JackTReason

It is no surprise that I am excited at the prospect of a grandchild coming into the world. The excitement I feel for myself is only exceeded by the joy I feel for those two who are your parents. Like other grandparents-to-be, my mind has raced to consider what help I can be, what changes should I make, and what my role should be.

I have commonly heard that grandparents spoil their children. That visits to and from them will provide a steady stream of coddling and attention that may sabotage some level of discipline the parents work hard to instill.
Spoiling you? I do not see this as my role to you.
And I don’t think that most grandparents see this as their chief duty, if a duty at all. Most see love and affection as their main gift, and a reliable surrogate for stressed and tired parents. A dependable body to help when needed.

And yes, watching you grow and learn and become are the reward I will receive for my presence. And I will delight in the opportunity to introduce you to the forest and watch your eyes in wondrous fascination of nature. The building of a campfire and the cacophony of wildlife at the stages of the day are experiences I hope to share.
And I will gladly teach you to throw a ball and swing a golf club and tennis racket, or at least be an adjunct in that education. And I hope to watch as you see and smell your first experiences at the ancient arenas of sport. For sport teaches more than bodily movement and strength. It teaches us to cooperate and embrace our fellows. How to compete with respect, how to honor others achievement, and the importance of loss.

And I will tell you of the things I love, of cloth and wood, of textiles and colors, of words and sentences, of kindness and virtue. We need to see what others treasure in order to determine what our treasures will be.

I have gained a fair amount of knowledge and perhaps a measured amount of wisdom in my years. This is something that only my longevity and curiosity could have gathered. This is unique to me. Experience is a great teacher to those who know they are students. And more time in life’s classrooms means more lessons to share. These are lessons that would be different from anyone else.

No, it will not be my duty to create rules and laws for you to follow. You have parents capable to that task, parents who have your interests in mind and resources available to consult if they need advice. Though it will fall on me to occasionally enforce those rules, it isn’t for me to make them.

I can teach you much, but it isn’t for me to tell you what to believe. I have a whole history of undoing beliefs foisted on me by well-intentioned people in my own past. I will share with on occasion over time beliefs that I may have, but only to show how they were built, and why my grip of them remains tenuous.
I think rather that teaching you how to think a much more worthwhile endeavor. It will not be for me to fill your mind with content, though I suppose some great measure of that will happen planned and unplanned; but rather to load you with tools for how to think for yourself. It is this as a practical matter, that seems the best use of whatever wisdom I have gained; to teach you how to reason, how to discern, how to think. But not what to think. Your own thinking mind is the best tool for gaining knowledge.

Thoughts should be born, not placed in your mind.

But in this I speak only of some practical training, some function as a life tutor. A duty that falls short of what must be my main purpose where you are concerned. And that is to be always on your side and in your corner. A reliable lap of love and safety.
I promise now that I will always be there for you with love. I will never reject you, nor withhold my tender affection. I will always be your champion and never cause you to doubt that commitment. You will have in me someone you can completely rely on through all the days of your life, or more practically, my life, to accept you and cheer you on. I am not here to make you into someone, but to accept the someone that you become.

I am Papa. And the first time I hear you say that word to me will be the most joyous moment of my life.

This is about the religious belief of an atheist friend. Well, former friend, I suppose. The termination of said friendship has prompted this missive.

If it seems like an oxymoron, please understand that religious belief does not necessarily require a god, but rather, only belief in something without good reason. It isn’t the belief itself that is a problem, but the refusal to relinquish belief when it cannot be supported by reason.

There are many examples I could use from the 40 years I’ve known this man, but I’ll pick one incident. It is from his efforts to get me to subscribe to the belief that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were false flag operations by the US Government.
Of course the entire 9/11 conspiracy movement is rubbish. It is entirely implausible at every level of examination, and belief in it requires acceptance of wild assertions and the willful avoidance and rejection of provable facts. But that doesn’t stop the true believers.
In the incident that follows I was reminded of something I couldn’t place, and it took me several years to identify the moment it was from. When the memory came it revealed to me the religious nature of conspiracy belief.

The former friend I refer to, let’s call him Alex, had described several things which, as far as he was concerned had proven 9/11 was a false flag operation. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it describes an attack on oneself or ally that is framed as if it came from a rival or enemy. The first of these that I ever encountered was in grammar school. I went to a K-8 school in Chicago, and during that last year a student running for class president defaced his own campaign posters to elicit sympathy and tarnish his opponent. It actually worked, and when discovered, caused a removal from office and expulsion from school.

In the case of 9/11, the theory proposes that the government attacked and murdered its own citizens and blamed it on Islamic terrorists. The goal was to encroach on the freedoms of American citizens, create a more powerful government, justify invasion of Afghanistan and eventually Iraq, or a combination of all three. None of these arguments are sound, but that would take a lot of space for debunking that has been thoroughly done elsewhere.
For this we focus on a single moment.

