My friend’s father went to the Virginia Military Institute, which is as hardcore as the name implies. He tells a story that has always stuck with me:
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1/ The school had a rivalry with another school, I can’t remember which. My friend’s father was one of three cadets guarding the school’s canon during the big football game. The rival school thought it would be a funny prank to steal and/or deface the canon.
2/ A dozen or so drunken students came upon the three of them, guarding the canon. My friend’s father was a bit scared, because they were badly outnumbered. But the cadet in charge was not scared. At all. He stood there with his rifle, holding it as if to bludgeon.
3/ The drunk students approached, rowdily demanding that the cadets move so they could deface the canon.
“Stand down,” the cadet said.
The students got closer, grew rowdier. Now they were taunting.
“Stand down.”
4/ The taunting grew. The drunk students fanned out, surrounding the three cadets. My friend’s father was now terrified.
Again: “Stand down.”
5/ Finally one of the drunk students made a run for the canon, trying to dash past the cadet. With one swift motion, the cadet swung the handle of the rifle, hard, smashing the jaw of the drunk student, who crumpled into a heap at his feet.
“I said, ‘Stand down.’”
6/ The other students fled. The injured one cried. The canon was not defaced or stolen. The cadet did his job.
So: the VMI canon was better protected on that day in 1958 than the SCIF was when Matt Gaetz stormed it—and more secure that the fucking US CAPITOL was yesterday.
7/ I have waited four years for a deterrent that is the non-violent equivalent of the cadet breaking that drunk asshole’s jaw. No indictments for Trump, Kushner, his family, Rudy, etc. No consequences for ignoring subpoenas. No charges for having a pizza party at a SCIF.
8/ Instead, talk of “healing,” and the former FBI director, whose historic fuck-up handed the election to Trump, arguing that this brazen crook should not be charged.
It makes me sick. Why would any foreign adversary fear us now?
9/ Congress, most of the time, is insulated from the outside world. I hope that yesterday’s brazen attempt at insurrection wakes them the fuck up. The strong statements from GOP like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are great, but we need ACTIONS now.
Every smirking cosplay insurrectionist who set foot in the Capitol yesterday needs to spend a minimum of 10 years in prison, per Trump's own "protecting monuments" EO.
And every politician who egged them on should face sedition charges.
As a practical matter, the insurrectionists have to be arrested in the next 13 days. It is a threat to the security of the President-Elect and the VP-Elect to have any of these goons not behind bars during inauguration.
As we now have an hour-long recording of Donald John Trump going full mobster on a Georgia state official, I thought I'd do a thread highlighting some of my work on the criminality of Trump & his associates.
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1/ We begin with the three-part series written with mob expert @LincolnsBible. Part One discusses how Trump, a second-generation mob money launderer, became a Confidential Informant, thus avoiding indictment: gregolear.substack.com/p/tinker-tailo…
2/ Part Two details how a guy owned by La Cosa Nostra came to be owned by the Russian mafiya. The 80s were boon times for hostile takeovers.
1/ When I was in high school, I worked at McDonald’s. It was a really good experience for me, and I met a lot of interesting people there (including, improbably, the best chess player I ever played against).
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2/ The lunch rush at McDonald’s was something else. For 2 solid hours, it was all hands on deck, super busy. There was one guy whose job was to run the grill & make sure everything ran smoothly. He would tell us what to make—cheeseburgers or Big Macs, the occasional Filet O’Fish.
3/ Our guy was named Joe Brown. He was a legend. He’d come in at 10 AM and take an entire pot of coffee to the break room, where he would smoke cigarettes and drink the entire pot to prepare himself for the lunch shift.
1/ The Committee’s bipartisan Report unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.....
2/ And it presents, for the first time, concerning evidence that the head of the Trump Campaign [Manafort] was directly connected to the Russian meddling through his communications with an individual found to be a Russian intelligence officer [Kilimnik].
Today, we ran the third installment of a 3-part series by Moscow Never Sleeps, on how to fix the Supreme Court—without packing the court (or winning the Senate). The series provides ample historical context & also a blueprint for what the Dems should—what we MUST—do.
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1/ Part one concerns Clarence Thomas (and his wife, Virginia Lamp). Did you know that SCOTUS justices can formally retire/take senior status? I didn’t either.
2/ Part two involves Brett Kavanaugh. @lincolnsbible & I have our own deep dive on this coming, for which I looked again at his murky finances, and HOLY CRAP are they suspect. We don’t need to impeach him. We just have to convince him to resign. gregolear.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-t…