@AdamSerwer Between @DanCrenshawTX's authoritarian cosplay video and @HawleyMO's salute to rioters, watching Republicans navigate their party's authoritarian currents is pretty terrible.
As former DHS official @juliettekayyem tells me, the memo shows:
"His own intelligence agencies” have concluded that “the lie that the election was stolen, which Trump continues to nurture, will motivate violence in the future.”
Let's be clear: For the far-right groups that carried out Trump's insurrection, the siege of the Capitol was a huge success, a major propaganda coup. I talked to experts in right-wing extremism about what this event really meant to them. Alarming stuff: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
"By all measurable effects, this was for far right extremists one of the most successful attacks they’ve ever launched. This will be propagandized on for the next decade."
I talked to folks tracking how the insurrection is playing on the far right:
The multiple security failures at the Capitol are already being treated as a propaganda victory by some on the far right, who see this as a sign of corruption and vulnerability:
Conor Lamb's powerful rebuke of the Sedition Caucus stands as an important statement about this dangerous moment. He laid bare an essential truth: The core ethos of this movement is that it does not feel bound by *legitimate* electoral outcomes. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here's my best effort to describe the true nature of the ethos of bad faith driving Trump and his insurrectionists:
The spin from McConnell and his allies is Trump's focus on stealing the election helped cost them the Georgia runoffs. It's nonsense. Republicans did all they could to exploit everything he unleashed among his voters. Don't let them memory-hole any of it: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The spin from McConnell and his allies is that Trump's conspiracy theories and grievances about the election cost them in the suburbs.
But McConnell and Republicans spent weeks feeding GOP base voter delusions on this front, for purely cynical purposes:
This keeps getting lost in euphemism. But Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are waging full-scale war *on their own state's voters.* If they win, this will be validated as just another tool of political mobilization. That's awful to contemplate. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Stop saying Republicans are "cowards."
Stop saying they are humoring Trump.
Stop saying Trump voters have trapped them in a difficult situation.
The reality is that Republicans are manipulating their voters in a show of extraordinary contempt for them: