THREAD: Here are the photos from the wedding of the daughter of the White House chief of staff, mid-pandemic. Let's take a look shall we?

TRUMP'S COUP TIMELINE

* This thread will use military time and EST time zone for any times provided.

November 7, 2020 - The press calls the 2020 presidential election for now President-elect Joe Biden, 4 days after the election.

November 9, 2020

After meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and in violation of standing Department of Justice policy not to interfere in elections, US Attorney General Bill Barr authorizes federal prosecutors to investigate claims of electoral fraud.

Richard Pilger, the head of the DoJ’s Election Crimes Branch, resigns in response to Barr’s memo.

Trump fires Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. In response, Esper says, “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”

Trump immediately names Christopher Miller Acting Secretary of Defense.

Trump follows Esper’s firing with firing the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and the Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense, constituting a “near total decapitation of civilian leadership” at the Pentagon.

I was working on something before the election that became the election...

Color revolutions are real and we just witnessed one live and direct...

1.

1) Looks like Trump KNEW what the coup plotters were plotting on the 6th, so he arrived an hour late to the stage, and talked longer than he intended, before he asked MAGA to walk peacefully down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol.

He also didn't walk WITH them as he promised.

Andy Ngo thinks Antifa are on a level with the Nazis in terms of wanton violence. Furthermore, he says that 'even the Nazis knew to cover their tracks' and that we didn't know about the Holocaust until afterwards.

Wrong, and offensive on almost every level.

Violence had been building for years prior to the Nazis assuming power, and much of it was instigated by the SA.

In 1932 for example, 105 people died in clashes between SA and opposing groups in Prussia alone - that's one region.

SA activity - marching through 'red' neighbourhoods and fighting those who opposed them was a deliberate strategy. The spectacle of violence and the implied 'restoral of order' was the point.

Just think of how Horst Wessel was remembered following his death in 1930. He was turned into a martyr who fell 'bravely in battle' against the Bolsheviks. Violence was inherent to the message - a clash between forces for the future of Germany.

During his time as SA leader in Berlin, Goebbels worked on a strategy of provocation that almost always ended in violence, a form of trolling that would always provide the opportunity for a brawl and the implication that a menace had been dealt with.

A central tension in our politics is this we have 1 political party that cares about upholding democracy, whereas the other party's aims can only be achieved thru undermining democracy. This is coupled w/ the fact that 1 party cares about people's well-being & the other does not

These 2 facts lead to a situation in which, in order to both uphold democracy & advance well-being, 1 party is dedicated to a functional gov't & the other party is well-served by a dysfunctional government. Such dysfunction is both instrumental & ideological (anti-government)

And then, of course, we have gerrymandering + a cap on the House of reps, 2 Senators per state, & the electoral college. A set of circumstances that gives massively disproportionate power to the anti-democracy & anti-well-being party.

Taken together, the structural issues in our electoral system, deep ideological divides about government/democracy, & the differential investment in advancing citizens' well-being does leave Democrats at a perpetual disadvantage.

A firefighter who is looking at a burning house & trying to decide whether to concentrate on stopping the fire from spreading or to save a child at the expense of a grandmother is facing a fundamentally different set of choices than the person who lit the fire in the first place