Tag: january 6th
Kathleen Sgamma

Trump Cabinet Nominee Withdraws Over (Sane) January 6 Comments

Kathleen Sgamma, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Bureau of Land Management, sent shockwaves throughout Washington, D.C., on Thursday after withdrawing her name just hours before her confirmation hearing.

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah announced Sgamma’s withdrawal at the start of the hearing, but Politico reported that her decision came after investigative outlet Documented published a 2021 memo where the oil and gas lobbyist condemned Trump’s role in spreading misinformation about the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

“I am disgusted by the violence I witnessed yesterday and President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it. I’m disgusted he discredited all the good work he did reorienting the judiciary back toward respect for the rule of law and constitution by dishonoring the vote of the People and the rulings of those very same judges on his numerous challenges,” the memo quotes Sgamma saying.

Sgamma likely withdrew her nomination not because she’s still upset with Trump, but because the leak of her past comments is embarrassing for both of them. After all, she knew about the Capitol attack when she was nominated and seemed totally on board with Trump’s energy agenda at the time.

While her comments about the insurrection were out of step with today’s GOP, they reflected the outrage that many Republicans shared in the immediate aftermath. And though Sgamma distanced herself from Trump at that time, she’s certainly no liberal—she even contributed to Project 2025.

Trump has continued defending the insurrectionists, calling them “patriots” and even pardoning them on Day 1 of his second term. He’s since doubled down on his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, insisting that anyone who refuses to spread his lies is the real problem. And it seems that Sgamma has now bought into Trump’s propaganda.

“Unfortunately, at this time, I need to withdraw my nomination. I will continue to support President Trump and fight for his agenda to Unleash American Energy in the private sector,” Sgamma said in her resignation statement.

While some Republican senators told Politico they weren’t given a heads-up about the withdrawal, some Trump allies, including former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, suggested that Sgamma’s withdrawal was inevitable.

“Individuals who know their views don’t align with the president… cause needless harm and conflict, hindering the president’s agenda,” he wrote on X.

Sgamma’s resignation marks the third Trump cabinet pick to either withdraw or have their nomination pulled.

Earlier, the White House backed off nominating Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York for United Nations ambassador, fearing losing a reliable GOP vote in their razor-thin House majority. Similarly, David Weldon’s nomination to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was pulled once it became clear he didn’t have the votes to get confirmed.

With the Bureau of Land Management overseeing energy production on federally owned lands—a key part of Trump’s second-term priorities—it remains to be seen whether his energy agenda will take another hit following Sgamma’s withdrawal.

While her decision may have been political, it also highlights the ongoing consequences of the insurrection, raising questions about whether there’s truly a divide between Trump and those who refuse to embrace his false election claims.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

I Dream of Greenland

Why Greenland Became The Ultimate Fascist Dreamscape

Ever since Don Jr. and his “Trump Force One” team of bobblehead doll righties landed at Nuuk Airport a day after the fourth anniversary of January 6, we’ve all been scratching our heads. It’s hard for normies like us to comprehend the deranged, anachronistic white supremacist lunacy behind the Greenland fantasy. Yes, there’s the newly melted Arctic and its soon-to-be-contested waterways, yes, there are rare earth minerals, and yes, it’s sparsely inhabited by indigenous people that Trump and MAGA seem to regard as lower races.

But going to the mat for it, with Trump browbeating and insulting the prime minister of Denmark? JD Vance flying over uninvited with his wife by his side? During my process of researching a long article for New York magazine about Donald Trump Jr., it became clear that the Greenland play is, on one level, a giant dog whistle to the white fascist extremist base.

Greenland has been – for decades – a neo-Nazi fantasy. Julius Evola, a mid-20th-century Italian philosopher and now “the internet’s favorite fascist,” proposed Greenland as “the primordial homeland of a highly civilized prehistoric white race … sufficiently civilized to be conceived as ‘divine’ by the ancients.” (Evola’s explanation for how these divines could morph into actual non-white indigenous inhabitants is that their divinity was perhaps diluted by, you guessed it, breeding with lower orders.)

The online intellectual fascist influencers followed and amplified by Vance, Junior, Musk, Marc Andreessen, and countless Trump administration minions (who we have covered in previous Freakshows) are deeply attached to this mythology.

