It is a well-accepted maxim that elections have consequences. Voters may not have fully realized, however, that by putting Republicans in control of the House, even by the slimmest of margins, they were granting enormous power to people who openly plotted to overthrow the government.
At a Republican “gala” in New York last weekend Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene assured everyone that if she had been in charge of Jan. 6, the insurrection would have succeeded because people who didn’t have guns that day would have been armed. Even more scary than her remarks is the fact that House Speaker wannabe Kevin McCarthy, if he wishes to assume that role, has to give Greene control over many major moves by the House.
Greene’s speech was delivered just before it was revealed in a trove of 300,000 text messages newly made public that at least 34 of her Republican colleagues took an active role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attempted coup. The list includes leading GOP luminaries like Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Paul Gosar of Arizona and Rick Allen of Georgia. Allen told Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, “high tech operatives in foreign governments” had stolen the election.
Meadows and 34 members of Congress shared text messages detailing plans of the coup aimed at reversing the loss of Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs and Pennsylvania’s Scott Perry exchanged texts with Meadows about plans to install a new attorney general favorable to the coup. South Carolina Republican Ralph Norman sent texts urging Meadows to push Trump into declaring martial law. Reps. from Texas sent texts saying everything would be lost if Meadows didn’t figure out a way to keep Trump in office.
At the very least, the texts clearly show Republican lawmakers as major factors in undermining public faith in democracy, while many show the lawmakers to be active planners of a real coup. What’s worse is many of the principals are slated to take positions as leaders of House committees in January.
The conspiratorial lawmakers and Meadows exchanged texts detailing methods that could be used to carry out the unfolding Jan. 6 coup.
While some joined those who called upon Mark Meadows to push Trump to declare martial law to stay in office, others joined the call for adoption of the independent state legislature theory, calling upon state legislative bodies to overthrow the popular votes for Biden in their states. The Republican lawmakers are clearly part of an extreme right wing authoritarian group that will soon be running one half of the legislative branch of the U.S. government through their control of the House of Representatives.
Two years after the attempted coup, the right wing-dominated Supreme Court appeared ready to jump in bed with the conspiratorial lawmakers last week by validating the independent state legislative theory which, on the day of the coup attempt, seemed to be nothing more than a right-wing fringe theory.
One of the most disturbing things about this entire matter is that two years after the coup attempt the key leaders, including Trump, his top advisers and the GOP lawmakers have not been called to task. It would seem that if the country is serious about preserving democracy, revelations about the new texts this weekend, two years after the attempted coup, would not have been necessary. By this time the texts should have been unearthed, and the guilty lawmakers and Trump should have been charged, tried and jailed.
One has only to look at the foiling last week of a right-wing coup in Germany which involved the extreme right, anti-Semitic forces, conspiracy theorists, lawmakers, army reservists and militia supporters. The plotters included exactly the types of extreme right-wing groups who backed the coup attempt in the U.S two years ago. Only the Germans have decided not to let them run rampant for the next two years!
The big difference with Germany, however, is that in the U.S. one of the major political parties, the Republican Party, played a a leading role in the coup and continues to pose a major threat to democracy. And, unlike the plotters in Germany, two years after the Jan. 6 coup they continue to run rampant in the U.S. with Donald Trump even running for reelection.
The revelations about the Republican texts supporting the coup were not the end of that party’s continuing threat to democracy. The Republican “gala” in New York this weekend reflects where they would take the nation.
In addition to Marjorie Taylor Greene there were other speakers who described the need for a “new civil war.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism throughout the United States, has cited the speech at that gala by Young Republican President Gavin Wax, who declared, “We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.
“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax also said. The words were almost identical to ones uttered in a speech in Berlin by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief in Hitler’s Germany.
SPLC’s Hatewatch reporters were on hand to observe as white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE met with Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr. They all took selfies with one another.
“Republicans publicly lauded members of a fascist political party in Austria that had been founded by World War II-era German Nazi party members,” said the SPLC observers.
At one of the tables, Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer publicly hobnobbed with and joked with “racist political operative Jack Posobiec,” the site said. Posobiec was the right-wing fanatic who spread the false Pizzagate conspiracy.
That conspiracy said Democrats were running a pedophile dungeon in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. A believer in that conspiracy theory ended up shooting up the place which, it turned out, didn’t even have a basement.
It’s not just Fox News that is kowtowing to the extreme right. Newsweek has grown increasingly friendly to right-wing extremists and white supremacists over the past several years, and Hammer has invited Posobiec onto his podcast. A long-time supporter of Trump, now he seems to be leaning to Ron DeSantis, the right-wing Republican governor of Florida.
Making no attempts to hide their support for fascism at the gala, “Republican speakers repeatedly voiced an anti-democracy, authoritarian ideology, and extremists in the audience cheered wildly,” wrote the SPLC.
“White nationalists such as the Brimelows of VDARE and leaders from extreme far-right European parties like Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) and Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), ate and drank in the same room as newly elected Republican congressional reps.”
Among them were George Santos, who represents parts of Queens and Long Island, Mike Collins who is from Georgia, and the incoming Floridian in Congress, Rep. Cory Mills.
Democracy requires a sustained effort by the people to protect it. It cannot survive otherwise.
It is clear that Republicans and their leaders, for the most part, have not and will not stand up and fight for democracy. Instead they have led and continue to lead a movement of white supremacism and fascism, a movement that does great harm to everyone in the country—except the corporate giants who fund the fascistic GOP lawmakers. With all their talk of all-out war against the left, they have yet to advance one single idea or program that benefits the people in any way.
It would pay to take a page from the playbook of anti-fascists in Germany last week who moved rapidly to crush the danger emanating from a large group of their own fascist conspirators. In that country even hate speech is not just monitored but actually outlawed. They understand very well from their own history that hate speech is the first step toward fascist repression of those who are the victims of that speech.
Above all, as we approach the 2024 elections there has to be a renewed determination to prevent the election of Republicans on all levels. The party is led by anti-democratic and fascist forces that have shown that when given the power they will abuse it by destroying democracy. It’s up to all of us to protect it.
John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.
