Good morning! I take it we’ve all been glued to more or less the same screens this week, and for me, the main theme emerging is denial. Denial paved the way for Wednesday (not only in that, like, the mob and the president had made the plan very clear, but in the sense that it took not four years of building horror, but a physical breach of the Capitol for Trump’s tweets to freeze, his cabinet to quit, and his colleagues in the Senate to break ranks). The GOP thought that by letting all the BS slide, they were just playing within the country’s existing structures to come out on top. But they roughhoused too hard and broke the play pen, and now it’s full of angry tourists wearing coonskin caps with horns. Even now, people want to say, “this isn’t our country,” but guess what: “America can hardly be a beacon of light if one of our two major parties threatens democracy itself,” Sarah Jones wrote in The Intelligencer. We’ve got a big problem on our hands.
Adam Serwer, who we should always generally listen to, called Wednesday not just an assault on democracy, but “an attack on multiracial democracy,” a relatively fragile entity in America that only dates back to the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Recall, he says, that “America did not have universal suffrage at its founding. The Constitution accepted the existence of slavery, and imagined democracy as the responsibility of property-owning white men.” The right has historically resisted the expansion of rights to everyone else, and particularly people of color. So of course they don’t want to count POC votes in Georgia and Philadelphia. The solution, then, back on the Sarah Jones piece, is to expand and enforce voting rights— to grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, and to enfranchise the poor. But we’ll note that voting only works if you uphold your democratic process, so maybe don’t let the mob in the door next time.
Now, for the obligatory shoutout to Via Getty. To catch everybody up, there’s an image going around of one of the rioters, sourced via Getty images, and the way the caption reads— “Via Getty, on of the rioters steals a podium…”— has led a bunch of commenters to mistake “Via Getty” for this dude’s name. Everyone on twitter is laughing so, so hard and I can’t help but feel like this* is why Getty and his friends all hate the left so hard (not that these folks are chilling on twitter— there’s Parler for that now).
*In addition to the enfranchisement issues cited above
This also feels like a good time to talk about the CIA rebrand, which appears to have been ripped directly from either a techno festival in Berlin or some vaporwave video game. According to Gina Haspel, the revamp is an attempt to “attract more diversity” to the agency that exists inadvertently to impose violence on people of color around the world. (She only actually said the first part of that sentence, obviously.) Before the FBI became the obvious choice for the hipsters of federal bureaucracy (that is, two days ago), the internet memed the shit out of this, and all of that magic is still available for your enjoyment. My Friday gift to you.
