The Organizer of the Violent J6 Coup Against the United States Becomes Target of Own Rhetoric
Trump sends a message for all to prepare for the inevitable, but nothing is written in stone
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The Organizer of the Violent J6 Coup Against the United States Becomes Target of Own Rhetoric
I am not going to sit on my high horse or preach to the choir about what the nation’s response should be to the attempted assassination of the leader of the Republican Party. There are way too many voices and way too many opinions that are irresponsibly adding to the chaos and collective anxiety that had been building up to Saturday.
As a nation, we need a little less being told what to think and do, and far more objective information and guidance on how to think through things for ourselves. And that’s what I plan to use this space for today.
What We Know
A 20-year-old shooter breached security at Trump’s rally in a small town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and used an AR-style rifle that belonged to his father to attempt to assassinate the GOP nominee. He was quickly killed by Secret Service counter-snipers, but he succeeded in creating damage that will surely have a lasting butterfly effect.
The shooter killed a MAGA rally-goer, injured another, and knicked the right ear of Donald Trump (either directly or indirectly). I say directly or indirectly because it still has not been confirmed by medical professionals about whether a bullet or a fragment of a teleprompter caused the injury—we cannot trust Donald Trump’s claims. The shooter wore a Demolition Ranch shirt, which is a pro-Second Amendment gun YouTube Channel.
It’s worth noting that the FBI is investigating the incident as an act of domestic terrorism, which designates the attempted assassin another infamous mass shooter who acted alone.
The shooter also came from a bipartisan household and was a registered Republican. While former High School classmates claim he was a staunch conservative, his actions show he is not necessarily a Trump supporter. It has also been verified that the shooter did donate $15 through ActBlue to Progressive Turnout Project on President Joe Biden’s inauguration day and then unsubscribed from the group’s email list in 2023. Neither of these facts mean that the shooter is a swing voter (he wasn’t eligible to vote in the last election) or that he used to be a Democrat.
Recall that John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 because of his obsession with actress Jodi Foster. And Lynette Fromme, a Charles Manson cult member, attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975 to raise awareness of environmental pollution.
We also know that Donald Trump has been using violent rhetoric since the lifelong New York Democrat decided to run for President as a Republican in 2016. Even after he directed a legal and physically violent coup against the United States on January 6, 2021, he has only dialed up the fascist messaging.
It is Donald Trump who is responsible for the toxic environment that this nation is traumatized by and trying to survive. And yes, those in the circle he keeps are all responsible as well. But the message people are listening for comes from the MAGA leader and it’s not just the base who is listening.
What This Means
What we can gather from the assassination attempt is that this was not staged, but it is a moment that Donald Trump and MAGA will use to their advantage. Both to get the GOP in line and to send a message to other voters that a second Trump term is inevitable.
The thing is is that nothing is written in stone. Voters have agency and Donald Trump doesn’t get to dictate the election results. He can certainly cheat, which he is, but what can stop him is the American people. We just have to take him seriously and unite against him.
Whatever the pundits, broadcast news anchors, journalists turned social media personalities, podcast bros, and columnists squawk about day-to-day is just noise.
Anything that isn’t hyperfocused on defeating the threat to U.S. democracy and the freedoms we have become accustomed to is a distraction. And it will lead to what Trump wants: Voters to feel so cynical that they believe the fix is in and participating in November doesn’t matter.
The bottom line is this: The institutions are failing us because the Republican Party has ensured that they will. The party has been working on this long game since Reagan. They want us to feel helpless, but this line of thinking is a self-defeating prophecy. WE pay their salaries, therefore they work for US. It’s up to us to deny them the minority rule that they desire.
It’s not going to be a quick fix. One election will not solve all the problems we face. The rot is just too deep. But it will solve the biggest problem that is Donald Trump and Project 2025.
That will enable us to play the long game in fixing the courts and holding the man responsible for this rolling coup against the United States.
-Stephanie
Related News
On Friday, Meta announced it is welcoming back the MAGA leader with open arms. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram reinstated the GOP frontrunner’s accounts in January 2023, but placed tight guardrails on them, including limitations on advertising. For instance, if Trump violated Meta’s rules, such as posting a person’s personal information without their permission, Meta could suspend his account for up to 2 years. Meta’s executives have had a change of heart about this, feeling it would be unfair to Trump’s endless need for attention.
