Joshua Holland

There is ample blame to go around for the MAGA insurgency that has so far resulted in eight deaths and left the rest of us on a knife's edge. A number of those charged for storming the Capitol have made it clear that they believed they were heeding on Donald Trump's call to action. Every Republican who acted as if Trump's claims of a stolen election had more validity than when he accused Ted Cruz of cheating his way to a victory in the Iowa Republican caucus in 2016 or said the Emmy Awards were rigged after "The Amazing Race" edged out "The Apprentice" is culpable to a degree.

But we need to look deeper to understand why hundreds of people who saw themselves as law-abiding "patriots" not only ran wild through the seat of American government but felt sufficiently entitled to do so that they later shared their criminal exploits on social media. Whiteness alone doesn't explain it.

The United States is unique among mature democracies for having a political culture in which the idea that ordinary citizens have a right and a duty to respond to what they perceive to be government overreach with violence. That belief has been called the "insurgency theory" of the 2nd Amendment, and it has been heavily promoted by the gun manufacturers' lobby—both the NRA and even more reactionary groups like Gun Owners of America—for decades....

The American right seems oblivious to the seething anger that the 81 million Americans who braved a multifaceted voter suppression campaign and a raging pandemic to vote against Donald Trump feel over Republicans' relentless attempts to silence their voices with Donald Trump's ludicrous election fraud conspiracy theories.

This week, many of them sought to weaponize President-elect Joe Biden's campaign theme of bringing the country together after four years of Trump's bomb-throwing. The very same Republican lawmakers who objected to counting the Electoral College votes that gave Joe Biden a resounding victory claimed this week that impeaching Trump would violate Biden's promise to promote healing and seek greater unity. "Rushing this resolution to the floor will do nothing to unify or heal the country," said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) during this week's debate. "These actions, again, will only continue to divide the nation."

But it is not on us to comfort the 74 million Trump voters whom Trump, most Republican lawmakers and the conservative media whipped into a frenzy. These calls for unity are premature--a transparent efforts to obtain impunity for those who brought us to the point where a mob of wingnuts clad in military gear and red hats planned to assassinate a Republican Vice President on Capitol Hill and there are now more troops stationed in DC to defend Biden's inauguration than there are on the ground in Afghanistan....

Donald Trump will end his disastrous presidency violating the central, overarching promise he made to the public in 2016: That he and his supporters would win so much that they'd be "sick and tired of winning." Trump vowed that he alone would bring back lost manufacturing jobs, restore white, Christian America's dominance over an increasingly diverse country and punish those politically correct elites who looked down their noses at his voters.

Now, four years later, the walls are coming down around him. Two years after Trump led his party to one of the most bruising midterm defeats ever, he lost his own bid for re-election and then lost dozens of court cases attempting to overturn the results. And he was widely credited with handing Democrats control of the Senate by depressing Republican turnout in Georgia.

He wasn't done losing. On Friday, his beloved Twitter account was permanently suspended, a loss that his aides say caused him to "go ballistic." This week, Lehigh University revoked the honorary degree it bestowed upon him more than 30 years ago and the Iraqi government issued an arrest warrant for him....

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.