Alex insisted that I listen to some audio he had. He described it as amongst the most compelling support for this conspiracy that he knew of, and implied that it should at least open my mind to the truth as he believed it.
It was a recording of about ten minutes in length of a presentation made by a former FBI agent named Ted Gunderson. I had never heard of him before that moment (not a surprise, really) but was to understand that he was a strong proponent of the 9/11 truth conspiracy theory.
The first five minutes or so was Gunderson relating his background. Decades in the FBI as an agent, and then as supervisor of various district offices managing hundreds of agents. He made it clear that he was a proficient administrator of bureaucracy and an expert in criminal investigation with many years of experience.
The second half of this speech concerned two things. First he said that the World Trade Center twin towers collapse could not have been caused by the planes that hit them; and that he was in touch with current (unidentified) FBI personnel who fed him secret information that supported the conspiracy claim.

Alex was blind to what I saw as obvious. Gunderson had debunked himself. His own words made it clear that there was no good reason to take him seriously. It was clear to me that he was a zealot, incapable of critical examination of his belief. I’ll explain for those who miss the point.
His prelude was to establish himself as an authority. To someone untrained in critical thinking, such a background as his, decades of service in a prestigious and trusted institution, made whatever he said compelling. But what I heard was admission by omission of lack of any relevant expertise that could give authority to his statement about the collapse of the towers. He didn’t suggest any study in structural engineering or metallurgy. He didn’t add any evidence or statements from those with such expertise, nor offer any support at all, but instead relied entirely on assertion and insistence. His opinion had no more weight because he had been a criminal investigator, than had he been a commercial fisherman or had played three years of semi-pro baseball.
It would be like me suggesting that my twenty years of maritime experience gave authority to my pronouncements about how far a regulation football could be thrown. It has no bearing on the argument.
And Gunderson should have known that. As someone with as much experience as he had, and with having sought out experts for cases he investigated, he must have known he was out of his depth. And yet he was willing to make claims on a matter where he knew he had no expertise. At that moment he became unreliable as a source of information. He demonstrated that he was willing to pass off his unqualified opinion as expert analysis. It didn’t matter what he said after that. For any reasonable member of his audience he was done. Dismissed as a crank.
The second part of what he said, about secret information should also be dismissed accordingly. First, because of what I just covered, that whatever he claimed was unreliable at face value; and second because claims of secret knowledge are an unfalsifiable argument. There is no way to prove that he doesn’t have secret information. His assertion requires acceptance without evidence, thus making his argument an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. It is a claim without evidence spoken by a man without credibility.

(I did look up Ted Gunderson and was not surprised to find that he had become obsessed with belief in Satan worshipers sacrificing babies, as well as many other conspiracy claims. He had dived down various rabbit holes of conspiracy, and even a perfunctory search would render him as a true crank.)

But Alex looked at me after playing this audio. He was nodding his head, and widening his eyes as if to say, “Now do you believe?”
Of course I didn’t, but something seemed so familiar about his posture and his expectation of my response. It took me years to recognize where I had experienced it.

It was way back in 1977. I was a seventeen year old Seaman Apprentice stationed on a Tank Landing Ship based in Little Creek, Virginia. While on board that ship I had several different Christian sailors attempt to convert me to their churches. Assembly of God, Pentecostals, and Southern Baptists to name the three that I remember. Two shipmates belonging to the latter of these invited me to their church to hear a sermon.
I had been raised Roman Catholic, complete with gothic sculptures, statues of Mary and the saints, Jesus on the crucifix, and priests resplendent in finery befitting a chain of command that led to the Vicar of Christ himself. All elements of an organization crafted to instill trust and faith. So, the setting of the church my shipmates took me was unorthodox, literally.
The minister wore a powder-blue leisure suit and stood at a podium that bore a simple cross. This was clearly all about the minister and his presentation of revealed truth. I do not recall if I ever heard the minister’s name, nor do I remember his face, but if you imagine Jerry Falwell you’d have a pretty good picture. Heck, I don’t know that it wasn’t Jerry Falwell.

The minister spent a half-hour railing about men with long hair and women who wore pants, along with a lot of other blather about who was a true Christian and heaven and hell and whatnot.
After this was over my shipmates asked me if I had been saved. “From what?” I asked.
“From going to hell,” they answered. “Don’t you want to go to heaven?”
“Was that guy in the powder-blue leisure suit going?”
They nodded yes, he was.
“Then I’ll pass,” I said. “I’m not going to spend eternity hanging around that guy.”

These two young men were dyed in the wool Christian believers. They had heard all of this before, and believed it completely. And each time they heard this minister speak they became more certain of the belief they held. Each experience at such a meeting was a heart-filling reenforcement of the belief they came in with. With no skepticism behind them and without the application of any critical thinking, they were unable to understand how someone else wouldn’t be convinced by their preacher’s message. They couldn’t see that others might view this as the ravings and rantings of a bigot and a cult leader. Utterly unconvincing and void of any reasonable arguments of support.

Let’s go back to Alex and Ted Gunderson and how these are related.
I realized it was the same thing. Alex was a true believer and part of the choir that Ted Gunderson was preaching to. He might as well have been standing behind a pulpit and talking about how much Jesus loves us. Identical in all but the words and claims. Alex listened to Gunderson with the same lack of skepticism that those young men in Virginia had so many years ago absorbed the claims of their minister. Gunderson was a priest presenting truth revealed to him through secret communication. His anonymous sources were no different that God speaking to the minister. Ridiculous to anyone not in the cult, gospel to those who are.

