In Real Time: the Revolution Continues.

Contrary to Gil Scott-Heron, the effects of the revolution are being televised even as the propaganda passes via word of mouth from one conspiratorial whisperer to the next.


If you want to see real time video of the recent revolution on the Capitol steps and inside the chambers, watch the clips that accompany undercover reporter war correspondent Luke Mogelson’s Among the Insurrectionists (New Yorker, Jan. 25,2021). Fantastic piece of writing, reporting, and chronicle of the revolt.

Apologists for Trump voters might watch UNM Business-law professor, David Clements’ slick defense of Trumpian ideology understood as the good conscience-bad faith expression of sophistry or triumph of rhetoric over fact. Clements uses half-truths, red herrings, strawmen, unsound premises, corrupt grounds and all the logical fallacies to support an untenable defense at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CreVpaDZgOY

Hysteria among the pundits on MSNBC continues a mix of sense and non-sense. The frenzied Joe Scarborough tries to have it both ways as a contemporary conservative, he advocates “law and order,” deploring the violent images of the sixties similarly to the way he deplores the attack on the Capitol.

But Conservatives never seem to deplore the unlawful disorder of the boardroom in Corporate America, which profits, as media companies do, from the drama of divisiveness, while the same media companies profit from a lack of regulation (like “Oil and Gas”) and plunder the countryside. Big Joe aids and abets those who pick the pockets of the lower classes and have helped, however unwittingly (?) the transfer of wealth to the uppers. Law and Order is another name for “shut up and go to jail” if you don’t like the minimum wage or the toxins in the air and water.

Meanwhile, the ratings for both Fox or other right-wing media rise even as Rachel Maddow’s show prospered as Trump became bigger and bigger, a principle to which she has never responsibly copped. Terrorists seek the limelight to promote their causes, regardless of content: it’s all about the presentation of image and politics a entertainment. Promote Trump v. Hillary (forget Bernie) then it’s Trump all the time.

Meanwhile the man in the basement ran a campaign based on “common decency” and won? Go figure.

Blame the insidious effects of “social media” but don’t forget politics as drama entertains and the broadcast and publishing establishment has prospered mightily off Trumpism just as Amazon has profited from the pandemic.

Yesterday, New Mexico made the news as Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin, founder of “Cowboys for Trump” made good on his promise to revisit the Capital and Capitol, armed with pistol and rifle, which he did, and shortly thereafter left the crime scene, placed under arrest by the FBI. (He led a demonstration in Taos a couple of months ago, prior to the election, attended by local yokels and QAnon devotees.)

Fascist takeovers, the merger of government and business, are always accompanied by a mixture of farce and tragedy, a play written by the agents and authors of narratives, paid for by the elite but pushed by the brown- shirt foot-soldiers of grievance. Remove the causes of grievance and the effects dribble away.

In America when you want answers you retrace the steps of the Watergate lessons, Bernstein, Woodward, and find out when you read Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers that the lesson is always the same: “Follow the money.”