This comes days after Trump threatened to arrest Meta founder and 4th richest man in the world, Mark Zuckerberg. In another conspiracy theory, racist, and antisemitic-riddled rant on Truth Social (Trump’s counterfeit Twitter), Trump accused the eleventy million billionaire and Democratic officials of election fraud and promised to imprison them. In addition to amplifying Tucker Carlson’s favorite white supremacist conspiracy theory, The Great Replacement, the GOP frontrunner referred to the tech executive as “Zuckerbucks,” an antisemitic dog whistle born from another conspiracy theory that emerged from the far-right in 2020. Definitely a totally normal Republican Party leader saying totally normal things. And a man who should get his social media accounts back.
In The Courts
On Friday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane threw out former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, meaning creditors can pursue the liquidation of his assets to resolve debts. This includes Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two former Georgia election workers who were awarded $148M in their defamation lawsuit against Giuliani in December 2023.
Judge Lane admonished Giuliani for repeated “uncooperative conduct,” including failures to comply with court orders, refusing to disclose sources of income, and an unwillingness to hire an accountant to review his finances. He also rebuked the disbarred lawyer for thumbing his nose at the bankruptcy process while shielding himself from his debts by self-dealing and not being transparent about his finances. He cited that Giuliani funneled at least $15K per month from his canceled talk radio show into his companies and concealed the income from those businesses. The judge also cited that Giuliani failed to disclose his “Rudy Coffee” brand promotions and belatedly disclosed his book contract.
On Friday, a Washington State judge rejected a request by the State Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office to compel the Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle to release decades of records on priests accused of child sex abuse. Prosecutors asked for a court order as they investigated allegations that the church used charitable trust funds to cover up the abuse. Judge Michael Scott, who was appointed by Governor Jay Inslee and whose term is up in January, ruled that the state AG lacks authority to subpoena documents and that the church is exempt #becausereligion. If you live in the state of Washinton, you can let this judge know how you feel about his complicity by voting against him in November.
On Wednesday, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Kansas denied the state’s, as well as 19 other GOP-controlled states, request to block the Biden administration’s rule requiring firearms dealers to get licensed and conduct background checks. The rule closes a loophole that has allowed weapons to be sold by unlicensed dealers without any oversight. Gun lobbyist groups are likely to appeal the decision and argue that the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is overstepping its legal authority. Expect them to cite the recent Supreme Court ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which eliminated the Chevron deference, which upended precedent and gave federal courts the authority over regulating business.
The Far Right Keeps Criming
Brazil’s investigation into former President Jair Bolsonaro has begun to bear some fruit about how he weaponized the government against his political enemies. On Thursday, 5 individuals were arrested for playing a role in turning the country’s intelligence agency known as the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência (Abin) into Bolsonaro’s personal spy network. According to a 187-page police document, Abin monitored and harassed some of the country’s top public figures, including high-ranking politicians, judges, journalists, and environmental agency officials. Bolsonaro’s spy chief, Alexandre Ramagem, gathered information on the president’s foes to deploy disinformation designed to damage reputations and democratic institutions. The agency also targeted U.S. Internal Revenue Service officials who were investigating Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, for corruption.
France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen is under a new investigation for corruption. The Paris prosecutor’s office began probing Le Pen’s campaign financing for her 2022 presidential bid last week after a report by the National Commission on Campaign Accounts and Political Financing (CNCCFP) flagged potential illegal activity, including embezzlement, forgery, fraud, and accepting a loan. Prior to the full 2023 report, the CNCCFP notified authorities of the candidate’s sketchy campaign activities, including refusing to refund posters, which is a breach of campaign advertising rules. It also fined Le Pen’s party for over-billing campaign kits for the 2012 parliamentary election.
Le Pen’s 2017 presidential campaign also raised similar red flags. In September, Le Pen and 24 members of her National Rally party will face trial for alleged misuse of EU funds. The case centers around a 7-year investigation that accuses the National Rally of embezzling public funds. The party created fake jobs for party members as EU parliamentary assistants. Roughly €5m ($5.45M) was paid to these party members even though they did not work for MEPs. Le Pen could be fined and serve up to 10 years in jail if found guilty. She could also be disqualified from running for office for 5 years. Noteworthy: Le Pen’s party received €9.4m ($10.2M) in loans from Russian and Hungarian banks and paid the Russian loan back in 2023.
Some Schaudenfraude
A county canvassing board in North Dakota rejected the absentee ballot of North Dakota’s First Lady, Kathryn Bergum, in the state’s June GOP primary because her signatures didn’t match. The wife of Republican Governor Doug Burgum and Trump’s potential vice presidential pick was one of six primary voters whose absentee ballot was rejected. A total of 60 ballots were rejected in the county for having missing or mismatched signatures, as well as late or missing postmarks. A member of the county board confirmed that the panel voted unanimously to reject Burgum’s ballot and that they were relieved they didn’t recognize the name because it would have been politicized and accusations of bias would have been made. The Governor told the press the matter has been resolved, but did not make any mention of how GOP voter suppression laws also impact voters in his own party and not just the ones the party doesn’t like.
