Saturday, October 02, 2021

THE RIGHT WING WAR AGAINST 'THE LEFT' IN AMERIKA

Steve Bannon Calls For 'Shock Troops' To 'Deconstruct' State As GOP Takes Oval Office

Mary Papenfuss
Sat, October 2, 2021,

Donald Trump’s former White House strategist Steve Bannon on Saturday evoked a dystopian future when he called for “shock troops” to quickly “deconstruct” the state as soon as a Republican takes the Oval Office again.

Bannon made the chilling comments in a phone interview on NBC News after it reported that he had met Wednesday with the party faithful to urge them to be prepared to “reconfigure the government” with a Republican leader.

“If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately,” Bannon told NBC. “I gave ’em fire and brimstone.”

Bannon, who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign, said the former president’s agenda packing the government with loyalists was delayed because he couldn’t move quickly enough to fill some 4,000 posts.

Bannon spoke at the Capitol Hill Club Wednesday at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, according to NBC. The group was formed as a resource for future GOP officials to tap into to quickly fill federal jobs.

Bannon told NBC that he wants to see “pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies” when the next Republican president takes office.

“We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Bannon was one of four close Trump associates subpoenaed earlier this week to appear before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Investigators said Bannon urged Trump to focus efforts to return to the White House on the Jan. 6 action. He rallied his listeners on his “War Room” broadcast that “all hell is going to break out” that day.

Bannon admitted last week on his podcast that he told Trump before the insurrection: “You need to kill this [Biden] administration in its crib.” That led Harvard constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe to wonder why the Department of Justice hadn’t convened a grand jury to consider sedition charges against Bannon.



Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Trump social media chief Dan Scavino and former Defense Department official and House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel were also subpoenaed by the committee.

Trump early this year pardoned Bannon, who faced multiple fraud counts in the Southern District of New York following an indictment a year ago for allegedly stealing funds from Trump supporters who donated to a charity he controlled, which purported to raise money to help build Trump’s southern border wall.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.


Bannon fires up 'shock troops' for next GOP White House



Jonathan Allen
Sat, October 2, 2021, 

WASHINGTON — Scores of former Trump political appointees gathered at a GOP social club Wednesday night to hear Steve Bannon detail how they could help the next Republican president reconfigure government.

"If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately," Bannon said in a telephone interview with NBC News. "I gave 'em fire and brimstone."

Bannon, who ran former President Donald Trump's first campaign and later worked as a top adviser in the White House, said that Trump's agenda was delayed by the challenges of quickly filling roughly 4,000 slots for presidential appointees at federal agencies and the steep learning curve for political officials who were new to Washington.

He is not alone in that view. His appearance at the Capitol Hill Club came at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which was formed to create a resource for future GOP officials tapped to fill federal jobs.

"There are so many statutes and regulations as well as agency and departmental policies, it can be very overwhelming when you first come in," said Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former Broadcasting Board of Governors official who is one of the organizers of the group. "This is an organization that has a very narrow, clear and much-needed purpose, and, once it is operational, I think it could do a lot of good not just for the Republican Party but for the country."



Trump often railed publicly about career civil servants and Obama administration political appointee holdovers whom he saw as obstacles to his agenda, referring to them collectively as the "deep state."

Bannon said he wants to see pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies when the next Republican president takes office. For the most part, that means the tiers of presidential appointees whose postings don't require Senate confirmation.

"We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies," he said, referring to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan and describing a 2024 electoral victory as a "second term."

The launch party Wednesday drew a crowd of roughly 200 former officials from multiple Republican administrations — though mostly Trump appointees — according to a person who attended and is not one of the organizers of the group.

Shapiro said organizers are still trying to determine who will lead the association, but he said the need for institutional memory is apparent.

"What we’re hoping to do is build a base of people that can be available as a support system for political appointees who are coming in for the first time," he said. "It’s easy, if you know the rules, to accomplish your objective."

