(Thread) Impeachment: Preliminary Considerations

💠Trump supporters are mounting an attack on truth & reality itself
💠More than 1/3 of the nation supports the attack
💠Without shared reality, legal proceedings may be a sham.

The GOP isn't having trouble getting to the truth⤵️
1/ GOP leadership is deliberately distorting the truth—and MAGA people eagerly tout the “party line” and repeat the lies, knowing they are lies.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Some of the MAGA people are genuinely fooled. But I think this number is fewer than you might suppose.
2/ Most of them know it’s a lie, and they cheer the lies.

I’ve written about why that is in this Slate article:
slate.com/news-and-polit…

It’s important to understand why so many Trump supporters are okay with the fact that their leadership is lying.
3/ In a nut shell, Trump and his supporters want to destroy the political establishment because of what Hahl, Kim, & Sivan call a crisis of legitimacy in their article, “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue."
asanet.org/sites/default/…
4/ A “crisis of legitimacy” happens when people don’t think the government governs on their behalf. They embrace the lies because they see them as inherently destructive—and they want to destroy.

Hannah Arendt in👇also talks about how followers can justify their leader's lies.
5/ When a demagogue’s followers learn that he has lied, “instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
@jenmercieca
6/ The GOP strategy of unleashing a torrent of lies is what the Rand Institute calls the Firehose of Falsehood propaganda strategy.

The Rand Institute explains why trying to refute each lie with the truth doesn’t work.
rand.org/pubs/perspecti…
7/ If you’re new to my feed and you missed it, I explained it here:

Some people are saying things like this: If we don’t impeach XX will happen (or not happen).

Others are saying, essentially: if we do impeach, YY will happen (or not happen).
8/ Take all such absolutes with a grain of salt. Nobody has a crystal ball. There are too many variables and too many unknowns.

One hope (fantasy, perhaps) for impeachment proceedings is that if the truth is put in front of enough Americans . . .
9/ . . .Americans will understand the level of corruption and lawbreaking in the GOP, and Trump and the GOP will lose support.

This assumes that the Firehose of Falsehood technique will not utterly confuse large numbers of people.
10/ With so many members of the GOP and Trump supporters on board with lies, others may throw up their hands and say, “all politicians are corrupt liars,” or “we can never really know what happened,” or “what Trump did wasn’t so bad or different from what others have done.”
11/ Another hope (fantasy perhaps) is that the truth will be so overwhelming that the Senate will remove, Trump will face consequences for his actions, everyone will learn their lessons, and we will all live happily ever after.
12/ One problem with this hope is that Trump is the symptom of a larger problem: a large segment of Americans view Trump as the savior of America. Many will not budge, and they are potentially dangerous. Removing a President they see as a savior can ignite something ugly.
13/ If we keep the dangers firmly in mind (and proceed with caution) I see good reasons to begin impeachment investigations.
And actually, it seems the House is already doing this without using the word “impeachment," which could trigger a dangerous situation.
14/ If handled correctly, impeachment proceedings can splinter the GOP into two halves that can no longer work together. One part of the GOP are the die-hard MAGAs for whom MAGA means "take America back to a bygone era when white men could do as they pleased."
15/ Getting to this result requires torpedoing rule of law, which in turn requires undermining reality itself.

The other part of the GOP, the true conservatives, are uncomfortable with this. They want to fall in line, but they really don't want to destroy our institutions.
16/ A positive outcome from impeachment proceedings would be to forever divide the GOP into these two halves, making it impossible for the far right wing to achieve electoral majorities.

I'll write more on impeachment (and the dangers of impeachment) in future threads.

end/
All of my threads are blog posts. You can view this one here:
terikanefield-blog.com/impeachment-pr…

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More from @Teri_Kanefield

Feb 21
Putin knows how to wield disinformation and he knows that the United States is divided: A large portion of the population, including the most influential voices from a major political party, want the United States to emulate his Russia.

