Daily Verse | Exodus 14:14
The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

Happy Tuesday. Who says that tacos are better today as opposed to say, Thursday?

Today’s Daily Broadside is a bit long because I need to convince you of something and I can’t do it justice in a shorter post. I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

Yesterday I wrote about why I’m leaving Facebook and Twitter at the end of this week. It’s because they banned president Trump, making it much more difficult for him to reach the people, and deplatformed Parler, destroying the upstart alternative social media platform. We now have a massive and unstoppable power center made up of trillion-dollar technology monopolies tied at the hip with the madmen in Washington, D.C.

I mentioned that several other companies had removed Trump from their platforms, including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and Reddit. But it didn’t stop there.

Several banks that did business with Donald Trump have cut ties with him, as have two law firms that represented his businesses.

More than 250 “editors, authors and publishing agents” signed a letter last week “demanding the industry deny Donald Trump the publication of any post-presidential memoir.”

Trump is also being impeached an historic second time for “incitement of insurrection” for the breach of the Capitol, even though it’s clear that he did nothing of the sort. The timing of the affair doesn’t work, nor do the words of his speech rise to the level of “incitement.”

Now that it looks as if impeachment will be DOA in the Senate, Chuck Schumer is considering invoking rarely-used Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution to prevent Trump from ever running for office again.

The disqualification provision, scholars say, was meant to keep former Confederate officers and officials from holding public office again unless they received permission from Congress to do so. It has seldom been invoked over the last 150 years, and never against a president.

But the measure is being dusted off today as a possible legal mechanism for keeping Mr. Trump from seeking the presidency again.

President Trump donated his presidential annual salary of $400,000 to a variety of government agencies. He worked to “Make America Great Again” without taking a cent. His accomplishments in just one term are unmatched by any president in recent history.

And this is the thanks he gets.

But it doesn’t stop there. Once the fascist oligarchy gets going, it’s not going to stop. Trump supporters are in the crosshairs.

For starters, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have faced pressure to resign because they objected to the certification of certain state ballots. Ironically, because of his objections, Simon & Schuster cancelled plans to publish Hawley’s forthcoming book, titled “The Tyranny of Big Tech.”

Hillary Clinton, who sticks around like gum on the bottom of your shoe, hosted Nancy Pelosi on her podcast and suggested that there needed to be “a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything that they can pull together and explain what happened” during the riot at the Capitol. During the podcast she said, “But we now know that not just [Trump] but his enablers, his accomplices, his cult members, have the same disregard for democracy.”

“Cult members”? She’s not the only one thinks that.

Former CBS News anchor Katie Couric appeared on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and said of members of Congress.

But I also think some of them are believing the garbage that they are being fed 24/7 on the internet, by their constituents, and they bought into this big lie. And the question is how are we going to really almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump.

“Deprogam” members of “the cult of Trump”? Getting a chill yet?

Here’s David Atkins, a Regional Director for the Democrats in California, saying the same thing.

CNN’s Don Lemon lumped all Trump voters in with Nazis and Klansmen and made no apology for it.

“If you voted for Trump, you voted for the person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis support. You voted for the person who the alt-right supports. You voted for the person who incited a crowd to go into the Capitol and potentially take the lives of lawmakers … You voted on that side, and the people in Washington are continuing to vote on that side,” Lemon explained to his colleague Chris Cuomo. 

Lemon’s coworker, Oliver Darcy, suggests that cable companies should be held accountable for what they allow to be carried on their networks.

So why do AT&T (which I should note is CNN’s parent company), CenturyLink, and Verizon carry OAN? Why do AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish carry Newsmax? And why do they all carry Fox — which is, frankly, at times just as irresponsible and dangerous with its platform as its smaller competitor networks?

John Brennan, who should be in prison for his role in the Russia! Russia! Russia! hoax, nonetheless appeared on MSNBC and slandered almost everyone who isn’t a progressive leftist.

The Biden intel community “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

Are you feeling the unity yet?

Loretta J. Ross, an author of three books on “reproductive rights,” wrote an article for CounterPunch.org called “The Nazification of the Republican Party.” In it she writes,

Global contempt for the word “Nazi” is a lesson for us today in the United States after the attempted criminal coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anyone identified as sympathetic, supportive, or financing these seditious acts that attempted to deny the peaceful transfer of power in our country should be treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II. This includes Nazified people in Congress, in the media, in universities, in regular jobs, and throughout society because fascism is not the fevered dream of one delusional man. Trump is a white supremacist; that he is also a deranged narcissist is really incidental.

It wasn’t an attempted “coup.” But according to her, if you are even sympathetic for Donald J. Trump, you should be treated like a Nazi—whether in media, education, “in regular jobs and throughout society.”

This is the language of a purge.

All of us should be very wary of the newly introduced Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act (DTPA) of 2021. While domestic terrorism is a concern, the elasticity of language, as I pointed out yesterday, makes this bill a terrifying prospect. Biden said he intended to advocate for harsh laws against “domestic terrorism.”

Who might these “domestic terrorists” be? Here—Joe tells you:

“It was not dissent, it was not disorder, it was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters. Don’t dare call them protesters! They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. It’s that basic, it’s that simple.”

Simple. If they’re willing to do what they did to the most powerful man in the world, what makes you think they won’t do the same to you? You’re not safe just because you didn’t participate in the “riot” at the Capitol. Words and laws are being changed under your feet.

Even Tulsi Gabbard, the most rational of the Democrat candidates in the primaries, said that, “this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends.”

With apologies to Martin Niemöller, it may look like this:

First they came for the president
and I did not speak out
because I was not the president.

Then they came for the politicians
and I did not speak out
because I was not a politician.

Then they came for the media
and I did not speak out
because I was not the media.

Then they came for the churches
and I did not speak out
because I was not religious.

Then they came for the guns
and I did not speak out
because I did not own a gun.

Then they came for the voters
and there was no one
who would speak out for us.

We are two Americas and each lobs the same accusations against the other. The time for talk is over because there isn’t really anything to discuss and the fascist are in power. We’re not going to negotiate our way out of this.

There may be other ways out, but only one is increasingly likely.

[Image: United States Holocaust Museum]