If insurrectionists are treated "gingerly" by the Biden Justice Department, Trump and his supporters will only feel "vindicated" again and take things to the "next level"

 

If Joe Biden wants to avoid any “drama,” the January 6 insurrection is a quizzical place to start. Following the storming of the Capitol, U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin was among those who suggested that sedition charges could be brought against some of  the rioters, and possibly even some politicians. When Sherwin made the same assertions on 60 Minutes recently, he was canned by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and is now subject to investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility; now we know why Barack Obama thought that Garland was the “moderate” choice for the Supreme Court that he hoped the Republican would have found acceptable.

Biden clearly wants his administration seen as “responsible” and “mature,” in direct contrast to the Trump administration. That apparently means not to get too excited about attempts to overthrow a lawfully-elected government, or appear to be too “judgmental,” so as not to upset sensitive Trump supporters. Just let the process roll on by, try to get most of the cases “resolved” through plea bargaining, keep actual trials to a minimum because we don’t want to further “divide” the country, as if that isn’t the Republican game plan. Another mass shooting? It’s just an excuse to ramp-up gun rights paranoia.

 Why the Biden administration prefers this treatment of the insurrection and insurrectionists is mystifying, given that Trump and his allies in Congress and in the media are behaving as if nothing serious happened, and their continuing use of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets as their personal propaganda organs to spread misinformation and out-right lies only serves to keep the flames going for an already radicalized base. The Biden administration is making a serious mistake if it believes that just sweeping the events of January 6 under the rug as quickly and quietly  as possible—if the insurgents just claim that they were “misled” and were “real sorry” about participating in the insurrection—will makes all this nasty business of divisive politics just fade away.

Biden and Garland received an assist in the quest to “tone down” the seriousness of the insurrection by Trump-appointed federal judge Trevor McFadden, who mind-bogglingly ordered that UCLA student Christian Secor be released from prison for his part in the insurrection, despite clear evidence that he still presented a danger to the community. An NPR report revealed that Secor had been a youthful adherent of Ron Paul’s “libertarianism,” but became “disenchanted” with Paul when he publically distanced himself from white supremacist and white nationalist groups. Secor then gravitated toward far-right extremist Nicholas Fuentes, who identifies as “white” and to “prove” it, he took a DNA test that allegedly showed that he was 79 percent white, as well as 15 percent “Native American”; he also claims that he is 91 percent “spiritually white.” 

Of course it helps to be “white” if you want to fit in with the white nationalist crowd, but it isn’t a necessary trait; Michelle Malkin is clearly not “white,” but she certainly knows who butters her token bread. All she needed was a bachelor’s degree to get a job as a columnist first for The Los Angeles Daily News, and then at just 26 she got a job on the editorial staff of the Seattle Times; Former Times reporter Ross Anderson remembered her as someone that Mindy Cameron wanted as a “new voice” and was a “minority and a woman.”  What that meant was that she attacked everything that smacked of government “intervention” into what came “naturally.” She wore out her welcome long before she landed a job as a syndicated columnist, which by then her anti-affirmative action and anti-immigrant views had made her a “darling” of the right desperate for a minority who was even more white nationalist than some of them. The “irony” is that Malkin is your classic “anchor-baby”: she was born in this country just three months after her parents entered the U.S. on an employer-sponsored visa. 

In recent times Malkin’s views have been too extreme even for Fox News, and thus she pals around with the likes of Fuentes, who at the age of 22 has made a “name” for himself as a “leading voice” in the far-right fringes. Fuentes has even caught the attention of Dominic Green of the conservative British periodical The Spectator, although mainly because he wants to point out that “real” conservatives are not “Jew-haters, homophobes and race cranks” like Fuentes and his ilk. Well, maybe not in the UK, but here…. Green claims that “Trumpism” doesn’t exist—well, that’s his opinion; why don’t we just call it “fascism” then?

It isn’t surprising that Green, Ben Shapiro and other “traditional” conservatives may be “embarrassed” to be “partnered-up” with people on the fascist-right; Fuentes opposes all immigration, claiming this is a country of “settlers,” not “immigrants,” as if there is a difference. He espouses “demographic realism,” meaning “slamming the door” on immigration so hard that it “breaks people’s faces.” He compared the Holocaust to “cookie-baking,” suggesting that the “math didn’t add-up” if you baked cookies in 15 ovens 24 hours a day for five years. He also wondered why anyone cares about Jim Crow laws, claiming it was “better for us and better for them” anyways. After the El Paso shooting, Fuentes asserted that “The easiest way for Mexicans to not get shot and killed in Walmart is for them to not to (bleep) be here.”

