Clinton weighs in on the current political climate, and what Margaret Atwood got right about the future for women
Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism
Maureen Dowd’s description overlooks a crucial point: It took decades of America’s decay to birth this monster
Members of the Patriot Front, and their founder, Thomas Ryan Rousseau, second from left, prepare to march with anti-abortion activists in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2022.
Photo: Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
During its initial hearings over the past week, the House January 6 committee has taken the nation back a year and a half to the frightening days when Donald Trump and his followers nearly overturned the 2020 presidential election. Thanks to graphic evidence from the insurrection and candid testimony from members of Trump’s inner circle, the congressional hearings have garnered strong television ratings and drawn intense media interest.
But unlike past congressional hearings into other major scandals like Watergate, the hearings have not provided a sense of closure or of lessons learned but rather one of foreboding. That’s because they don’t just offer a look back at what happened in the 2020 election, but also a glimpse of what is likely to happen in 2024. The January 6 hearings feel like a prequel.
In fact, even as the hearings constitute the clearest public account of Trump’s coup attempt, a series of incidents around the country has ominously shown that the threat of a repeat in 2024 is very real.
During the first hearing, the House committee highlighted the leading roles played on January 6 by pro-Trump white nationalist groups, particularly the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The committee documented how the Proud Boys helped lead the insurrectionist mob into the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
The Justice Department has also focused on the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers leaders, charging them with seditious conspiracy for planning to prevent the “lawful transfer of presidential power by force” on January 6. On Wednesday, prosecutors made public a document showing that Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, had specific plans to gain control of key buildings in Washington in an effort to overturn Joe Biden’s election. The criminal charges against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have signaled that the Justice Department is intensifying its probe into the planning behind the insurrection, a shift from its earlier practice of issuing minor charges against low-level individuals who stormed the Capitol.
Meanwhile, other white nationalist groups are starting to rise to prominence. On June 11, for example, just two days after the first January 6 committee hearing, police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, stopped a U-Haul truck and arrested 31 men, all wearing identical clothes, who police later said were planning to start a riot at a Pride event in the city’s downtown. They were members of a white nationalist group called the Patriot Front, formed in the wake of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
In addition to the racist language about a “European diaspora” that typifies white nationalist groups, the Patriot Front’s “manifesto” includes fascist, dictatorial rhetoric that could make the group a natural successor to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers as Trump’s favorite white nationalist group, whether he gets reelected in 2024 or not. The Patriot Front’s rhetoric sounds vaguely socialist, but only because its goal is to get the “collective” — America — to bend to the will of a white nationalist autocracy. “Individualism, while originally good in concept and proposition, has been allowed to run rampant in our modern society, where it has become a plague in its amplification,” the manifesto states. “The nation of the future will not abolish the individual, nor will it ruthlessly enforce a sole collective, but the merits of both must be structured to complement one another.”
It’s not surprising that the Patriot Front chose to attack in Coeur d’Alene. The small city in northern Idaho, which was once a Democratic stronghold thanks to a heavy concentration of unionized miners, has in recent decades become a magnet for conservatives and right-wing extremists. The Aryan Nations, a white nationalist group prominent in the 1990s and labeled a domestic terrorist organization by the FBI, was based in the area before it splintered and its power waned in the face of investigations, lawsuits, and internal division. After the Patriot Front arrests, Jim Hammond, the mayor of Coeur d’Alene, insisted that “we are not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations. We are past that.”
Yet droves of conservatives are still moving to northern Idaho from California and other states; many Los Angeles police officers have retired in the area. Some real estate agents in northern Idaho specifically market themselves as conservative to attract right-wing customers who want to move into the region.
The arrests in Idaho came just as the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning of a heightened threat of domestic terrorism from such extremist groups throughout this year, spurred at least in part by the midterm elections. To be sure, Homeland Security’s warnings are often overblown, but the department does warn that among the groups extremists may target are racial and religious minorities, government facilities and personnel, and the media.
The House committee’s second hearing on Monday focused on Trump’s lies about the election, showing that he kept pushing to overturn the results even as he was repeatedly told by top advisers that there was no proof of fraud. Former Attorney General William Barr testified that he told Trump the Justice Department had looked into claims of voter fraud and found them to be “bullshit.” Former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told Trump that the fraud claims were “not supported by the evidence developed.”
But Trump kept pushing. Thursday’s hearings focused on the former president’s attempts to force then-Vice President Mike Pence to derail the certification of the election on January 6. The hearing showed that Trump kept pressuring Pence even though he and his allies knew it would be illegal for Pence to interfere with the certification. Trump kept up the brutal pressure on Pence, calling him a “wimp” and “pussy” on a phone call from the White House, and after the mob broke into the Capitol, calling for Pence to be hanged, Trump didn’t bother to check in on him.
The House committee has shown conclusively that Trump’s own inner circle repeatedly told the president that his claims of a stolen election were false, yet his election lies continue to dominate the Republican Party.
More than 100 Republican candidates who say the 2020 election was stolen have been nominated for either statewide office or Congress, according to recent analysis by the Washington Post. If elected, they could use their new power to try to overturn the 2024 presidential election to make sure that Trump or another Republican is installed in the White House. They could join other Republicans like Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, who, on January 5, 2021, gave a tour of the Capitol to someone who joined the insurrection the next day screaming threats about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to footage released by the January 6 committee.
A confrontation in New Mexico shows the continuing threat the Republican Party poses to the integrity of U.S. elections. This week, the New Mexico Supreme Court was forced to order county commissioners in rural Otero County to certify results from the June 7 primary election there. The three county commissioners, including Couy Griffin, founder of “Cowboys for Trump,” who is due to be sentenced Friday on charges related to his involvement in the January 6 riot, have refused to certify the results because the votes in the primary were counted by voting machines from Dominion, a company that was repeatedly and falsely attacked by Trump and his supporters as they sought to hold onto power.
Dominion Voting Systems has filed defamation lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who both lied publicly about the company’s machines while trying to help Trump invalidate Biden’s victory. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from buying into the lies.
Under pressure from the state Supreme Court, the Otero County commissioners finally scheduled a new vote Friday on whether to certify the primary results — the same day that Couy Griffin is scheduled to be sentenced by a court in Washington for trespassing on the Capitol grounds on January 6.
Griffin said Thursday that he may try to vote on the certification by phone from his sentencing hearing — and that he plans to vote no again.
The post In the Shadow of the Jan. 6 Hearings, Right-Wing Militancy Is on the Rise appeared first on The Intercept.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s attempt at a fiery populist speech in front of a federal courthouse was marred by a single protester on Wednesday.
Bannon is asking a Trump-appointed judge to dismiss two contempt of Congress charges against him for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 Committee.
When he arrived at the courthouse Wednesday morning, his team was already waiting and prepared to stream the video to a pro-MAGA social media network.
Bannon spoke from behind a meager assembly of two microphones. He was barely audible on the Gettr stream.
He attacked the Jan. 6 Committee because “their ratings stink and they can’t compete with the trial of Bannon.”
“That’s why they canceled,” he said, referring to a Wednesday hearing.
As Bannon ranted, a lone protester with a “Failed Coup” sign strategically flanked him.
One reporter asked Bannon if his goal was authoritarianism.
“We believe in free and fair and transparent elections! And we’re winning everywhere!” he exclaimed. “This is going to be a massive blowout like 1932. You’re witnessing, right now, a political realignment like 1932. And we will govern for 100 years after we win 100 seats.”
“Do you want to govern as a one-party kind of total government?” the reporter wondered. “Do you want to destroy the Democratic Party?”
J Michael Luttig testifies that ex-president and his supporters are preparing an ‘attempt to overturn 2024 election’ as they did in 2020
In a chilling warning, a conservative judge closed the the third January 6 committee hearing on Thursday by saying Donald Trump, his allies and supporters were still “a clear and present danger to American democracy”.
J Michael Luttig testified that the former US president and his Republican supporters are preparing in open sight an “attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but [to] succeed”.
At least 108 primary victors in races across several states have won after repeating false claims originated by the former president
More than 100 Republican primary winners support Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
At least 108 primary victors in races across several states have won after repeating claims originated by Trump that electoral fraudsters denied his winning the 2020 election after rigging the race in favor of Joe Biden, according to new analysis from the Washington Post.
Prominent Christian leaders accuse Trump allies of spreading misinformation about 2020 election and Covid, while distorting Christian teachings at ReAwaken America events
A growing number of prominent Christian leaders are sounding alarms about threats to democracy posed by ReAwaken America rallies where Donald Trump loyalists Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and rightwing pastors have spread misinformation about the 2020 elections and Covid-19 vaccines, and distorted Christian teachings.
The falsehoods pushed at ReAwaken gatherings have prompted some Christian leaders to warn that America’s political and spiritual health is threatened by a toxic mix of Christian nationalism, lies about Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, and ahistorical views of the nation’s founding principle of the separation of church and state.
John Yoo has teamed up with Robert Delahunty, his coauthor of some of the infamous torture memos during the George W. Bush administration, to devise a blueprint for the vice president to decide the outcome of presidential elections. This legal theory will be published in a forthcoming 82-page law review article in the Case Western Reserve Law Review.
In their article, the two radical right-wing law professors do not say that former Vice President Mike Pence should have refused to count the Electoral College votes and handed the 2020 election to Donald Trump. That is because no state had submitted competing slates of electors — for example, one slate from a Democratic governor for Joe Biden and another slate from a Republican legislature for Trump. If states had tendered more than one slate of electors, Yoo and Delahunty argue that Pence could have decided which slate to count.
Although the authors of the U.S. Constitution created three co-equal branches of government to check and balance each other, Yoo has always favored the executive branch. Whether advising the president how he could torture with impunity or championing the “unitary executive,” Yoo has sought to relegate Congress (the legislative branch) to a lesser role.
Twisting the law to fit his nefarious agenda isn’t new to Yoo. When New Yorker writer Jane Mayer interviewed him, Yoo told her that Congress “can’t prevent the president from ordering torture.” When asked if any law prohibited the president from “crushing the testicles of the person’s child,” Yoo responded, “No treaty.” Mayer then asked him whether another law forbade it. Yoo said, “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.” But the Convention Against Torture, a treaty the U.S. has ratified, outlaws torture without exception.
Yoo also sought to empower the president to explicitly override the will of Congress. He inserted the phrase “unitary executive” into Bush’s signing statements attached to legislation, in which the president reserved the right to disobey any parts of congressional statutes he disagreed with.
Under Yoo and Delahunty’s scheme, a GOP-led state legislature could transmit a slate of electors to a Republican vice president who could choose to count that slate over a competing slate from the state’s Democratic governor, thereby ceding the presidential election to the Republican candidate. The extensive gerrymandering of state legislatures to benefit Republicans increases the likelihood that this scenario will occur.
The 12th Amendment, enacted in 1804, sets forth the process for counting electoral votes. It says, “The President of the Senate [the vice president] shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” It goes on to say that if neither candidate gets a majority of the electoral votes, “the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.” But the amendment doesn’t specify who should count the votes or how to resolve disputes about a state’s electoral slate.
To fill those gaps, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act in 1887, which allows governors to certify the state’s electoral slate. Although the vice president, sitting as president of the Senate, can accept or reject electoral votes, Congress can overrule his determination. If the House and Senate cannot agree, the slate certified by the state governor prevails. In the 2020 election, Pence counted the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania for Biden. Although a handful of GOP congress members challenged Pence’s decision, those challenges were rejected by both the House and the Senate.
Yoo and Delahunty think the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional even though the Supreme Court has never struck it down. Using an originalist analysis, they say that Congress shouldn’t play a role in deciding which votes to count, despite the fact that the drafters of the Constitution named the House of Representatives to choose the president if neither candidate garners a majority of electoral votes. Generally rejected by courts and legal scholars, originalism is a vehicle to achieve a right-wing result under the guise of following the understanding or intent at the time the Constitution was written.
Trump lawyer John Eastman also thought the Electoral Count Act was unconstitutional and concocted a plan for Pence to execute a coup d’etat on January 6, 2021. Under Eastman’s proposal, Pence would accept Trump’s bogus claims of widespread voter fraud and reject electors or delay the vote count. Then the House of Representatives would choose the president. Each state would get one vote and since Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, they would have a majority to make Trump president. To his credit, Pence refused to go along with Eastman’s plan.
In April, U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter found it more likely than not that Trump and Eastman committed the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the United States. Carter wrote, “In his discussion with the Vice President’s counsel, Dr. Eastman ‘acknowledged’ the ‘100 percent consistent historical practice since the time of the Founding’ that the Vice President did not have the authority to act as the memo proposed.” Carter called the attempt by Trump and Eastman a “coup in search of a legal theory.”
Yoo and Delahunty write in their forthcoming article that the 12th Amendment grants the vice president almost total authority to resolve any disputes about which set of electoral votes to count. They do allow for judicial review by the courts, which Trump packed with Republican judges.
The strategy that Yoo and Delahunty propose could lead to a situation in which a Republican vice president counts an electoral slate presented by a GOP-controlled state legislature. If the vice president’s decision is challenged, the right-wing Supreme Court — now loaded with originalists — would uphold it.
This would present a dangerous threat to the fundamental right to vote, the separation of powers, and our already imperiled democratic system.
Trump holds up a fist at the Stop the Steal Rally on January 6, 2021. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
We now know Trump expressed support for hanging Pence and did little to stop the violence — actions that suggest some very dark historical parallels.
Amid the many extraordinary revelations at the January 6 committee’s first primetime hearing Thursday, one stood out for its sheer depravity: that during the assault, when rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” in the halls of the Capitol, President Donald Trump suggested that the mob really ought to execute his vice president.
“Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he said, per a committee source. “[Mike Pence] deserves it.”
Endorsing violence is hardly new for Trump; it’s something he’s done repeatedly, often in an allegedly joking tone. But the reported comment from January 6 is qualitatively worse given the context: coming both amid an actual violent attack he helped stoke and one he did little to halt. The committee found that the president took no steps to defend the Capitol building, failing to call in the National Guard, or even speak to his secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security.
While he was de facto permitting the mob’s rampage, he was privately cheering the most violent stated objective of people he acknowledged as “our supporters.”
Throughout Trump’s presidency, there was a raging debate among experts as to whether it was accurate to describe him as a “fascist.” One of the strongest counterarguments, that his political movement did not involve the kind of street violence characteristic of Italian and German fascism, was undermined on January 6 — though some scholars still argued that the term was somewhat imprecise.
But when a leader whips up a mob to attack democracy with the goal of maintaining his grip on power in defiance of democratic order, then privately refuses to stop them while endorsing the murderous aims of people he claims as his own supporters, it’s hard to see him as anything but a leader of a violent anti-democratic movement with important parallels to interwar fascism.
This doesn’t prove that fascism is, in all respects, a perfect analogy for the Trump presidency. Yet when it comes to analyzing January 6, both Trump’s behavior and the broader GOP response to the event, last night’s hearing proved that the analogy can be not only apt but illuminating.
January 6 is the culmination of a long history of fascist-like rhetoric
In The Anatomy of Fascism, Columbia University historian Robert Paxton lays out a fairly clear definition of the political tendency:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Most of this seems to fit Trumpism fairly well. “Obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood”? Check. “Compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity”? Check. “Uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites”? Check. “Without ethical or legal restraints”? Check, check, and check.
One key factor that was missing, at least for most of Trump’s presidency, was the violence. Paxton’s definition stresses the centrality of force to fascist politics: that “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants” uses “redemptive violence” to pursue “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Yet Trump personally had long harbored a fascination with political violence. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he praised the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Trump said. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”
During the 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that “Second Amendment people” might be justified in assassinating Hillary Clinton if she wins the race. He repeatedly encouraged his supporters to attack counterprotesters, even offering to pay their legal fees. The dangers were obvious; during the Republican primary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) warned that his language might lead to mass violence:
This is a man who in rallies has told his supporters to basically beat up the people who are in the crowd and he’ll pay their legal fees, someone who has encouraged people in the audience to rough up anyone who stands up and says something he doesn’t like. …
But leaders cannot say whatever they want, because words have consequences. They lead to actions that others take. And when the person you’re supporting for president is going around and saying things like, ‘Go ahead and slap them around, I’ll pay your legal fees,’ what do you think’s going to happen next?
During his presidency, his fascination with extra-legal violence came up again and again.
In 2017, he described some of the white supremacists at Charlottesville as “very fine people.” During a 2019 rally, he “joked” about shooting migrants at the border, to cheers from the crowd. In a 2020 tweet, he used a segregation-era slogan to call for violence against George Floyd protests (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”). During a presidential debate with Joe Biden, Trump told the Proud Boys — a far-right militia that would later lead the assault on the Capitol — to “stand back and stand by.”
What this record shows is that the potential for a Trump-led political movement to lead to bloodshed was always there. The president seemingly believed in the cleansing and redemptive power of violence; it has been a hallmark of his thinking for years, even decades. That he would sometimes frame these comments as jokes, or even backtrack after offering them, is characteristic of fringe right political movements — which often cast their most extreme positions in a kind of ironic tone that allows for their supporters to simultaneously embrace radical ideas while also distancing themselves from them.
The question about Trump was whether his fascination with violence would ever manifest in a mass movement: that he would align himself with an illegal violent action designed to secure his own grip on power.
This, of course, happened on January 6. But as the events unfolded, there was crucial information we didn’t know: the extent to which Trump intended to encourage violence and how he reacted as it unfolded in real time.
On the first point, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) suggested in an interview they had evidence Trump’s team was in direct contact with both the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, the other militia group that spearheaded the attack. Their proof was not presented last night; there’s also some evidence that Trump’s subordinates wouldn’t let him communicate with the extremist groups directly. This makes it hard to evaluate the question of intentionality just yet.
But on the second point, the committee’s evidence is damning. The comment about hanging Pence, together with the refusal to do anything to stop the violence, strongly indicates that the president was fine with the violence proceeding: that he saw it as furthering his cause. That is, undoubtedly, fascist.
Does the “fascism” label matter?
Like my colleague Dylan Matthews, I’ve long been hesitant to describe Trump as a fascist.
Unlike interwar fascists, Trump has not laid out an ideological alternative to liberal democracy that involves abolishing elections — in fact, he doesn’t seem to possess a coherent ideology at all. The greatest threat the Trump-led GOP poses to democracy is not the explicit overthrow of democracy, but its hollowing out from within — an endgame that resembles the Jim Crow South or contemporary Hungary far more than Nazi Germany. There’s a real concern, in my mind, that hyper-focus on the interwar model can bog us down in a definitional debate that distracts from more resonant and informative parallels.
But when we’re talking about January 6 specifically, the fascism analogy really is useful.
Events like the 1922 March on Rome or 1923 Beer Hall Putsch help us understand the way in which attempts to forcefully seize power — even failed ones like the Putsch — can play a role in the rise of radical far-right movements. They help us understand the clarifying and organizing power of violence, the way in which banding together to hurt others can help solidify dangerous political tendencies.
And it helps us understand the potential for violence to recur, especially given the mainstream Republican Party’s continued whitewashing of January 6.
One of the defining elements of the interwar fascist ascendancy is the complicity of conservative elites — their belief that they could manipulate fascist movements for their own ends, empowering these movements while remaining in the driver’s seat. This is precisely how the mainstream Republican Party has approached Trump, even after a violent attempt to seize power exposed just how far he’s willing to go to hold power.
In the midst of last night’s hearing, the official Twitter account of the Republicans on the House Judiciary committee repeatedly mocked and downplayed the significance of the committee hearing — even going so far as to label it “old news:”
All. Old. News.
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) June 10, 2022
It wasn’t. Though some of the revelations had been telegraphed in broad strokes by leaks, including the comments about hanging Pence, the specifics had yet to be made public — and there were many revelations that were simply brand-new.
But the issue here isn’t factual inaccuracy on the House GOP’s part. It’s that the official organs of the Republican Party saw their job as covering for Trump, even as evidence emerged that he literally suggested that a Republican vice president should be lynched. The lessons of the interwar period, and indeed the long history of mainstream conservative parties’ dalliances with radicals, seem entirely lost on the Republican leadership.
And this, in the end, is why using fascism as a framework for understanding January 6 is worthwhile. This explicit alliance of political violence to an effort to seize power through force is shocking — so shocking that it deserves comparisons to what’s universally seen as the darkest moment in the history of Western democracy.
That these parallels may not be perfect in every way does not make it unreasonable to draw them, or to seek lessons for how to think through the future.
There is a lot to examine in the 10-minute video compilation of the Capitol insurrection produced by the congressional committee investigating the attack. Some of the footage, which aired during Thursday’s primetime hearing, had never been broadcast before. Other clips are now receiving fresh attention. You can watch a MAGA protester read President Donald Trump’s tweet condemning Mike Pence through a megaphone to an angry mob. You can see another clip in which the mob chants about executing the vice president. Elsewhere, the video lingers painfully as Trump supporters beat police officers attempting to stop them from entering the Capitol.
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022
But to me, one of the most visually striking things about watching the video—and about watching the events unfold in real time last year—is the incredible assemblage of flags. There are so many flags, in more varieties than I can properly identify. There are regular American flags of course, but also: blue Trump flags, red Trump flags, American flags with Trump’s face on them, three-percenter flags, a Christian flag, Gadsden flags, a Confederate flag with an assault rifle on it, a Colorado flag, and various other niche symbols that people more familiar with the various court filings might have a better chance at deciphering.
One flag in particular stands out. It’s one of the first flags you see, and it also happens to be one you can see just about every day in one form or another: It’s the so-called Thin Blue Line flag.
The flag’s promise of power and force mattered more than the police officers themselves.
The Thin Blue Line is the unofficial (and sometimes official) emblem of American police departments. It’s a metaphor for the antagonistic way in which many cops view their jobs—as the “thin blue line” between civilization and chaos. And it’s been widely adopted by opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement and by the American right, in general.
We see it in the opening scene of the January 6 video, waving behind a woman who tells a cameraman, “I’m not allowed to say what’s going to happen today, because everyone’s just going to have to watch for themselves.”
It is a striking, though not surprising, flag to see in the context of an insurrection in which Trump supporters attacked the cops who tried to stand between them and Congress. One of the two in-person witnesses at Thursday’s hearing, Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, described the scene that day as “carnage,” and said she was “slipping in people’s blood.”
But in another sense, the mob understood the flag’s meaning perfectly well. The symbol has never been about the idea of respecting laws in the abstract; the very idea of redesigning the American flag in such a manner and aggressively foisting it upon everyone else is a statement of dominance and control and authority. Like the Punisher logo it’s often blended together with, the Thin Blue Line flag is a rejoinder to people who question the work that cops do, laced with no small amount of malice. The right-wing political apparatus considers police officers both allies and mascots for its project. During the campaign, Trump even rallied with members the NYPD’s Police Benevolent Association at his golf course. But ultimately, actual laws and actual order were completely non-essential to his own idea of “law and order”; the flag’s promise of power and force mattered more than the police officers themselves. And on January 6, the thin blue line was just in the way.