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Barton Gellman

Friday 26th of April 2024

2020 Presidential election As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election Only one meaningful correlation emerged [from the Chicago Project on Security & Threats' study of January 6 insurgents]. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one point drop in a county's percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election To understand the threat today, you have to see with clear eyes what happened, what is still happening after the 2020 election. The charlatans and cranks who filed lawsuits and led public spectacles on Trump's behalf were sideshows. They distracted from the main event: a systematic effort to nullify the election results and then reverse them. As milestones passed — individual certification by states, the meeting of the Electoral College on December 14 — Trump’s hand grew weaker. But he played it strategically throughout. The more we learn about January 6, the clearer the conclusion becomes that it was the last gambit in a soundly conceived campaign — one that provides a blueprint for 2024. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election What Pape was seeing in these results did not fit the government model of  lone wolfs and small groups of extremists. “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” he told me. “This is collective political violence.”  Pape drew an analogy to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, at the dawn of the Troubles. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 [Robert A. Pape, the leader of a study of the insurrectionists by Chicago Project on Security & Threats called them “committed insurrectionists” and estimated there are 21 million in the US] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Impeachment Already there is enormous demand for impeachment. A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll in May found that 68 percent of Republican voters think the House should impeach Biden.  A majority expect that it will  impeach him. Thwarting those expectations would be dangerous for any House Republican. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, October 26, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Impeachment Sometime next year, after an interval of perfor- mative investigations, Republicans in the House  are going to impeach Joe Biden. This may not be  their present plan, but they will work themselves up to it by degrees. The pressure from the MAGA base will build. A triggering event will burst all restraints. Eventually, Republicans will leave themselves little choice. This prediction rests, of course, on the assumption that Republicans will win control of the House next month, which seems likely: … Impeachment is the corollary of election denial — the invincible certainty that Biden cheated in  2020 and Donald Trump won. If you truly believe that and haven't joined a militia, impeachment is the least of the remidies you will accept. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, Oct. 26, 2002 © 2022 Kwiple.com
 
State of the union There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging on it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without. Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com