neutered” and society has become “emasculated.” Meta, like many big corporations, made a large donation ($1 million) to Trump’s inaugural committee….

Due to cold weather, Trump’s coronation was moved inside, into the Capitol building his supporters ransacked four years ago. Holding the ceremony in the small Capitol rotunda gave it an exclusive, cozy feel and kept out the riff-raff: No commoners could watch Trump’s swearing-in live in-person — not even Republican governors, who were relegated to an overflow room. Only the elite of the elite and the best Trump supporters. Musk. Zuckerberg. Bezos. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat with them. Apple CEO Tim Cook was there. Former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush were seated in front of UFC’s Dana White. Rogan, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, and Turning Point USA chief Charlie Kirk were there, too….

Musk — who leads Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter) — came out as a MAGA fanatic this summer and leaned in, spending $153 million to boost Trump’s presidential campaign via his Super PAC. He amplified Trump’s campaign against migrants and undocumented immigrants, running ads decrying the “HISTORIC BORDER INVASION” and “illegal immigrants getting handouts.” [….]

Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chairman, has his own space business, Blue Origin, and Amazon provides cloud services to the government. The world’s second-richest man started cozying up to Trump not long before the election, when he killed The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Bezos, who’s owned the paper since 2013, wrote in a Post op-ed that “no quid pro quo of any kind” was to blame for his decision. After Trump won, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. The company, which is spending $40 million to license a documentary and a limited series about First Lady Melania Trump, recently deleted its public commitments to protecting the rights of Black and LGBTQ+ people from its website. The Post’s editorial board separately endorsed most of Trump’s Cabinet and Cabinet-level nominees….

Zuckerberg, the third-richest man in the world, was seen as a Trump enemy — specifically because he funded election infrastructure during the 2020 contest, after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump literally threatened to jail him for life. Following Trump’s win, Zuckerberg flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to suck up to the incoming commander in chief. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Meta announced it is ending its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and changed its policies to allow users to attack LGBTQ+ people as “mentally ill,” women as “crazy,” and Mexican immigrants as “trash.”

If corporate America used to toss liberals some cultural wins here and there, instead of improving anyone’s material conditions, the ultra-wealthy are done bothering with that charade now. 

There is no reason for America’s oligarchs to hide anymore, no penalty to pay. What matters, financially-speaking, is getting close to Trump. 

We are turning into post Soviet Russia. I wonder if it is going to be possible to fight this? We can only hope.