Thread by @jeffblack945

#RevThread # 131
Mueller Report

1/ My wife and I ordered a couple of copies of the Washington Post edition of Mr. Mueller’s report. It’s 750+ pages because there’s a 50 page introduction, a separate and wonderful article about the lives of Mueller and Trump,

2/ and -- after the two volume document -- the texts of all the indictments Mueller’s team produced. Took awhile to read.

3/ Here are my two main take-aways: we have sustained a major, debilitating, successful attack by a malevolent, mafia-led state which intends to attack us again; they have empowered us to install a criminal enterprise, beholden to them, in the White House.

4/ We are dealing with evil.

5/ Scripture tells us that when battling evil we need to protect our heads and our hearts. We need helmets and breastplates. And we need a weapon -- the word of truth. [Eph. 6:13-17]

6/ I’ll return to this battle business in a moment, but for now I’d like to offer a bit of help with reading the document itself:

7/ I suggest that we focus for now on two sections: in Volume Two, the meticulous accounts of 11 actions by Donald Trump to obstruct justice (a very high crime); and the part of the Appendix which contains Mueller’s indictments of the Russians.

8/ The more I thought about it, the more the Russian attack made my hair stand on end. I’m old enough to have clear memories of the Red Scare of the 50’s and 60’s, which was always preposterous to me. Were Ruskies going to seize the suburbs of Phoenix?

9/ But now, after communism has died and their leaders are driven simply by nihilistic personal greed, they really have wantonly attacked us. Their euphemism is “active measures” which is creep talk for crimes by spies.

10/ Russian interference has tipped a close election to Trump. Even more, they successfully pitted large groups of Americans into antagonism against other Americans. They’re doing it now and they will do it more next year.

11/ When you read the Mueller report you’ll see that it wasn’t just a bunch of computer nerds over in an office in St. Petersburg. Russian attackers of the election came to America, travelled to various states,...

12/.. mastered our arcane election rules, and fed all kinds of information back to the boys on the keyboards. Scores of millions of Russian-composed communications, mostly on Facebook, occurred, spreading propaganda into the minds of individual voters in strategic states.

13/ This is a cyber war. We are losing. It may not feel like war - we don’t see young people slaughtering one another as flags go up over territories. But it is war. And we are not responding. Our leader is corrupted by his own greed, and by whatever hold Russians have over him.

14/ The Republican Party, already aligned with The Don’s endless greed, will never defend us from this attack, having become a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Enterprises.

15/ One would think our President would seize the moment and counterattack in order to defend us. That would garner him enormous popularity. What autocrat doesn’t want a villainous foreign enemy menacing his people? ... It must be that the Russians have something on him...

16/ Rome is burning. The EPA, the DOJ, the DOD, and the Senate, are engulfed. Our electoral system has been torched. Soon enough the flames will be licking at the Supreme Court.

17/ Meanwhile, our ersatz Nero is just fiddling around. The depraved kleptocrat of Moscow, sitting on his personal stack of hundreds of billions, smugly smiles.

18/ What to do? Back to Ephesians, to the images of the helmet, the breastplate and the sword:

19/ The helmut, which Paul calls “The Helmet of Salvation”, protects the brain. For our purposes, we can adapt this phrase to “Helmet of Identity.” In other words, protect your mind by remembering who you are. You are an American citizen.

20/ That means that we are about government not over the commoners by the wealthy and for the wealthy, but government of the common people by the common people and for the common people...

21/... Not over the non-whites by the whites and for the whites, but equally of everyone by everyone and for every one. Not over the women by the men for the men, but of, by, and for the whole human family.

22/ To “guard our minds” means, especially in this moment, to become alert to propaganda - that form of deliberately twisted language meant to inflame us against one another, and to deny realities we have just seen for ourselves.

23/ Trump, Bannon, Miller, Hannity, Piro, Ingram, McConnell, Jordan etc, ad nauseam, are not just people with one particular point of view. They are liars. They traffic in propaganda. Don’t let them/it in.

24/ Rather, listen to Justin Amash or Joyce Alene, to Mike Barnacle or Nicolle Wallace, to Chuck Rosenberg or Karine Jean-Pierre, and consider about how everything to do with their presentations is the opposite of the propagandists.

25/ These folks - Republicans and Democrats, men and women, Blacks and Whites, young and old - are calm and curious, learning as they listen. They have summoned the courage to face the evil of this hour...

26/.. and have found the capacity to sustain their dignity as they acknowledge the horror all around us. They’ve got good helmets.

27/ The "breastplate" This is to protect our hearts. Here’s how I think that plays out in Trumplandia. Once you are on to the Trumpsters’ uniquely horrific abuse, you know you need support & become baffled by how some people can be so actively supporting such transparent evil.

28/ Protect your relationships, especially within the family. Those whose minds are being engulfed by the propaganda invite our anger, but don’t let your anger slide into contempt..

29/.. One of our house guests recently shared about having voted for Trump. She was still our guest. Actually, as the conversation progressed, she wanted to assure us she would never vote for him again.

30/ To get really involved in the resistance is to be sorely tempted into self-righteousness, & into a constant low level rage. Find time for walks in the park, dogs, ball games, watching babies, & simply quiet breathing. Treasure the sacred. It's all about guarding your heart.

31/ The third of the many pieces of protective gear Paul describes in Ephesians that I want to lift up is the "sword", which he defines as the Word. If you think about it, this whole crisis is a war of words.

32/ There’s the President’s sleazy way of insulting & of always, compulsively, distorting every event. There’s the measured gravity of Robert Mueller, the shrill invective of Jim Jordan, the menacing sanctimony of Bill Barr, the rapid fire accuracy of Elizabeth Warren, etc, etc..

33/ This is an hour to guard our words. Let our model be Lincoln, who revelled in words, but whenever he got really hot about some wrong doing, would write a scorching screed, put it in an envelope, and let it stay in his desk for a few days...

34/ Lots of those letters did not get sent. The ones that did, however, helped win the war and put the nation back together.