Thread by @TimInHonolulu

1. I've been pondering the fact that Garland picked a war crimes prosecutor to head his task force. I don't think that was just a random coincidence.

My brief connection to Ruby Ridge in the 1990s left me with in interest in domestic terrorism that evolved into an interest in

2. international terrorism. I don't just report on it, I work actively to defeat it. War crimes have taken up a number of hours of my research in the past years. I don't claim to be an expert but I am interested and a student of the both the law and the strategy behind war crimes

3. prosecutions. My interest goes back to being a kid in Florissant Mo watching the Eichmann trial on TV with my parents. Children of a front-line Chinese civil war correspondent married to one of the most well-read humans on earth, made our lives a petri dish for the growth of

4. geopolitical thinking that few kids in the 1950's could fathom. Then, many years later, one of my sisters married into Nuremberg's noble family whose history was much longer than Germany's and the dormant interest in war crimes returned in spades.

5. I remember the first time my brother (who years later worked closely with Merrick Garland) and I both arrived in Nuremberg for the Christmas holiday. We immediately took my sister's car and without saying a word drove to the stadium. It drew us like gravity.

6. Little did I know that on that same solstice night one of my closest friends who was working on the job, a job for which I had given him the NY Times classified want ad, was dying over Lockerbie flying with a one of DOJ's last Nazi war crimes prosecutors. Hobgoblins.

7. The goal of the Nuremberg prosecutions was not simply to punish the leaders. The guilt for the Holocaust and the war that killed so many millions was spread too far to punish everyone. What had to be done was to indict an idea and make guilt for that idea become too terrible

8. to ever be viewed as legitimate political expression. But the seed for the resurgence of the idea remained here in degenerate monsters like Fred Trump who spawned our own hate-filled monster. Now the DOJ is tasked with stopping this flood of racist violent hate that has become

9. the platform of the dead party of Lincoln. Nothing can revive it. People like Reagan, Bush 41 and 43 used dog whistles to advance their own political careers financed by a growing billionaire class. All the so-called former GOP who flood the air were very happy in the

10. world of the dog whistles. We welcome them but should never forget that they too were part of the destruction of their own party when Reagan and his handlers repackaged Nixon's fascism into a war on the poor. And because our policies had made the Black American more likely

11. to be poor it became a war on them. So now we have a heavily armed racists army led by a drug addicted racist sociopath with an elementary school intellect who is the world's new Hitler. Unless Jack Smith destroys his ideology and exposes the monstrous force that is growing

12. this will just be the beginning of our final chapter as a pluralistic democratic society.

The Koch family thinks they own our country. They think they should not have to pay more in taxes than the poorest American. They led the force of evil that corrupted the GOP

13. by installing Reagan and his velvet glove racism that the Bush family exploited. The wealthy flooded to the call to corrupt our institutions that included overt Nazis like Harland Crow openly bribing a member of the SCOTUS while the DOJ and the Congress simply look on

14. hoping that some code of ethics will cure the disease that the billionaire class spread through the Reagan tax policies and a corrupted SCOTUS that equates bribery with free speech. A virus injected into our body politic to fester and grow into the monstrous

15. army led by the creature who is about to be indicted in DC for attempting a fascist coup. To successfully kill the idea, the billionaire funders must be charged. The people like Koch, Byrne, Ginni Thomas and Crow need to be connected to the crimes, charged and convicted

16. and sent to prison. Make their lives and their descent into prison oblivion our Nuremberg trials for this generation to reset the law of "never again" and end this use of racism as the means to excuse to seize our democracy to make the richest richer.

17. And this election must be about freeing the Democratic party from enslavement to its own billionaire donors. Each of us must do what we can to replace the force that seeks to destroy us, by our own hard work and support so we can take the House back and hold a large

18. enough majority in the Senate to end the filibuster regarding expanding the court to kill the power of the billionaire force destroying America. Then enact a new civil rights act that bans all gerrymanders and makes each state reflect its population in Congress and

19. in state legislatures. End the ability of one rogue district court judge who allows a judge shop to impair our democratic system. But for now, we wait for the charges to be brought and hope that the reason Garland picked a war crimes prosecutor is because he's gong to indict

20. an idea and all the people who funded the coup and willingly advance the hateful ideology that should have died at Nuremberg. /end