An anon called Plethonist (who seems to have now deleted his X account after we started writing about fascist Xitter) writes in an online white supremacist-friendly rag called IM1776. The magazine is published by The Arts & Literature Foundation, an outfit that bills itself as the “leading publication of the New Right.” It is housed in the same building near Capitol Hill as other hard-right, well-funded conservative outfits, including the Conservative Partnership Institute and the extreme Zionist Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and ironically, was home to far-right Liberty Lobby (founded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto). Its editor-at-large writes and tweets under the pseudonym Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Here is Plethonist in IM1776 waxing hysterically Rudyard Kipling about Greenland, a month before Trump started to publicly lay claim to it:

“Projects call us now. Recently, some have spoken of plans to purchase Greenland, either for the United States or for the creation of a new state entirely. In either case, this would mean the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain. A hard people then, and rich perhaps, from the resources they could exploit there, or through the domination of advanced technology in a land free from pinching regulation and a parasitic governing class. It is no longer so hard to believe that this will happen, after what we’ve seen. I hope it does, and I would like to offer one thing to the men who, now or in the future, make that island noisy with ambition and industry: Palingenesis.” (Palingenesis is an ultranationalist concept of racist rebirth.)

Don Jr.’s pal Jack “Jack P” Posobiec wasn’t on the trip to Greenland, but he was definitely in on the joke. Two days before Christmas and more than two weeks before Junior and his posse landed in Nuuk, he posted on Xitter a long letter to Greenlanders which reads in part:

“Dear Honored Residents of Greenland, Imagine a Greenland where the promise of your land's vast potential is not just a dream but a reality. A Greenland where your children can dream bigger, your economy can grow stronger, and your voice can resonate louder on the world stage. This vision can become your reality by joining the United States of America.”

Posobiec (who has called Democrats and progressives “unhumans” and named dictators as political role models) has been grifting off Trumpism since 2016. The longtime neo-Nazi collaborator is so highly regarded among Trump cabinet members that Treasury Secretary Bessent invited him to Ukraine. Hegseth reportedly wanted to bring him to Europe (but Posobiec, clearly a man in demand, declined the latter invitation).

On Xitter, extreme right Passage Press publisher Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman amused himself after Junior’s visit by proposing that sacked DEI federal employees could be sent to Greenland to mine rare earth minerals. (America’s Siberia, for now, appears to be ICE’s swamp gulag in Louisiana.).

Another Greenland dreamer is Dryden Brown, a Peter Thiel acolyte, who designs for building utopian cities for the tech elites in a project called Praxis and who was covered rather fawningly not long ago in the New York Times.

Brown was moved to advertise his own white nation fantasies the same day Junior landed in Greenland, in a giddy tweet that included a map (see below) of a new American empire encompassing all the white-led nations on the planet.

For a while after Junior’s expeditionary assault, MAGA tried to claim Greenlanders really want America to invade (which is a lie). Of course, what Greenlanders might actually want is of no real concern to men seeking a new homeland from which to “re-breed” Aryans.

In his Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth, Yale historian Greg Grandin proposed that Trumpism, and the big beautiful border wall of the first MAGA regime specifically, signaled the end of the nation’s founding ethos. He proposed that only endless expansion had kept the violence at the heart of the American experiment at bay. Now, with the oil wars lost and the nation too broke to conquer farther frontiers, we were shut in together, with no steam valve for the hate.

A white nationalist beachhead in Greenland buys more time for us, perhaps.

The fantasy is one-half X-Box sword-wielding hero homunculus and one-half emulation of Hitler – the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. The bros read their Tolkien. Their thumbs were weaned on the controllers moving heroic medieval knights and sorcerers. For the Millennial fascists in Junior’s set, Greenland promises manly ardors and challenges where a new race might emerge from the chrysalis of the 21st-century American Everyman, waddling between SUV and front door with a Diet Coke in hand.

Donald Trump might be a vulgar marketer of money-laundering condos and cheesy merch – but when they squint, he’s the vessel by which the white philosopher-priests that inhabited Hyperborea might return.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER'S American Freakshow.


White Supremacist terrorist group

Historian: Trump's Third Term Yearning May Provoke 'January 6 Scenario'

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump once again flirted with the idea of running for a third term, not ruling it out entirely in an NBC News interview.