I met Alex in 1980 when he joined the ship I was on. (A different ship, this one based in California.) He was at the time a new recruit, fresh from Navy “A” school in Orlando, Florida where he had been evangelized. At some point later he abandoned that belief. I’m not sure what did it for him, but in retrospect I can’t believe his journey away from deism was similar to mine. Mine was a growing appreciation for logic and reason, and the requirement that my beliefs be sufficiently justified through those tools. Over time I couldn’t rationalize the stories from the Bible and make them align with any kind of reality. And gradually the very concept of the supernatural became just so much fantasy forced into a hole where knowledge ended.
I wonder if Alex had simply heard some George Carlin sketch humorously shredding the traditional beliefs in God, and just abandoned the belief on the spot. Or if it was the accumulation of people scoffing at the silliness of so much of biblical belief.
But what became clear in time, in a very long time admittedly, was that Alex had never adopted reason as a means to work out truth, or skepticism as a tool to resist assertions from those we are trained to trust. What also became clear to me was his willingness to accept as true the claims that align with pre held belief.

There is no intellectual difference between true believers, regardless of the belief.

Alex held many other conspiracy beliefs, from the laughable and harmless belief that NASA faked the moon landings, or that jet planes are spraying chemicals over the cities; to darker ones that really caused me to question and ultimately end our friendship; such as the belief in a secret cabal of Jewish bankers who controlled the world behind the scenes, and that the holocaust didn’t happen as reported. And more recently, of allowing the current viral pandemic to cull the population of the unhealthy and unfit, in lieu of vaccination, which he considers to be one of the tools of world domination the aforementioned cabal use.

I suspect that Alex had, when he surrendered belief in God, retained his belief in the Devil. Not an actual devil or Satan or whatever, but perhaps a more nebulous evil that exists as an entity. Like some invisible miasma. A force that attracts bad actors and influences them to ill exploits. Perhaps he had adopted belief in “the force” and its dark side that were introduced in the Star Wars franchise. I know many who do subscribe to that.
It is much easier in a world full of science and reason to move the supernatural away from a single creator and a band of angels and to a vague and amorphous “force.” I read once that the decline in religious belief in America was matched by an increase in belief in extraterrestrial visitation. Our need to feel we are at the center of the universe. If there isn’t any Gods paying special attention to us, than perhaps it is the aliens.

As far as Alex went, I concluded that efforts to bring him around with reason were never going to work as he would never accept he was wrong about anything. I recognized that I had to face the antisemitism he supported, and the inhumane attitude towards other people. A clear-eyed look without the filters that four decades of friendship had applied. He would be quite comfortable disposing of unappealing members of the population. It was easy to imagine him as a Pilgrim to early America, smiling at the natives while carrying armloads of blankets. Smallpox would only destroy the weak.
And he wasn’t content to hold his beliefs separate from our interactions like others I know where we politely agree to disagree. In Alex I had seen already through countless encounters that he wouldn’t keep any of these ideas to himself. Truly, he was bent on convincing me of those beliefs.
And finally I realized, that whatever time I have left in my life, it wasn’t enough time for crazy.

The Civil Rights Act was passed and signed in 1964. As I was born in 1960, the act was something I learned about years later. When my school taught me about this act, about ten years or so after it passed, the events that lead up to it seemed to be part of ancient history. A story in black and white film clips and pictures of men and women marching, of police and firehoses and savage dogs. Of soldiers walking a small black girl to school, and the National Guard forcing a Governor to stand down. Of lunch counters and buses and bridges. Of black citizens and white authority.

I grew up in Chicago, having moved there in 1968. I saw plenty of examples of racism and prejudice and while I learned that it was wrong, I didn’t connect any of it to the changing laws and practices, or to the segregation of the recent past or the integration going on around me and throughout the country. I saw the racism, and as I was a white kid it wasn’t hidden from me. On the contrary, racists took my skin color as a sign of alliance; a mark of confederacy.

And I went through my young life, from high school and into the Navy, having racists assume I would laugh at their racist jokes while almost simultaneously listening to white people tell me that racism was all but gone in the north of America. Sure, there were still racism in the South, but up north we were civilized. This was a lie folks told broadly, and only believed by those doing the telling.

But I didn’t live in the South with separate water fountains and bathrooms, and I didn’t join the Navy before the military was integrated. The America that I knew was functionally integrated yet remained heavily committed to segregation. The instances of black and white personal integration were more rare than intentional segregation. Whether it was at school or aboard ship, people segregated. And we accepted this as culturally comfortable. While the occasional black man sitting with a table full of white people wasn’t all that rare, people actually did a double-take when they saw a solitary white man freely sharing company with a group of blacks. The policies and laws had changed, and some number of the people accepted that as just and good, but so many others rejected it in their own lives and community. The laws had changed, but you can’t stop people from choosing their company.

Many years later I was told that integration had economically hurt the American blacks more than it helped them. My impulse was to reject this. Perhaps it was the source. I often heard from racist whites how things were better for the blacks before the laws had changed. This still goes on today, with the worst of them promoting the benefits slavery brought to African Americans. (Look at how bad things were in Africa before we brought them here! In The States the blacks were housed and fed and clothed. etc.)