Fears of 'election subversion' as Trump flirts with 2024 White House bid

Issued on: 03/10/2021 -
TOMMOROWS NEWS TODAY
Police attempting to hold back supporters of US President Donald Trump at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 
Olivier DOULIERY AFP/File

Washington (AFP)

The US presidential election of 2000 hinged on a few votes in Florida and was ultimately decided in the Supreme Court.

The 2020 White House contest gave birth to the "Big Lie" and saw supporters of the losing candidate storm the US Capitol.

Just wait and see what 2024 has in store.

Donald Trump, the first president in US history to refuse to accept the outcome of an election, is flirting with another White House run in what could be a make-or-break moment for American democracy.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, set alarm bells ringing in political circles last week with a chilling doomsday scenario opinion piece in The Washington Post.

"The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War," Kagan wrote.

The neoconservative scholar warned of a "reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves."

A man carries a flag that reads 'TRUMP WON' before a rally featuring former President Donald Trump Perry, Georgia
 Sean Rayford GETTY IMAGES/Getty Images/File

Polls suggest a majority of Americans share at least some of Kagan's concerns: 56 percent of the respondents in a recent CNN-SSRS survey said US democracy is under attack.

Thirty-seven percent said it is being "tested." Only six percent said it is in no danger.

Trump's unceasing and unfounded claims that the November 2020 presidential vote was "stolen" by Democrat Joe Biden have seeped into the political bloodstream.

Seventy-eight percent of the Republicans surveyed by CNN-SSRS said they do not believe Biden legitimately won the presidency, a figure in line with the findings of other opinion polls.

"It's a new phenomenon in American elections," said Edward Foley, a constitutional law professor at The Ohio State University.

Donald Trump's unceasing and unfounded claims that the November 2020 presidential vote was 'stolen' by Democrat Joe Biden have seeped into the US political bloodstream Sarah Silbiger GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File

"There have been fights over hanging chads -- like Bush vs Gore in 2000 -- and there have been recounts for as long as there have been elections in America," Foley said.

"But the 'Big Lie' is a new thing. It's disconnected from reality and it's kind of a social pathology."

- 'By whatever means necessary' -


Richard Hasen, a law and political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, said in a recent research paper that the United States finds itself in a moment of "democratic peril," facing an unprecedented danger of "election subversion."

Supporters of Donald Trump inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 
Saul LOEB AFP/File

"The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future US elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules," Hasen wrote.

In his opinion piece, Kagan said the 75-year-old Trump and his Republican allies are laying the groundwork to ensure a 2024 victory "by whatever means necessary."

Trump, who retains an iron grip on the Republican faithful and is all but certain to be the party's presidential nominee if he does decide to run, appears to be setting the stage for the "Big Lie 2.0," said Foley.

The strategy involves restrictions such as voter identification laws passed by the legislatures of some Republican-led states which Democrats claim are intended to suppress the minority vote and Republicans say are designed to protect the integrity of the ballot.

It also includes replacing Republican state election officials such as Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused to do Trump's bidding in 2020 and "find" 11,780 votes, with candidates who are diehard supporters.

"Once you have that person in charge you have somebody who has great influence on how the election is conducted, how the votes are counted, who's declared the winner, how the Electoral College votes align," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

- 'Ultimate perversion of democracy' -

While it would spark Democratic outrage, Republican-controlled state legislatures could potentially ignore the popular vote in their states if it goes against Trump and appoint their own electors to the Electoral College, the final arbiter of who wins the presidential race, Sabato said.

Joe Biden, seen here being sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, received seven million more votes than Donald Trump and won the Electoral College by 306 to 232
 Rob Carr GETTY IMAGES/AFP/File

Republicans are also well-positioned to win a majority in 2022 in the currently Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, giving them another potential lever of power in 2024.

"As ugly as last January 6 was with bloodshed and insurrection the outcome was never in doubt," Foley said, as then vice president Mike Pence ultimately refused to go along with Trump's demands that he reject the Electoral College slates from several states they lost to Biden.

"But if members of Congress on January 6, 2025 are predisposed to the 'Big Lie' approach, and are willing to repudiate election results just for the sake of pure political power, that would be the ultimate perversion of democracy," Foley said.

© 2021 AFP

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