Ignoring the Searing Trauma of the Trump Fascist Brownshirt Menace: The Whore of Trump is More Whore of Trump Than Ever!:
David Shasha
The Whore of Trump is More Whore of Trump Than Ever!
A little over a week ago I posted an item detailing what Tikvah Tablet The Scroll was up to as the country was gearing up to witness the historic 1/6 Committee public hearings:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/Y1FvXOfwPow
For those who might have missed it, here was the Whore of Trump’s authorized view of the matter:
As if the creation of the Jan. 6 commission were not already enough of a politicized pseudo-event, the group has now brought in TV executives to choreograph a show trial. According to reporting from Axios and the New York Post, the committee’s televised hearings, set to begin on Thursday, will be a made-for-TV event with the help of the former president of ABC News, hired to turn the committee’s findings into “compelling” viewing, as the Post put it. The miniseries still seeks an ending, though, with the committee divided over what takeaway proposals it wants to endorse. Axios reports that some members, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), want to call to abolish the electoral college; others, led by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), seek more modest changes to the college than its wholesale abolition and worry that such dramatic policy proposals will undermine the committee’s legitimacy.
As an addendum to my attack on the Trumploving SHANDA, which also had some choice items on Guns and School Violence in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, I provided The Washington Post’s Phil Bump’s article on the infamous FOX News refusal to air the hearings.
This Tuesday’s hearing provided yet more detail on what Trumpworld was up to outside of DC, as the Sedition Insurrectionists found their way to threaten Swing State government officials – almost all of them Trumpublican Loyalists – with death and other forms of violence.
Following this note I provide a number of articles on the details of the witness testimony – testimony that was ignored by the Whore of Trump and her Tikvah Tablet The Scroll that same day:
https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/june-21-2022
The Tuesday Tikvah Tablet The Scroll post found space for the corrupt Trumpscum SCOTUS 6-3 ruling on fraudulently allowing the use of public money for Parochial Schools:
Advocates of school choice and religious liberty notched a major victory today after the Supreme Court issued one of the year’s biggest remaining decisions on its docket. In a 6-3 majority opinion, the court found that Maine’s tuition assistance program withholding state money from private religious schools violated the constitutional rights of two Christian families. Of the 180,000 secondary school students in Maine, roughly 5,000 students, primarily located in the state’s rural north, live far enough from a public school that they receive tuition assistance from the state to attend any accredited private school that is both “nonsectarian” and provides the equivalent of a public education. David and Amy Carson, along with another family, qualified for the assistance and sued Maine for the exclusion of two Christian schools from the program. One of the schools, Temple Academy, forbids the admission of students with gay parents, teaches lessons on the immorality of homosexuality, and seeks to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion.”
In previous instances, the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional to withhold public money from religious entities simply because they were religious. In the high court’s latest ruling, the majority opinion found that beyond allowing the participation of religious schools, the state is required to fund religious education, even if those schools do not adhere to some of the state’s rules on public education.
The implications are wide reaching and could significantly rewrite public secular education nationwide. The decision could apply to parents who wish to choose schools in larger school systems or publicly funded charter schools that previously were not allowed to include religious teaching. More broadly, the decision implicates other publicly funded institutions. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissent, “What other social benefits are there of the State’s provision of which means … that the State must pay parents for the religious equivalent of the secular benefit provided?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor was more blunt in her assessment: “Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”
“There is nothing neutral about Maine’s program,” countered Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority opinion. “The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”
Please do read the articles which follow this note, and re-read the Tikvah Tablet The Scroll lead story to fully absorb how truly decrepit and disgusting the Whore of Trump really is.
Reading the rest of the post we get the usual Neo-Con garbage on China, COVID, Facebook, assisted suicide and the Pope, Jeff Bezos, NRA-style Uvalde apathy, the classic Troll the Biden economic schadenfreude, and a truly bizarre closing piece on “Antique Vibrators” – whatever the hell that means.
But nothing on the staggering testimony from the 1/6 Committee hearing on Trump Fascist Violence.
For the record, even as Tikvah Tablet has chosen to utterly ignore Trumpworld Fascism in its many articles published from 2015 to the present, I did post an item on the YEEZUS publicist who was an important part of the Tuesday hearing:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/U3pK0Yasj8E/m/3xgjMwPnBgAJ
Here is how WP’s Bump described the Trumpterror unleashed on Georgia election official Ruby Freeman and her family:
“Hey Brad, why wouldn’t you want to check out Ruby Freeman?” Trump asked. It was one of more than a dozen references to Freeman, an election worker in Georgia’s Fulton County, that Trump made in the call. Freeman was one of the individuals seen in a surveillance video from State Farm Arena that went viral after the election, in which poll workers were shown running ballots through a vote-counting machine. That activity was cast as depicting illegal vote-counting, which was not true. But in his grasping effort to retain power, the accuracy of information was never a powerful constraint for Trump.
The effect on Freeman was severe. She and her daughter, who was working with her, were the targets of repeated harassment by Trump supporters who falsely accused her of cheating on Joe Biden’s behalf. A concocted “confession” circulated online in which claims about undermining the vote in “racist Georgia” were attributed to her. She was forced to repeatedly appeal to local law enforcement for protection.
On Jan. 4, the day after Trump’s call with Raffensperger, Freeman got another unsolicited knock on her door, according to the new Reuters report. This time it was a woman named Trevian Kutti who claimed that she had traveled from Chicago on behalf of a “high-profile individual.” According to the news agency, she came to “give Freeman an urgent message: confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail.”
If you read Tikvah Tablet, you will not hear about any of it.
As patriotic Americans and believing Jews – those for whom the Torah has actual meaning and existential import – suffer through all this Trumpscum Brownshirt horrorshow, things are indeed very different in the home of the Bastard Children of Zalman Bernstein.
Indeed, we know that Cancel Culture is a major issue for these decrepit Neo-Con Straussian robots, but when it comes to the Cancellation of American Democracy – and the Cancellation of Torah values – they are proudly AWOL.
Processing what we saw all day Tuesday was a truly traumatic thing.
But not for the Whore of Trump and her Tikvah Tablet Trumpscum dittoheads.
David Mamet certainly approves!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/U3pK0Yasj8E/m/3xgjMwPnBgAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/U3pK0Yasj8E/m/3xgjMwPnBgAJ
Tell it to Jarvanka as they continue to avoid jail, and fleece America by violating the Emoluments Clause, and laughing at the rest of us suckers:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/67OVx-rTDJ8
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/sXzHlwnjbQI
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/HHKLGWqGmKs
It is all truly disgusting, as it reflects the nihilism of The Tikvah Fund and its subversion of all Jewish values.
David Shasha
‘There Is Nowhere I Feel Safe’: Election Officials Describe Threats Fueled by Trump
By: Catie Edmondson
WASHINGTON — Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of Arizona’s House, braced every weekend for hordes of Trump supporters, some with weapons, who swarmed his home and blared videos that called him a pedophile.
“We had a daughter who was gravely ill, who was upset by what was happening outside,” he said. She died not long after, in late January 2021.
Gabriel Sterling, a top state election official in Georgia, recalled receiving an animated picture of a slowly twisting noose along with a note accusing him of treason. His boss, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, recounted that Trump supporters broke into his widowed daughter-in-law’s house and threatened his wife with sexual violence.
And Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, two Black women who served as election workers during the pandemic in Georgia, suffered an onslaught of racist abuse and were driven into hiding after Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Donald J. Trump’s lawyer, lied that they had rigged the election against Mr. Trump.
“I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation,” Ms. Freeman said, adding as her voice rose with emotion, “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”
Election official after election official testified to the House Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday in searing, emotional detail how Mr. Trump and his aides unleashed violent threats and vengeance on them for refusing to cave to his pressure to overturn the election in his favor.
The testimony showed how Mr. Trump and his aides encouraged his followers to target election officials in key states — even going so far as to post their personal cellphone numbers on Mr. Trump’s social media channels, which the committee cited as a particularly brutal effort by the president to cling to power.
“Donald Trump did not care about the threats of violence,” said Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee. “He did not condemn them. He made no effort to stop them. He went forward with his fake allegations anyway.”
The stakes for the nation, Ms. Cheney warned, were dire. “We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence,” she said.
Mr. Bowers of Arizona was the first to testify. For nearly an hour, he described the pressure campaign he faced over several weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, after Mr. Trump lost the state. He spoke of the fear he felt when a man bearing the mark of the Three Percenters, an extremist offshoot of the gun rights movement, appeared in his neighborhood.
“He had a pistol and was threatening my neighbor,” Mr. Bowers said. “Not with the pistol, but just vocally. When I saw the gun, I knew I had to get close.”
The threats, he said, have gone on for a long time: “Up till even recently, it is the new pattern, or a pattern in our lives, to worry what will happen on Saturdays. Because we have various groups come by and they have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician and blaring loudspeakers in my neighborhood and leaving literature,” he said, as well as arguing with and threatening him and his neighbors.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, who rejected efforts to overturn the state’s electors, described trying to put her young son to bed when she heard a growing din. Armed protesters with bullhorns were picketing outside her home. “My stomach sunk,” she said. “That was the scariest moment, just not knowing what was going to happen.”
Mike Shirkey, the majority leader of Michigan’s Republican-controlled State Senate, was subjected to nearly 4,000 text messages from Mr. Trump’s followers after the president and his campaign publicly posted Mr. Shirkey’s personal cellphone number.
“It was a loud noise, loud consistent cadence,” Mr. Shirkey testified. “We heard that the Trump folks are calling and asking for changes in the electors, and ‘You guys can do this.’ Well, they were believing things that were untrue.”
Ms. Moss, who goes by Shaye, and her mother became the targets of Trump supporters after Mr. Giuliani falsely accused them in a Georgia State Senate hearing of passing around USB drives like “vials of heroin or cocaine” to steal the election from Mr. Trump.
What her mother actually handed her, Ms. Moss testified on Tuesday, was a ginger mint candy.
But Mr. Giuliani’s claim — later elevated by Mr. Trump himself, who referred to Ms. Moss by name more than a dozen times in a call with Mr. Raffensperger — tore across far-right circles of the internet. Soon after, the F.B.I. informed Ms. Freeman that it was no longer safe for her to stay at her house.
The urgency of that warning became clear after Trump supporters showed up at the door of Ms. Moss’s grandmother. They forced their way into her home, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest of her granddaughter.
“This woman is my everything,” Ms. Moss testified about her grandmother. “I’ve never even heard her or seen her cry ever in my life, and she called me screaming at the top of her lungs.”
While in hiding, Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman continued to face threats explicitly invoking their race, including a comment that Ms. Moss and her mother should “be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”
“A lot of them were racist,” Ms. Moss said. “A lot of them were just hateful.”
Both women testified that nearly two years later, they were still haunted by the threat of violence. Ms. Moss recalled listening to the audio tape of Mr. Trump attacking her and her mother and immediately feeling “like it was all my fault.”
“I just felt bad for my mom, and I felt horrible for picking this job,” she testified, growing emotional. “And being the one that always wants to help and always there, never missing not one election. I just felt like it was — it was my fault for putting my family in this situation.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, quietly responded from the dais.
Ms. Freeman testified that she no longer went to the grocery store, and felt nervous every time she gave her name — once proudly worn bedazzled on T-shirts — for food orders.
“There is nowhere I feel safe,” Ms. Freeman testified. “The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one.”
Aishvarya Kavi and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
From The New York Times, June 21, 2022
Rusty Bowers's profile in courage
By: Aaron Rupar
Since early January 2021, the country has been familiar with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who during an infamous recorded phone call just days before the insurrection resisted Trump’s threats about how he could be guilty of crimes if he didn’t find enough votes to overturn Trump’s loss in the state to Joe Biden.
Raffensperger offered important testimony to the January 6 committee during its fourth hearing Tuesday, including a lie-by-lie debunking of false claims Trump threw at him during the aforementioned call. But the breakout star of the day ended up being Rusty Bowers, the Republican Speaker of the House in Arizona who shared his less publicized story of standing tall in the face of a similar Trump/Giuliani pressure campaign.
Tuesday’s hearing was about the efforts made by Trump and Giuliani — with help from Republicans like Ron Johnson — to get Republicans legislators in states Biden won to go along with a fake elector scheme, even after they were told by White House lawyers that not only was the plan not legally sound, but the fraud claims they were making weren’t true.
Of course, whether the plan was illegal or factual was beside the point, which was ultimately to give Vice President Mike Pence a pretext to reject Biden’s electors and send the election back to Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Arizona and Georgia that could presumably be counted on to do Trump’s bidding. But as Bowers made clear on Tuesday, he wasn’t having it.
“I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to,” Bowers testified, recounting a December 2020 journal entry he wrote as Giuliani and Trump were repeatedly trying to cajole him into calling a hearing aimed at affirming the big lie and decertifying Biden’s victory.
Bowers was a Trump supporter who voted for him in the 2020 election. But he began his testimony Tuesday by telling Adam Schiff that Trump is lying about conversations they had in November 2020. Trump claims Bowers told him the election in Arizona was rigged, but Bowers strongly denies that characterization, saying on Tuesday that “anywhere, anyone, any time has said that I said the election is rigged, that would not be true.”
Bowers testified that in the weeks following the 2020 election, he repeatedly pressed Rudy Giuliani to provide evidence backing up his wild claims about dead people and undocumented people voting in Arizona. But none ever came. On the contrary, Giuliani eventually told Bowers and his counsel on a call something to the effect of “we’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”
“I don’t know if that was a gaffe, or maybe he didn’t think through what he said … afterwards, we kinda laughed about it,” Bowers said.
From author Substack page, June 21, 2022
Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman: January 6 testimony reveals threat to democracy
By: Zack Beauchamp
Tuesday’s hearing of the House select committee probing the January 6 attack on the US Capitol ended with perhaps the single most emotional segment in the hearings to date: a mother-daughter team of former Georgia poll workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, discussing what it was like to be singled out as part of former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that the election was stolen — and that poll workers like Moss and Freeman were involved in the plot.
In doing so, they highlighted a serious and ongoing threat to American democracy.
In the weeks following the 2020 election, the Trump campaign and its allies publicly accused the two women of committing election fraud in Fulton County (home to Atlanta). Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, at one point claimed that the mother and daughter — who are Black — were passing around USB sticks full of doctored votes like they were “vials of heroin or cocaine” (it was actually a ginger mint, according to Moss).
During Trump’s now-infamous call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump pressured the latter to “find” enough votes to alter the election result, he mentioned the two women 18 separate times. (Raffensperger also delivered testimony at Tuesday’s hearing.)
The result was a wave of harassment that ruined the two women’s lives. Moss testified that she received “a lot of threats, wishing death upon me — telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like ‘be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’” She went into hiding and said she gained 60 pounds from the stress. Trump supporters attacked her grandmother’s home, barging in and “exclaiming that they were coming in to make a citizens arrest.”
Freeman, for her part, used to proudly wear T-shirts with her nickname — “Lady Ruby” — on them. “Now,” she testified in a videotaped deposition, “I won’t even introduce myself by my name anymore.” She continued:
There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen, who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.
This testimony revealed the real damage done to human lives by lies spouted by Trump and his allies. But it also pointed to something deeper — the way that attacks on individual poll workers chip away at the very foundations of our democracy.
Civil servants across the country, from ordinary people like Moss and Freeman to officials like Raffensperger, step up to make sure our elections run lawfully and smoothly. By targeting them so personally, Trump and his anti-democratic allies are raising the costs of such civic participation — and opening the door for MAGA disciples to infiltrate our elections infrastructure in 2022 and beyond.
Undermining democracy, one poll worker at a time
While Moss and Freeman were special targets of Trump and Giuliani, they were not the only poll workers to experience vicious harassment in the last election cycle. A 2021 survey found that 17 percent of America’s local election officials experienced threats due to their jobs during the 2020 election cycle. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told me last year that this was very far from normal prior to 2020.
“It’s not even accurate to say [threatening election workers] was rare prior to 2020. It was so rare as to be virtually nonexistent,” he said. “This is beyond anything that we’ve ever seen.”
Sometimes, these threats were the direct result of Trump singling a poll worker out — as was the case with Freeman, Moss, and other officials like Raffensperger.
Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican responsible for election oversight, became a lightning rod when Trump tweeted that he was someone who was “being used big time by the Fake News Media” as a cover for election fraud. He received a wave of threats; a deputy commissioner, Seth Bluestein, was subjected to antisemitic abuse. Schmidt’s wife got emails with threats such as “ALBERT RINO SCHMIDT WILL BE FATALLY SHOT” and “HEADS ON SPIKES. TREASONOUS SCHMIDTS.” The family left their home for safety reasons after the election; Schmidt has announced he will not run for reelection in 2023.
In other cases, presidential involvement wasn’t necessary to incite harassment. Trump’s conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen, and that local election officials were often part of “the steal,” had created a climate in which hardcore Trump supporters felt empowered to take matters into their own hands.
In Vermont, not exactly a swing state that interested Trump, one of his supporters sent a series of threatening messages to election officials in late 2020 — warning them, among other things, that “your days are fucking numbered.”
This harassment obviously did not enable Trump to overturn the 2020 election. But it has done immense psychological harm to election workers like Moss and Freeman, who work difficult jobs for little pay. A 2020 nationwide survey of election officials conducted by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College found that about a quarter of respondents planned to retire before the 2024 presidential election. One of the top reasons cited was “the political environment” — meaning that the politicization of their jobs and attendant threats made them want out.
When dedicated poll workers quit, it means the person’s years of expertise in specialized and technical areas vanishes. One departure, or a handful, might be manageable. Mass resignations — and an environment that dissuades the civic-minded from stepping up to fill the vacancies — can be catastrophic to election management.
That’s especially true given that Trump’s allies are working to insert their supporters into key election roles. A September 2021 ProPublica investigation documented the emergence of a “precinct strategy,” beginning with a call to action on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s radio show, in which Republicans have begun flooding local voting precincts with volunteers who could shape the counting process in the next election cycle. They found that thousands of Republicans had signed up for these roles since Bannon’s campaign began, with no similar surge on the Democratic side.
“Your best-case scenario [if poll workers quit en masse] is more problems at polling places and in voting,” Becker told me. “The worst-case scenario is not just if we lose it, but what happens when that experience gets replaced by hackery … more people who believe that their job is to deliver their election to the candidate that they want to see win.”
Election security analysts are already worrying about the 2022 midterms — in particular, whether the campaigns of harassment and intimidation of 2020 will be repeated. There are good reasons to think they will be, given that a majority of Republicans still believe Trump’s fictions about a fatally compromised electoral system.
There is a real chance that Moss and Freeman will not be the last poll workers to have their lives upended as part of Trump’s quest for power. That looming possibility and its chilling effects on civic-minded Americans could prove debilitating for our democracy.
From Vox, June 21, 2022