Of course it was better to open the whole of the country up to everyone without restriction to race. I read about separate but equal, and redlining, and the Green Book. Integration must have been a positive all around. But I was mistaken, and though I was told this several more times, I didn’t fully understand it for many years. There was truth to that claim, though not for the reasons the racists I knew offered.

In 2009 I bought a small wreck of a house in Michigan, north of Muskegon and inland from Lake Michigan. The idea was to reduce my cost of living to as low as I could, and so afford choices that greater economic freedom allow.

The neighborhood I found my home in had been platted as an addition to the resort community of Lakewood back in the beginnings of the twentieth century but had never been built up. The Great Depression stopped the building of cabins, and the resort closed. The housing became permanent homes to workers who filled their rolls in the arsenal of democracy that was Muskegon during WWII. Eventually that resort was incorporated as the village of Lakewood Club, but without the platted addition across the township line. 

The rapid increase in industrialization Muskegon felt during those war years put a demand on housing. One of the solutions was houses built from kits. All the parts numbered and packed to be put together by the homeowner or contractor. We all have heard of the kit homes from Sears, but there were other companies too. My house was one of those, though it was located in Muskegon proper. Late in the fifties developers wanted the land it and many of its cousins sat on, and an entrepreneur bought up many of these small kit homes and moved them north to this platted but undeveloped neighborhood where they were then rented out. The neighborhood was settled by mostly African Americans, many of whom would eventually buy the houses outright. Many of these homes were gone by the time I arrived, and though some several remain, the neighborhood is nothing like it was in days past.

In my research of these properties and this neighborhood I found that the recently demolished roadhouse a quarter-mile west of me had once been called the Ebony Club, and following that I learned of the Chitlin’ Circuit. The Chitlin’ Circuit was a collection of clubs and theaters throughout the country that catered to black entertainers and audiences. Famous entertainers such as The Temptations played there. As I dug deeper into this I learned about the summer resort known as Idlewild. It was in Lake County, Michigan, and catered exclusively to blacks. It may have been the largest summer camping resort in the country, and was founded in the early twentieth century in response to Jim Crow laws.

The business flourished, as did many other black-owned businesses throughout the country. Across the country, businesses owned by African Americans and catering to the black race were a central part of the wealth in those communities. But when The Civil Rights Act was passed and signed, it legally opened white-owned businesses to non-white customers. It was a practice that many whites had been accepting as a matter of economic advantage. But the end of segregation, both as a practical issue and a legal one, did indeed spell the demise of many businesses that formally had a captive audience. Idlewild exists today as an unincorporated community, with a museum I plan to visit once the pandemic has passed.

Let me be clear as to what it was I realized. Integration put money on a one-way street, going from the pockets of the black community to those in the white community. This is about money.

The real failure here was from the other direction. While much of white America objected to segregation and lauded the Civil Rights Act, they didn’t embrace the practice. They failed in integrating themselves with the black community and black owned business. It was the other side of integration.

And for this discussion I will not dive into the practices of many towns and neighborhoods of establishing covenants to maintain those color restrictions that had been before codified in law. Here I only acknowledge what was never presented to me when I was taught about the end of segregation. While my people were patting themselves on the back for allowing blacks to shop at their stores and eat in their restaurants, there was no effort made to do the reverse.

What should have happened but didn’t, was the opposite movement of some money from the white pocket to black business. Integration became synonymous with allowing blacks to join whites. In truth it should have been (and still needs to be) both whites and blacks joining each other.

And yes, there are those who practice this very thing. But too few do, and too few recognize that this failure on the part of white America is partially responsible for the failure of the proportional success of black business.

I am not here at this moment to address reparations for slavery, or the myriad business practices that banks used to keep the upper hand white, nor all of those other actions taken by businesses and governments to foster economic segregation. I take this moment to offer my commitment to patronize black owned business in my community, intentionally and deliberately. And ask for other white Americans to do the same. Let us integrate some of our money as it should have been done all along.

January 2021 – post insurrection

I imagine that those reading this understand what the First Amendment of the US Constitution says about speech, and they also understand what that speech that applies to. But to summarize, it protects the public from government restrictions on speech. That is all. It doesn’t force anyone to listen, nor does it force anyone to give you a soapbox to speak from. It merely says the government can’t lock you up for what you say. But even in that statement it leaves out, by omission, certain obvious assumptions about speech. As has been decided by the Supreme Court, it is fair to assume that the founders never intended for incitement to violence or speech that could cause panic to be so protected. The classic claim about falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater as an example.
The speech so protected is limited, and applies solely to Government restriction. So, when Twitter banned off their platform the further speech of the sitting US President, Donald Trump, it was not violating his free speech. It is their business, after all. And as you don’t have to let someone come into your house and scream obscenities at your children, Twitter doesn’t have to allow Trump to use their house to say what he will. They could ban anyone they like. Their decision to do so wasn’t based on his politics, but rather on his incitement of a crowd to violence that was to them, the last straw in a series of obvious and deliberate attempts to raise anger to action amongst his followers by spreading lies and misinformation. To bolster this claim, I refer to the numerous tags they added to false information tweets he has made prior to the banning. They have, just as every other social medial platform has, standards of use that give them legal right to eject you from their sites without ramifications.
Facebook and a host of other sites have done the same.

But the larger question comes to mind, how in this world of mass communication through social media is free speech supposed to be delivered if those platforms can shut you down? Could they, one may ask, eject someone simply for political speech that the platform disagreed with? Well, yes. In fact, on the alternate site Parler, it was common for them to kick off users for disagreeing with the far-right agenda they present (despite the irony in their claims of being a free speech platform). As a note, Amazon web service dropped Parler off their servers for failure to curb speech that threatened violence and promoted sedition. Another example of a private entity choosing who they do business with.

Take a walk back in history and see people picking out public corners to speak. There, so long as you were abiding by some rules, you could say what you will, a freedom you would not enjoy on someone’s private property.
And to reach a larger audience, you could find a printer will to print you message, or later a radio station, and still later a television station to allow you to have your say. And if none of those places would let you have your say through their organ, you could build your own press, etc., etc., etc.

Are we then in danger of having a corporate oligarchy controlling our ability to spread our message? Judging from what I have been easily able to access, no. Not anymore than Thomas Paine was while needed someone to print his pamphlets.
And what newspaper is required to print the opinions and positions of the public? Most accept letters to their editors, but use their own discretion which to print.

And when it comes to extreme rhetoric, what exactly is wrong with some of that speech? And why shouldn’t it be allowed? After all, In the marketplace of ideas, the truth will bear out; is a maxim long established by jurists of great esteem over the centuries. The freedom to reasonably argue ideas and debate them in open and frank discussion is at the core of intellectual honesty. Why suppress it at all? Wouldn’t it be better to hear it, and then have it countered with alternative speech?
Well, yes. I suppose it would if, and only if there were measures taken to get that alternate speech out and have it heard. False speech cannot be countered if the reply is not heard. Platforms of social media are built to exclude alternatives to speech. You see those you follow, and are fed posts that correspond to your taste. You are funneled into an echo chamber of those that agree, and away from opinions to the contrary. Such platforms tacitly limit open discussion.
But what I’m talking about here is not the free expression of ideas and your unwillingness to hear others, I’m talking about deliberate falsehoods, propaganda made and built to be fed into that echo chamber to convince people of some travesty that in fact, never happened. Propaganda.

Propaganda can be used by almost anyone. And it is certainly used by all sides to one degree of another; especially in times of war. But the idea that it should be expressed by the President and used against the other branches of government is wrong and should be restriced. And those who believe it do not have a right to hear it on whatever platform they like. But more importantly, we as a people should reject that speech and make it clear to our leaders that we expect and demand honesty and factually based information. When a person in power speaks, they should be held accountable for speaking untruths. I do not think that the application of free speech should extend to the same degree to those who are elected as it does to the public at large. When then President Trump falsely stated that the election was fraudulent and stolen from him by corruption, this should not be protected as free speech. His authority has weight, and his making that speech inspired others to accept his claim as true and act out against lawful authority as a result.
Public officials should be held to a higher standard of speech and be expected to verify the claims they make. The claims he made were actually checked and found wanting evidence. For him to continue to make those false claims should not be protected, but rather they should be viewed as incitement to lawlessness.

We curb free speech in government regularly. During war government censors blacked out parts of letters written by those in the field if they felt they might compromise the war effort. Details of location or troop strength were censored. That speech was restricted and censored. Diplomats are selected for their ability to self-censor. They must carefully gauge what they say with the understanding that their speech could cause other governments to rise to action. And if they fail to be so guided, they are removed. In short, their speech is restricted.

We must set truth as the standard for speech by those elected to lead us. And when they abuse their official platforms to make false claims and incite the masses to action against the lawful elections they should face consequences.

One. More. Time.

400,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.
And Donald Trump could have helped but didn’t. Look at the tapes. It is all on record. He downplayed the seriousness of this virus when he knew how serious it was.
LOOK at the tapes. This was all recorded. He told us it would go away when spring came. He said their were 15 cases that would soon be zero. That is on tape at a press conference.
But at the same time he was also telling Bob Woodward that he KNEW how serious it was. On tape. LISTEN to the tapes.
He refused to wear a mask. He made fun of those who wore masks. He attacked the doctors and scientists who were telling us how serious this was.When Governors took action to save their citizens he mocked them. He called on his supporters to LIBERATE those states. As the cases and deaths climbed he told us everything was fine. As the cases and deaths RAGED he said we were turning a corner.

He lied to you and me and we knew it. And you should have known it. But you wouldn’t listen. He could have done something but didn’t. We just passed 400,000 dead. If you are still defending this DEVIL than shame on you. We told you. The scientists and doctors told you. If you didn’t listen that is on you.

J’ACCUSE!

Tomorrow we start anew. We will try to rebuild this country and heal the wounds. A new President will take over and try to help make things right. I don’t want to hear a GODDAMN thing from those who supported this MONSTER.
You had your chance. Admit you were wrong or shut the fuck up and get out of the way.