An Overlooked Massive Data Breach
On Friday, telecommunications behemoth AT&T confirmed that nearly its entire customer base has been impacted by a massive cyberattack on Snowflake, an AI data cloud company that the Telecom uses to store customer records. Snowflake disclosed the data breach on May 30, which has also impacted businesses including Ticketmaster and LendingTree. AT&T said in a statement that the stolen data is from a 6-month period between May 1, 2022 and October 31, 2022 and contains phone numbers of both cellular and landline customers, as well as records of customers with partnered carriers and information about the sender and receiver of calls and texts. The company denied that the content of calls or texts was not stolen, but said it does include the metadata such as the total count of calls/texts and call durations. It added that this metadata does not include the time or date of these interactions, but does include cell site ID numbers, which reveals the geolocation data. It also confirmed that one of the cybercriminals has been arrested by the FBI.
On Sunday, WIRED reported that AT&T paid a $370K ransom to the hacker who conducted the Snowflake data breach. The ransom was paid in exchange for the deletion of the telecom’s stolen customer data and was paid in Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. The tech magazine also revealed that a security researcher with the online handle Reddington notified AT&T about the breach in April after being contacted by John Erin Binns, an American hacker based in Turkey, who informed him he had his AT&T call logs, as well as millions of other customers. Binns also told Reddington that the breach began with the Ticketmaster cyberattack, in which his team of hackers with the international cyber threat group, ShinyHunters, stole login credentials of a Snowflake employee, to conduct. From there they used a script to hack more than 160 businesses at once.
Reddington told WIRED they negotiated the AT&T deal and has done so for several other companies who have been attacked by ShinyHunters. They also said they believe the entire AT&T dataset was deleted because they have access to the cloud server Binns stored the data on and saw it was removed. They also saw that the ransom was laundered through several crypto exchanges and wallets, but cannot verify who controls them. On Friday, 404 Media confirmed that Binns was arrested in Turkey in May for a 2021 data breach that targeted T-Mobile. The outlet verified that Binns is the apprehended person the FBI is investigating for these cyber attacks.
Nevada Election Deniers Refuse to Certify GOP Recount Results
Three Republican commissioners in a key Nevada swing county voted to not certify recount results in 2 local primary races. Washoe County Commissioners Michael Clark, Jeanne Herman, and Clara Andriola, who make up the 5-person board’s Republican majority, voted against certifying the recount results for Andriola’s seat who won the primary and oddly voted to reject her own certification and for a far-right candidate who won a nonpartisan school board primary. The far-right challengers are funded by GOP mega-donor Robert Beadles, who is also a virulent election denier, antisemite, and a Christian Nationalist and who claims to have his own crackpot team of CyberNinjas for county election results.
Nevada State law requires counties to canvas election results within 5 business days of a recount’s results. But thanks to Clark and Herman, who have twice voted against certifying the primary results of the second biggest county in Nevada, that deadline has passed and Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar and Attorney General Aaron Ford filed a request for a court order on Wednesday to force the commissioners to follow state law. The commission still has a chance to do the right thing at its next meeting on July 16. Noteworthy: According to Project Democracy, at least 21 counties across 8 states have experienced certification refusals from election deniers.
Capitalism has jumped the shark
Dallas-based American Rounds, an obscure advanced technology ammo vending machine company that uses Trump’s messaging, has deployed its product to grocery stores in rural Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas. The company, which was founded one year ago in July 2023, told the press that it has one machine in Alabama, four in Oklahoma, and one in Texas, with plans to install a second in Texas and one in Colorado.
News outlets aren’t doing their homework on the company’s chief executive officer Grant Magers, but I looked into his background and he appears to be a fortune-hunter who follows cultural trends to make his riches. Prior to American Rounds, Magers headed a CBD wellness retailer, Hempori, Inc. Before that, he served as the VP of Operations at Zen Technologies, a smart home services company that no longer exists and seems to have merged into a consulting group.
The company bills its machines as high-tech, using identification scanners and facial recognition software to accurately verify the purchaser’s age. It claims that the software scans a customer’s driver’s license and verifies it is a valid Government-issued ID as well as that the person is of legal age to purchase ammunition. It then claims the facial recognition verifies that the buyer matches the scanned ID. While this all sounds safe and secure, it appears to be a data and surveillance collector. And there’s no messaging about what the company does with a person’s data, what safety guardrails the company has to protect it, or how/if the company uses the data for marketing or other purposes.