American ISIS

As Third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in July 1776, “Let the facts be submitted to a candid world.”

 

The words are those of Academy, Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin from the August 2012 first Season finale of “The Newsroom” from Home Box Office [HBO], words he put in the mouth of Emmy Award-winning Actor Jeff Daniels, playing the role of “News Night” anchor Will McAvoy.

“The Tea Party believes in loving America but hating Americans. They believe in loving America, but hating its government. Ideological purity, compromise as weakness, unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, a hostile fear of progress, a demonization of education, severe xenophobia, tribal mentality, intolerance of dissent and a pathological hatred for the US government.” McAvoy tells his audience after the November 2010 election of the 112th Congress. “They can call themselves the Tea Party, they can call themselves Conservatives. They can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are: The American Taliban.”

A decade after the inauguration of the Tea Party Congress, however, we are confronted by a force at the very top of the American government that makes the American Taliban seem positively sane by comparison.

 

It began, as best as anyone can tell, innocuously enough with anti-Clinton conspiracy theorists such as Australian divorcee and college dropout Julian Assange and 9/11 truther standup comedian James “Jimmy” Dore. Assange’s partially-fabricated “WikiLeaks” of documents illegally obtained through cyberterrorism on the part of Russian Military Intelligence [formerly know as the KGB] fomented and incited what became known as “PizzaGate”: the belief that high-ranking Democrats in the United States federal government, such as then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV], current Senate Majority Leader Charles “Chuck” Schumer [D-NY], Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] and former Secretary of State and then-Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton were operating a child sex slave trafficking operation out of pizzerias in the Greater Arlington-Baltimore-District of Columbia metropolitan area. The anti-Clinton conspiracy theories propagated by Dore and now-Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernard Sanders [I-VT] helped the Russian military’s coup d’etat place failed real estate developer and reality television game show host Donald Trump [R-NY] in the White House and accelerated the process of the Wikileaks-fed anti-Clinton “PizzaGate” conspiracy propagated by Dore and others evolving–mutating–into what is commonly colloquially referred to by the media and in the press as “QAnon”: The belief that not only Democrats in Washington but also liberal-minded celebrities in Hollywood are both part of the aforementioned child sex slave trafficking syndicate and also just happen to be shapeshifting –presumably extraterrestrial–reptilian Satan worshippers who drink the blood of the aforementioned children in order to attain eternal life. The QAnon movement, who hold that so-called “5G” wireless satellite telecommunications signals are part of Microsoft founder William “Bill” Gates’s plot–in combination with vaccinations against such preventable diseases as chickenpox, influenza [flu], measles and mumps, hepatitis, polio, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis and; most recently; Ebolavirus and Coronavirus–to control and ultimate cull the world’s human population using microchips–adopted Donald Trump, who believes that windmills cause cancer as well as that vaccination causes autism, as their infallible messianic cult leader.

 

When, thanks in no small part to his ani-medical-science belief system when it came to the aforementioned Coronavirus, Trump was voted out of the White House by a historically-unprecedented 81 Million Americans, he called upon his QAnon cult. The crowd of believers he rallied at the famous “Ellipse” in front of the White House was told that their Messiah would be marching with them to the United States Capitol Building–one of more than 30,000 lies Trump told during his four years in the White House. The fact that their cowardly leader immediately retreated to his public-housing fortress mansion to instead enthusiastically cheer on the march on the nation’s capitol on television did nothing, however, to dissuade his followers and supporters from doing what their cult leader commanded and seeking to stop a Joint Session of the House of Representatives and Senate–presided over by Trump’s sycophantically-loyal Vice President Michael “Mike” Pence [R-IN] in his sole Constitutional capacity as President of the Senate–from certifying the Electoral College…

…by means of abducting and assassinating the Speaker of the House, then-Senate Minority Leader Schumer and; presumably just for good measure; then-Senate Majority Leader Addison “Mitch” McConnell and Vice President Pence as well. In this endeavor, Trump’s QAnon cultists were more than happily joined by the Confederate and anti-Semitic Nazi White Supremacist Christian Nationalists whom Trump had declared to be “very fine people” after their August 2017 “Unite the Right” march in former President Jefferson’s hometown of Charlottesville in the neighboring state of Virginia resulted in the deaths of a paralegal and two State Troopers.

Whilst the joint QAnon/Confederate-Nazi domestic terrorist attack failed both at assassinating the second, third, and fourth in the Constitutional Presidential line of Succession and in halting the certification of now-President Biden’s overwhelming electoral vote total, the heavily-armed riot organized, planned and scheduled by the now-former occupant of the White House did succeed in causing the deaths of three officers of the United States Capitol Police, one of whom was brutally beaten to death on camera with an American flag.

 

Simply put, if the Tea Party was the American Taliban, QAnon is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS], which grew in 2006 out of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization founded by Saudi Arabian multibillionaire Osama Bin Laden after then-President George Bush [R-TX]’s toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad and resulting 8-year military occupation thereof.

 

My first-ever introduction to Political Science–the discipline I would later earn my degree in at the University of Wisconsin College of Letters and Sciences–was accompanying my older brother to protests against the Bush regime’s illegal “preemptive” invasion of Iraq in the Spring of 2003, before I turned fifteen. My first-ever vote cast in an American election after turning eighteen was for then-Senator Barack Obama [D-IL], the first African-American leader of the free world, in 2008, and part of what I arguably admire most about now-former President Obama was the message in his victory speech on election night in November 2008 saying that he would be a President for all Americans, not only the people who voted for him–a message reminiscent not only of Obama’s own famous keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts but that of Sorkin’s character of fictional President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet [D-NH] on his Emmy-Award-winning NBC drama “The West Wing”. It was more than mere rhetoric, however, on President Obama’s part, as this spirit of bipartisan cooperation across the proverbial aisle was embodied in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries by no one more so that Obama’s nominee for Vice President, then-Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware. And it was that very spirit of inclusiveness, in contrast to the bigotry and xenophobia ubiquitous throughout both Trump’s extended family and his White House administration, that perhaps as much as anything carried Biden into the Oval Office.