A century ago the Klan was popular in West Michigan. While it seemed to have peaked nationally at the beginning of the decade, it was strongly supported by many in the first half of the 1920s. It was less about hatred of blacks in the region than it was about hatred of immigrants and Catholics, though racism was still a part of the story. But support and membership fell dramatically in 1926 after a murder that occurred just a few hundred yards from my current home. A local Klan Knight, who was Constable of Blue Lake Township, angered by the election of a German American Catholic to the position of Township Supervisor, mailed a bomb to the Three Lakes Tavern that the supervisor owned, killing that man, his daughter, and his daughter’s fiancee. Their wedding was scheduled for the following Saturday, and they together opened what they assumed was a wedding present. The bomber expressed regret about the two children, saying that he didn’t think about the wedding. The aftermath shocked the region and caused many to drop their membership in the Klan, though we all know that hatred and group superiority never really goes away.
I know a lot more about this, but this isn’t a history lesson. I bring it up because I am hopeful for a parallel to today. I hope that like then, the masses of Americans who tacitly supported the various factions who raged against the election of Joe Biden, against Black Lives Matter, and against other immigrant and minority groups, will look at this assault against our Capitol and the principals of our nation and reject it, as they did 94 years ago.I am hopeful they will see the worst of what they have endorsed, and reject those who try to continue this action.

Tomorrow is January 14. It has two anniversaries of note to history that I would like to highlight for Americans today.
The first is 1784, which is Ratification Day. It was the day when the Treaty of Paris was signed, officially ending the Revolutionary War. Peace with the other side is possible. Even after a long fight.
The second is 1943, when the Casablanca Conference took place. This was a meeting between our President Roosevelt, Britsh Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and others to plan the next phase of World War Two. The reason this is an important anniversary in my reckoning, is that it is where Roosevelt borrowed a phrase from Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, and said that the allies would seek only “Unconditional Surrender” of the Axis forces.

We are today facing an uprising not seen in this country since the Civil War, and the last action taken was Impeachment of the sitting President for the second time. This time for inciting to riot those who attacked our national Capitol. The process of electing our leaders is under threat by those in the minority, who having lost a free and fair election seek to impose their will on the majority. They do so with threats to leaders and with direct attacks against the body politic. As the Speaker of the House of Representatives said today, We do not negotiate with Terrorists, I add:
We should not accept anything less than Unconditional Surrender from the traitor that we have Impeached, and the seditious mob that follow him.

To the Republic we stand.

It Failed

The story of what happened at the US Capitol on January 6 has been told in different ways. Apologists for Trump tells us that it was a peaceful protest and a few bad apples broke into the Capitol and rummaged around a bit. Others acknowledge that it was a protest that got out of hand.

But there are some very strong pieces of evidence that point to the most sinister of conclusions: Trump tried to overthrow the nation with an Executive coup.

Legality:

First, Trump’s legal argument had no plausible avenue for success long before he called his followers to join him in DC on that morning. He claimed and seemed to believe that the Vice-President, who had an important but entirely ceremonial role in the counting of the Elector ballots, could simply refuse to accept some of them and send them back to the states. This would leave no candidate with enough electoral votes, leaving the matter to be decided by Congress on a one vote per state basis. Trump might well have been delusional enough to believe this, but he certainly had plenty of lawyers around him who knew that it wasn’t an option. And the Vice-President knew it wasn’t an option and told him so. The simple truth is that such an attempt would be an unlawful act, putting the VP in legal jeopardy. More than that, it would have been a direct attempt to undermine the Constitutional process used to select the President.

That’s right: Trump was asking Pence to participate in a coup. Drop all the talk about plausible legality as there wasn’t any.

The legal arguments ended long before January 6. Legal avenues closed absolutely when the electors from the states voted.

But they should have ended long before. After the separate states counted votes and declared the victories, some room was open for challenges. Some states had results close enough for candidates to ask for recounts. Trump asked for one in Georgia, and also paid for a partial recount in Wisconsin. These operations were done, and the results were the same. These included hand counts of ballots, completely destroying his claim of computers changing votes.

At that point he should have recognized that the election was fair and concede. He didn’t. And when the Department Of Justice said that they found no evidence of large scale fraud, and those several states all declared their elections fair, he should have stopped and conceded. He didn’t.

For all of this, the counting of the electors at the US Capitol by the joint session of Congress had no real legal value. The idea that members of Congress could object to the electoral votes in some state or another is valid, but that would only require those bodies to separate and debate those challenges, and return to vote. There was never a realistic chance that the outcome would be different – unless you add treachery.

If, you might offer, an armed mob of citizens swarmed Congress and captured and detained House and Senate members unwilling to oppose the electoral vote. This would allow the remaining members, Trump supporters all, to form a quorum and reject the electoral votes of those states, throwing the decision to Congress.

This would be straight up treason and a coup d’tat. Dig through historical examples to find similar events that installed governments in other countries that are similar, but none change the basic idea that this would be an overthrow of the nation, and would reject the validity of the Constitution.

This is the only plausible goal that President Trump could have had.

The actors:

For months Trump had been denying his election loss and claiming massive fraud. He took his claims to court almost sixty times and in front of about 80 judges, many of whom he had nominated for their seats. All were either rejected or withdrawn lacking merit or standing. And all of the legal processes with those several states found no evidence of his claims and universally agreed in the stated results. Despite all of this Trump had a devoted following of true believers who accepted his claims without question or examination. Their willingness to turn on anyone who rejected Trump’s assertions was clear and openly announced. Members of Trump’s administration who had been completely loyal to him, and had engaged in operations of questionable legality in his support, such as Attorney General William Barr, and Vice-President Mike Pence were denounced the moment they parted ways. Preceding the assault on the Capitol, his followers were publicly calling for Pence to face a firing squad. During the assault on the Capitol, Trump’s supporters built a gallows on the mall.

