Insurrection Conspiracy
Our media is failing us in their reporting on the Trump insurrection following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.. The focus is always on the violent assault on the Capitol, but the insurrection was a broad conspiracy to overthrow republican government in these United States.
One part of the plot was to pressure election officials in close states to reject the outcome of the election. Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro were prominent participants. Another part, either as a backup or a continuation of pressuring election officials, was the fake Elector scheme. Chesebro and Giuliani were among the main drivers here, as was John Eastman, who laid out much of the conspiracy in a pair of memos to Trump.The fake Elector scheme involved two courses of action. Their preference was state officials in “swing” states declaring Trump the winner and certifying their fake Electors. If that failed, they hoped to leverage any statements decrying the election process by officials in those states along with the votes of the fake Electors to create a rationale for objecting to certifying the actual Electoral votes from those states. Pressuring Vice President Pence was part of this, and Trump was directly involved in pressuring Pence.
The assault on the Capitol was a parallel line of effort. Its purpose was to pressure and intimidate Republican members of Congress along with Pence to go along with the fake legalisms of the main line of effort, the fake Elector scheme. Roger Stone was the link between the Eastman-Chesebro side of the conspiracy and the rightwing militia groups used to foment and carry out the assault. Trump was also involved in this line of effort. The rallies on January 5 and 6 brought large numbers of Trump supporters (“normiecons” as the militia groups referred to them) to the area, and those supporters were used to both conceal the actions of the militia groups and provide numbers to overwhelm the Capitol Police.
All of this is connected. All of it was to achieve the same goal: unlawfully installing Trump in power after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
There were other efforts to overturn the election where there isn’t evidence to support a connection. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ridiculous lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for allegedly violating the Constitution by enacting rules to run an election during a pandemic, for example, isn’t clearly connected to the insurrection plot. I suspect Paxton, like many other Republicans, filed this performative suit in order to pander to what is now the Republican base. I think many of those 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against accepting Electoral slates from either or both Arizona and Pennsylvania were essentially willing dupes, though some, like Senator Ron Johnston of Wisconsin, were co-conspirators.
I used the phrase “our media” above, but the media isn’t monolithic. The internet has made information widely available, but it also means information is Balkanized. Rightwing media has set out to rewrite recent history and erase the memory of the violent attack on the Capitol. It ignores the broader conspiracy to keep Trump in power and end our centuries old tradition of peacefully transferring power from one Presidential Administration to the next. The “mainstream media” reports on each piece as if each happened in a vacuum despite the considerable evidence in the public domain showing the connections between the lines of effort. Leftwing media is similar to the mainstream media in this regard, though slightly better at seeing the connections.