 

Unfortunately, however, the “American carnage” left in the wake of the four long years of the Trump regime is a world wholly unlike any Obama–or Bartlet–had to contend with. By voting to declare the man who orchestrated, organized, planned, permitted, scheduled and solicited the riotous mob of fanatical QAnon cultists and Confederate Nazi White Nationalists to be “not guilty” of the terrorist attack against the American Capitol that attempted to decapitate the legislative branch of the United States Federal government by summarily executing the Speaker of the House and President Pro-Tempore of the Senate–Third and Fourth in the Presidential Line of Succession, respectively–the GOP formally allied themselves with at least one terrorist organization, if not more than one.

 

Yes, Just as the Tea Party was the American Taliban, QAnon is the American ISIS, and as much as my older brother and I might have ferociously attacked then-President Bush for invading the wrong country not once but twice in response to Al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington in September 2001, never in our wildest fantasies; in our most deluded moments of pique, would we ever have asked–to say nothing of expected–either Bush of his Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney [R-WY] to sit down across a table with either Bin Laden or his successor, ISIS founding leader Abu Al-Baghdadi. And unfortunately, a QAnon Caucus has found safe haven and fertile ground in the 2021 remnants of the 2010 Tea Party of the 112th Congress. However, once again, the words are those of President Bush himself in his now-famous address live on national television from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on the evening of the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in September 2001:

“We should make no distinction;” President Bush told the nation that night; “Between the terrorist who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

 

Following the crushing defeat of Whig Party Nominee Lieutenant General Winfield Scott in the 1852 Presidential election, with Democratic 14th President Franklin Pierce winning an overwhelming 85% of the electoral votes and 27 of the 31 States, in March 1854 in Fond Du Lac County, Wisconsin, “New York Tribune” Founder and Editor Horace Greely and “New York Times” co-founder Henry Raymond established a new political party in the United States of America. Founded out of an effort to prevent the practice of African slavery from spreading to the then-newly-created 31st State of “California“, the movement was as much as anything a reaction to the coming succession of what would become the Confederate States, and so Greeley and Raymond called their new party “Republicans”. Six years later, they recruited a relatively little-renowned former United States Congressman from Illinois as their nominee in the 1860 Presidential election, who in turn defeated Southern Democratic Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky to become the 16th President of the United States: Abraham Lincoln. In naming their new party, Greely and Raymond borrowed the word “Republican” from the Democratic-Republican Party of former President Jefferson and his Secretary of State and successor, Fourth President of the United States James Madison, author of the United States Constitution.

 

Both Jefferson, in penning the aforementioned July 1776 Declaration of Independence and Madison in authoring the March 1789 Constitution of the United States looked for the system of government of their new nation to the Roman Republic, founded by Co-Consuls Lucius Targuinnius and Lucius Brutus in the late Sixth Century BCE after their overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus, the last King of Rome. Likewise, when Madison was writing the Second Article of the Constitution, on the Executive, there was heated debate about what the formal title of address should be for the historically unprecedented and heretofore unheard-of position the American Constitution would invent: that of a “President”. When one of the suggestions offered was “His Majesty, the Lord President”, a possibly apocryphal, but–by me–nonetheless beloved anecdote has the presumptive First President of the United States, former Lieutenant General and then-College of William and Mary Chancellor George Washington of Virginia standing and raising a hand in objection, proclaiming to the assembled Constitutional Congress in Pennsylvania that:

“I did not fight to defeat King George the Third, only to become King George the First.”

 

In the Roman Republic, the counting of votes, especially in the Senate, was a sacred act, to the point of actual religious observance. So, too, had it been for most of the century-and-half-long history of the American Republican Party…

…Until, that is, February 13, 2021. That is the date when the overwhelmingly vast majority of those with a capital letter “R” in parentheses next to their name in the American Senate voted in favor of the mastermind who orchestrated a terrorist attack against, among other things, the United States Senate itself in an explicit effort to prevent votes from being counted. On that day, at that instant, the Republican Party, for all practical intents and purposes, effectively ceased to exist, for one very simple reason: Simply put, as even the Ancient Romans could tell you, counting votes is a prerequisite to having a Republic, and the moment they declared fomenting and inciting a terrorist attack against a body counting votes to be not only acceptable but, and I quote, “UNIMPEACHABLE” [synonyms of which, according to the Dictionary of the English language, include “above reproach”], those Senators ceased to be “Republican”. That is to say: they ceased to be in favor of having a Republic.

In Fond Du Lac County, Wisconsin in March 1854, Horace Greely and Henry Raymond founded their “Republican Party” in opposition to the pro-slavery, ultimately pro-secessionist platform of the Southern Democratic Party. But as many writers, Sorkin included, have noted, history has a tendency towards being quite fond of ironies, and there is perhaps no greater historical irony in recent American memory than the simple fact that, as of February 13, 2021, there remains precisely one political party in the United States of America in favor of having a Republic [that is to say: one American Republican party], and it is the Democrats.

~ by Judgian12365 on February 17, 2021.