Morning Briefing: The January 6th Committee Hearings Continue
Morning Briefing: The January 6th Committee Hearings Continue
U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack held a second day of hearings, which focused on the former President's strategy to publicly undermine the results of the 2020 election.
Morning Briefing: U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack held a second day of hearings, and “was able to lay out a clear timeline of Trump’s decision to reject the election results and how top aides repeatedly debunked various claims of fraud.”
Among the revelations were that the former President was keen to listen to the advise of “definitely intoxicated” Rudy Giuliani, and Jason Miller, former advisor to the former President, said during previously taped video testimony that Giuliani said on election night that “We won it. They’re stealing it from us. Where did the votes come from? We need to go say that we won.”
The Select Committee also presented extensive previously taped video testimony of Former Attorney General William Barr, during which he said that he repeatedly told the former President that claims of election fraud were “bullshit,” and Barr also criticized Dinesh D’Souza’s propacumentary1 2000 Mules as “singularly unimpressive” and “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”
D’Souza, the former president of the Christian university The King's College and the author of What is So Great About Christianity, responded to Barr’s criticism by describing the former Attorney General as “Fatso,” and claiming that Barr is “stereotypical small-town sheriff, overweight and largely immobile, whose rank incompetence results in the whole town being robbed from under his nose.”
Another revelation from the Select Committee hearing was that the former President reportedly “raised over $250 million in emails pushing debunked voter fraud allegations for an ‘official election defense fund’ that the committee found did not exist.”
Must Reads
Thomas Lecaque writes that “Rod of Iron continues the Unification Church’s tradition of apocalypticism, but adds to this framework beliefs derived from a variety of sources that include, most importantly, the rhetoric, imagery, and ideology of both QAnon and Christian nationalism. The younger Moon wrote a constitution for the messianic kingdom he and his followers believe will replace the United States following its collapse. The church’s website calls for people to join in defending “freedom” by standing up for the Second Amendment, which “applies to all freedom loving individuals—across the planet.” (Just how a part of the U.S. Constitution is supposed to apply to the whole planet is left unstated.) And members of the church perform ceremonies wearing bullet crowns and carrying AR-15s—even, following the elder Moon’s tradition, the occasional mass wedding.” [The Bulwark]
Sarah Pulliam Bailey writes that in “1983, a lawyer named Michael Farris founded a Virginia-based group called the Home School Legal Defense Association, a group designed to protect home-schooling families from government regulations it saw as unnecessary. HSLDA has gone to great lengths since to ensure legal protections for home-schooled children across the country. ProPublica has reported that the organization successfully killed proposed regulations and changed existing laws in states across the nation on visitation rights from grandparents, mandatory high school attendance, and kindergarten programs at public schools.” [The Washington Post]
Paul Finkelman writes that this “controversy is hardly new and reflects a long southern tradition of suppressing speech that rocks the political or cultural boat. In the 1830s, after David Walker’s death, mobs attacked the Charleston post office, burning mail from northern states to prevent the dissemination of newspapers, pamphlets, and other literature denouncing slavery. Until the Civil War, freedom of expression mostly ceased to exist in the slaveholding states. Anyone could praise slavery. People could debate the best way to treat slaves, the most efficient way to use their labor, the most effective ways to punish them, or what to do with the South’s free Black population, which surpassed a quarter of a million people in 1860. But no one in the South was free to criticize slavery.” [Washington Monthly]
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“propacumentary” (adjective): a film or other multimedia that is presented as a legitimate fact-based documentary, while similar films may be referred to as a pseudo-documentary, this type of film is specifically intended to propagate false or misleading information to advance a political or ideological objective.