1/
Some background:

After Russia enacted anti-homosexual legislation, Pat Buchanan said Putin was “entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly city of today" because he was stamping out western evils like easy divorce and homosexuality.
buchanan.org/blog/whose-sid…

2/
British right-winger Katie Hopkins, in an article in which she was interviewed with her friend Ann Coulter, said “Putin rocks.”

Katie Hopkins then went on to praise Russia as being “untouched by the myth of multiculturalism and deranged diversity."

rt.com/uk/429777-kati…

3/
Read 4 tweets
Feb 18
Trump lost in court THREE MORE TIMES today.

Trump tried to get all three of these cases⤵️ dismissed and lost. I analyzed one of the cases last April, Blassingame, here: (Transcript on my blog.)

He tends not to do well in court, where facts matter.

1/
The defendants made the following arguments (screenshot #1)

Trump also claims, among other things, that he has absolute immunity. (#2)

It turns out that the absolute immunity question isn't as easy as you might think (but Trump still lost).

2/
If you want to get caught up on one of the cases, my analysis from last April is here:terikanefield.com/blassingame-v-…

And here:

You can read the court's decision here: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

3/
Read 8 tweets
Feb 16
Um . . . this isn't the defense Trump thinks it is.

Trump published a letter he received from Mazars dated (it looks like) 2014. He then summarized the letter.

#1: What Mazars said
#2: What Trump says Mazars said

Me = 🤦‍♀️

Does he think nobody can or will actually read it?
Mazars said, "Trump is responsible for preparing the financial statement."

Also Mazars does not "undertake to obtain or provide any assurance that there are no material modifications that should be made . . . "
Trump posts the letter and says Mazars "strongly states that all work was performed in accordance with professional standards and that there were "no material discrepancies in the financial statements."

There is no "I don't know how to read" defense.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 13
For this week’s blog post, I edited and combined a few of my recent threads.

I started with a reading of the newly unredacted sections of the Mueller report, then talked about some of the responses on Twitter . . .

terikanefield.com/is-social-medi…
. . . and concluded with thoughts about how social media brings out authoritarian instincts in large swaths of people who ordinarily would not be given to authoritarian impulses.



It's too easy for truth to lose, and when truth loses, democracy loses.
Right. And not all "manipulators" are bad actors, but all people need to learn to evaluate sources.

Reflectively saying, "Professor X should know" is not how to do it. It takes more work. Falling in line is always easier than doing the work.

Read 4 tweets
Feb 12
I'm tired of the word "accountable." It's a weasel word. Don't say "accountable." Say what you mean.

Does "accountable" mean
🔹Lose elections?
🔹Go to prison?
🔹Lose a lawsuit?
🔹Be hated?

It would be nice if all the good people were rewarded and the bad people punished.
So you want to start indicting people and gather the evidence after they're indicted?

Or not worry about evidence?

There are rules of evidence, which means that the stuff you've read in newspapers and Tweets probably isn't admissible in court . . .
Indicting people and having juries return "not guilty" verdicts because there isn't evidence to prove each element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt may not accomplish what people think it will accomplish.
Read 10 tweets
Feb 12
One reason I think social media is turning everyone into authoritarians: people don't read or think.

They see a headline and have a strong emotional reaction, which they Tweet and which then gets repeated by others, who are also not thinking . . .

1/
Political psychologists like @karen_stenner describe the authoritarian personality.

Those with an authoritarian disposition are averse to complexity. They reject nuance.

They prefer sameness and uniformity and have “cognitive limitations.”

(link in the next Tweet)

2/
See for example, "Authoritarianism is not a momentary madness,” which originally appeared in this book, an dwhich Stenner has now made available free on her website, here: ……e-4700-aaa9-743a55a9437a.filesusr.com/ugd/02ff25_370…

Timothy Snyder also talks about the danger of what he calls Internet Memes.

3/
Read 7 tweets

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