Before Trump was President and was still a candidate, he famously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. His recognition of the cultish loyalty from his base was clear even back then. His regular calls to his supporters to take back their country that had been stolen, and insistence that all who opposed him were the enemy had a calculated effect that he was clearly aware of. Trump knew what would happen if he gave the right encouragement. And like a Mafia don who never actually orders a murder, it happens anyway when he states his displeasure with the victim, and nods at one of his capos.

But let me first separate out some of his supporters.

There were, of course, many of his supporters who went simply to show support and who would never engage in a violent act. They range from those who supported his policies to the civically illiterate. Many, many of his supporters have no real concept of how our Government is structured, or how the process of making laws works. A common belief I have found is that the President is like the CEO of a company, and the other branches are subordinate to him and are required to enact whatever policies he sees fit. These people were there in great numbers, with most having no plan to engage in physical attacks against the government.

But there are also large numbers of those who are very willing to do so; and not only willing, but hoping for that opportunity. Groups like the Proud Boys, to name one, were actively planning actions. They were openly vocal about their intentions. For weeks they talked on social media about meeting in Washington, DC to take back their country. They discussed methods of sneaking weapons into the city (against local law.) They made both veiled and open threats of violence. They had previously presented themselves with arms at state capitols around the country in support of Trump. One separate group in Michigan has been arrested for plotting to kidnap and bring to “trial” the Governor of that state. Their backup plan, which they contacted other militia groups for personnel, was to bring hundreds of armed men to overwhelm the State Capitol and kill those who tried to stop them. Sound familiar?

There are also groups and actors inspired by conspiracy outlets, such as Qanon, who believe that Trump is waging a war against a deep state of corrupt pedophiles. A whole book could be written about the ludicrous claims that are believed by some of these people, so I won’t say more here; but the numbers who believe these conspiracies speak of who was coming to DC and what they were willing to do. And there is little doubt that Trump is aware of their willingness too.

During the assault on the Capitol, countless photographs and videos were taken. As these were analyzed it was noticed that many of these actors brought with them personal restraint devices. Zip tie handcuffs and other tools which would have no place in a spontaneous mob riot, but would be brought if the intention was to capture and hold people. There were actors within the Capitol who went from room to room looking for elected officials, and it appears a concerted effort was made to surround and detain the entire 1st branch of our government. They made an outright assault against Capitol Police, who stated that as they were being attacked and beaten, the attackers claimed they were “doing this for them.” A statement entirely inline with the militant goals of overthrow of government.

The President:

After years of building a base of followers seemingly willing to do anything he asked, and years of decrying all those who opposed him as enemies of the people, and after crafting the image of himself as a victim of corrupt and unfair forces allied against him; he then spent months declaring and restating the false claims of voter fraud. He called his follower to come to the Capital on January 6 to take back the country, and to stop the steal of the election. He gathered them in a rally and stoked the anger of this crowd. A crowd that he knew was full of actors willing and intending to do mayhem. He repeated his claims of fraud, repeated his calls for taking back the government, and then sent them marching (with the false promise of his participation) down the street to the Capitol to cheer on the loyal Congressional allies who were waiting. He repeated his wish for Pence, whose loyalty he now questioned, to take action to overturn the vote.

Trump left the stage and immediately returned to the White House where he watch the events unfold on television.

The police preparedness for such an event was absurdly planned. They had no real defense against such an assault that they should have know was coming. Investigations in the months and years ahead will tell us how and why this was the case.

But when calls were made to activate more police and national guard regiments to assist the Capitol Police, the appropriate authorities held back. It wasn’t the President who released these additional units, but the Vice-President. And when members of Congress called the Governor of Maryland to send his national guard, he was prevented from doing so for more than an hour, even though the Capitol had been breached and Congress was under siege. It appears that they were told not to respond.

All of this points not to an unfortunate and spontaneous riot, but rather a planned event designed to sequester the power of Congress, or at least the members of Congress who opposed Trump, in order to further an Executive coup d’tat. Maybe even to kill them. At the very least we faced the worst hostage crisis the country has seen.

It seems beyond reasonable to conclude that Trump intended for this to happen. His actions leading up demonstrate that, and I believe were it not for the courage of many individuals, and the incompetence of the leader, it would have succeeded.

While we struggle through the effects of this pandemic, and deal with the legions of nut-cases who support ludicrous conspiracies and outrageous attempts to overturn the election result, as well as a President who seems increasingly detached from reality and appears willing to engage in overt sedition and treason to avoid admitting his loss; we must not lose focus that there are actors around the world who are watching for such a opportunity.

Would this be the right time for Russia to assault and occupy Ukraine and other former Soviet block states? How about China launching at last that war of submission against Taiwan? 

Or skip those two major long-term areas of international concern and contemplate the numerous smaller spots of tension where would be belligerents wait for American attention to be distracted homeward, allowing them the opportunity for wars of conquest in their own region?