I watched a few of Fuentes videos, and he doesn’t shy away from offensive, juvenile rhetoric while wearing a suit and tie; in one, he claims that it is a “fair trade-off” to tolerate violence against minorities and immigrants if it means a “restoration” of the country’s “core white identity.” Two days before the Capitol riot he “rhetorically” asked if you can’t kill recalcitrant legislators who won’t vote to overturn the election, then “what else can you do?” He described Barack Obama as a “communist Islamist sympathizer,” and of CNN, he wanted the people that run the network “to be arrested and deported or hanged” because of  the network’s “deliberate lies” with “malicious intent.”

Isn’t it remarkable how some white people can’t “live” with people who look different than they do, and can’t accept that this is their problem? It isn’t surprising that Malkin would use her “influence” to help someone like Fuentes with that “problem” to gain a foothold in the far-right, white nationalist freak show. Nor is it surprising that Secor—who was looking for an alternative “mentor,” and one who would confirm his own white nationalist and white supremacist beliefs—would find that person in the Boston University dropout who was a “peer” who easily communicated the “angst” of young racists who just cannot “deal” with having to sit in the same classroom with a racial or religious minority person.

Fellow students at UCLA communicated their fears about Secor’s efforts to stir hatred and even violence on social media and at school political meetings, but university officials did nothing on “First Amendment” grounds, even failing to denounce his extremism when forced to publically address his statements. Although more “moderate” members of the campus “young Republicans” were “uncomfortable” with his white nationalist rhetoric and his extremism on gun rights, Secor’s influence and pro-Trump stance pushed the campus Republicans to embrace more extremists view, abandoning personal views and accepting alt-right conspiracies as their own.

Secor joined in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, and when he returned to California he “got rid” of his phone and confidently claimed that he would not be “caught.” But he was recognized by some who watched video from the insurrection, and on February 16 he was arrested. Prosecutors provided abundant evidence that Secor was a potential danger to the public. In the home of his mother, a “ghost gun” was found in a gun safe. Both Secor and his mother claimed to be ignorant of who it belonged to or how it got there; although there was no evidence that it had been taken to the Capitol riot, Judge McFadden had no issue with the fact that Secor and his mother were clearly lying about the origin of gun and why it was in their house. 

Law enforcement also found a video of Secor dressed-up ready for combat with an AR-15 assault rifle. Did it really matter if he did or didn’t take his weapons with him to the Capitol? Any reasonable person would have been concerned about what he might do now; the night before he was arrested, he sent a text message promising an “ultra-secret” operation was in the works. McFadden satisfied himself with defense claims that all this was “speculative” despite Secor known “fascination” with exercising his Second Amendment “rights.” At the very least, the judge should have put together the totality of the evidence against Secor, instead of failing to see the forest for the trees.

Remember when the Mueller Report decided not to accuse Trump with obstruction because they left that decision to the Justice Department? Trump only saw that as “vindication” and not as a warning. He went on to be impeached for abuse of power and obstruction in regard to demands on the Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 election, with military aid in the balance. Did that cause Trump to be more “careful”? If anything, his later election fraud conspiracies only ramped up the insanity to levels not seen in this country since the run-up to the Civil War.

What Biden and Garland do not seem to understand that with Trump and his familiars ratcheting up their fear-mongering propaganda with the help of an eager and willing Fox News, and far-right extremists like Malkin nurturing the next generation of extremists like Fuentes, who in turn are “arming” the minds of “foot soldiers” like Secor who are willing to make the “ultimate” sacrifice to make America “great” according to their warped fascist vision, you can’t just step gingerly as if to avoid a mine. Those mines are everywhere, and they can only be diffused by exposing the evil of Trump and those who enabled his crimes. If not, Trump and his supporters will just carry on as if they are “vindicated.” When people like Trump and his supporters feel “vindicated,” history tells us they will feel free to take things to the next “level,” and what higher “level” can there be after the events of January 6?