Will the threat of civil war or unrest open doors for conflict in other locations?

I suppose that if I am considering this, it is likely that trained experts are aware as well. But will the discord and disruption to the country that Trump is sowing, intentionally it seems, allow for wider disturbances? Will either these or US civil conflict become the catalyst for a larger war? Will our 2020 elections become the Franz Ferdinand moment of the 21st century? Are we living in our Sarajevo moment?

I don’t have the answer to these questions. I voice them to help make people aware that the divide in our country can effect more than just us.

I’m a history minded fellow and sometimes I forget that others are not. I tend to study history more than most, but not as much as many others. And there is a sliding scale of interest that ranges across the vast depth of history. Even the most studious have blind spots where our knowledge is weak. Still others have almost no knowledge of a wide swath of our collective history yet are remarkably well informed on a single area that is of interest to them. When I talk about the past and look for lessons to be learned, I am aware that some several or even many are better informed than am I, but still try to write to those who know less.

Today I address authoritarianism. Right now. Right now it is raging around the world. In countries from east to west people are accepting and even warmly embracing authoritarian leaders in ways that trouble those of us who favor democratic rule. I won’t bother to name countries, but strongmen dictators have found themselves in power in countries that had once shunned such concentrated power. And while this isn’t universal, it has grown in the past several years. And even a glance at history through this lens informs us that this recurs in some irregular cycle. I haven’t cracked the books to see just how often this happens, nor to find the papers that explain it in depth, nor do I pretend to know what exactly happens that make a democratic people turn toward dictators. Fear, perhaps, but that is too vague for a real understanding.

But here we are in the most democratic country, the country that invented the modern version of democracy, facing a rabid lust for a dictator by close to half our people. It is frightening. The idea of democracy is to spread power as a check against despotism. Once power concentrates it is damn hard to split it up again.

But we’ve seen this before in America, and perhaps shining a light on this will help those who seek it understand what they are lusting for.

During the 1930s the Great Depression ravaged not only America, but the whole world. People became desperate and often began to doubt the ability of their democratic institutions to address their privations and fears. From country to country they accepted or adopted authoritarian individuals who promised to make things right. There are plenty of history books that will explain each of these cases in depth, and still others to show how doomed the results were in most of those cases. But the string of truth running through all of them was that the individual in question was really seeking power and glory for themselves, as opposed to genuine relief for their constituents. The most famous of these built countries that required war and conquest to survive the changes made. Through the clear glass of history we can see that the people brought death and destruction on themselves in adopting a dictator to lead them.

America was not immune to this. In the thirties it was fascism that we saw grow in Europe. And while it took hold under that name in Spain and Italy, and as National Socialism in Germany, the same fascist desires were growing in Great Britain and the United States as well. There was an organization called the German American Bund. It was a straight up Nazi party in the USA. It boasted 25,000 members and was meant to be sympathetic to the Nazi party in Germany. They even wore similar uniforms and advocated for similar policies.
But this group was limited to German-Americans. But even amongst those who had no ancestry to share with them there was admiration for the dictators of Europe. There were Americans who sympathized with the Nazis before, during, and even after the war. Across the country people of all stripes were turning toward what they perceived as strong, nationalist leaders that made promises of greatness. People were told to blame immigrants and those who looked different. There was always an “other” that was the enemy. Populists gained greater influence. But always it was the power and glory they sought for themselves that drove them. We managed to keep our democratic government structure through all of that, and while people revered President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he resisted the temptation to establish himself as dictator. I say resisted because in the face the crisis at hand, he considered taking powers not afforded by democracy.

But our establishment of democracy in America was a fight against a despot. It was our desire to rule ourselves through collective agreement that prompted us to throw off the yoke of tyranny of a solitary and powerful king. We saw that concentrated power was prone to abuse and corruption. As it was, the people of America, then colonists of Great Britain, had a bad king. But rather than hoping that the next one would be better, or seeking to implant their own, they rebelled and created a country where no one man made the rules.

And we have today organizations lauding those patriots who bore arms and fought to create this nation. We recognize that it wasn’t all of our citizens in agreement to gain independence from the king. No, many of the those in the colonies were loyal subjects of the crown and wished to remain so. We even today have groups that claim (erroneously) that only three-percent of the people fought for the new country. Yet it is true that amongst the population there was a great many who would rather keep the king telling them what to do. Sure, many of these were folks simply preferring the status quo to the struggles of rebellion, but many remained loyal to the crown even after independence was achieved. People went to Canada or back to England.

It is ironic that today many of those who ardently support the authoritarianism that Donald Trump espouses, claim allegiance to the patriotism of the founding armies. They are crying for freedom while supporting the opposite. They are indulging their fantasies of kinship to those who threw off the yoke of regency and tyranny, while proclaiming fidelity to a man trying to subvert the democratic process to retain power. They call on the ghosts of the founding fathers who began a government of the people, while they endorse an authoritarian would-be dictator.

Make no mistake, authoritarianism, by whatever name we call it, has risen its ugly head around the world again. It was the fascists and the nazis then and by other names today, but it seeks to take back what it lost when this country was founded.

The words of President Lincoln ring in my head today. … that government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the earth.