But on Monday, presidential historian Tim Naftali told CNN that after the ratification of the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, term-limited presidents have no legal way to stay in power. He pointed out that short of the arduous process of amending the Constitution (which involves getting two-thirds support among state legislatures and two-thirds support from both chambers of Congress), Trump will have no choice but to leave the White House in January of 2029.

"President Trump does not have the Constitutional cards in this case," Naftali said. "There are only two scenarios by which you could constitutionally alter the the Constitution and allow him to run for a third term, and they both involve finding 38 states. Donald Trump knows that there aren't 38 red states."

CNN host Brianna Keilar then asked Naftali about the scenario in which Trump could mimic Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister under Dmitry Medvedev and ran the government behind the scenes before once again ascending to the presidency for yet another term. Keilar posited that Trump could run as Vice President JD Vance's running mate in 2028, only for Vance to then resign if elected and allow Trump to once again occupy the White House for four more years. However, Naftali threw cold water on that idea.

"The 12th amendment of our Constitution stipulates that no one can be a vice presidential candidate if they're not Constitutionally eligible to be president," he said. "That kind of Putin-Medvedev scenario is not possible in our country."

But the historian and New York University associate professor then pivoted to what he viewed as the most pressing question, which is: "Why is he talking this way?" Naftali explained that Trump "knows he doesn't have 38 states" and said that his talk of a third term has just three possible explanations. He added that the third option had particularly dark implications.

"One: Political theater. Donald Trump likes attention. He likes the fact we're talking about him right now. Maybe he's also hoping some people are going to say some things that are a little bit outrageous, which he can use to fundraise," he explained. "Number two, we're living in a in an increasingly evident culture of impunity. The president is using fear to get his way with universities, to get his way with law firms, to get his way with Congress, to get his way with Canada and Greenland and Panama and Ukraine. He's on a roll. And so why not talk about what he really wants, which is to stay in office as long as he can? The third is the January 6th scenario that the president, when he was in his first term, was capable of pushing for an unconstitutional and/or illegal way of staying in office. And maybe he is signaling to his supporters: 'Start thinking about ways we can stay through 2028 and 2029.'"

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Pardoned January 6 Defendant Wants His Child Porn Indictment Dismissed Too

Pardoned January 6 Defendant Wants His Child Porn Indictment Dismissed Too

One man granted clemency by President Donald Trump for laying siege to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 is now hoping that his pardon will be extended to a separate charge for possession of child pornography.

Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney tweeted Wednesday that the legal counsel for 37 year-old David Paul Daniel of North Carolina is now arguing in federal court that his client's child pornography charge should be thrown out based on what he admitted was an "unprecedented legal question."

In the 14-page filing submitted to U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, attorney William Terpening asserted that Trump's January 20 executive order pardoning the approximately 1,500 people charged in connection with January 6 also covers Daniel's alleged possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) due to how it was obtained by law enforcement.

According to Terpening, when police executed a search warrant on Daniel's property and subsequently found an iPhone and a laptop that contained images of a "nude minor female," they were doing so as part of the January 6 charge. He then posited that because Trump pardoned his client for the January 6 charge, the other "derivative" charges that were brought about as a result of the initial charge should be automatically dismissed.

"A pardon completely exonerates a person — it is as if the conviction that is pardoned was never prosecuted in the first instance," Terpening wrote. "The expansive effect of Trump’s Executive Order in erasing not only Mr. Daniel’s January 6 crime, but also any basis for prosecuting it in the first instance, is apparent from the Executive Order’s plain text, which describes the DC Case as 'a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years' ... The Order’s intent is undisputedly to convey that the DC Case had no legal basis."

Terpening further argued that the Trump administration's Department of Justice has intervened on behalf of other January 6 defendants facing separate charges that were brought about as a result of January 6-related search warrants. The filing noted that in the case of Capitol rioter Elias Costianes — who had illegal weapons seized at his home following the execution of the initial search warrant — the Trump DOJ clarified in federal court that Trump's pardon extended to the gun charge.

Additionally, January 6 defendant Jeremy Brown, who was convicted on both possession of illegal weapons and classified information from his time in the U.S. military, also had his other charges thrown out. Terpening also attempted to bolster his case by looping in the case of Daniel Ball, who was arrested on federal gun charges just one day after Trump handed down his pardon, but later had those charges dismissed by the DOJ.

"Although the crimes with which Costianes, Ball, and Brown were charged in Maryland and Florida were unrelated to their January 6 charges, the government concluded that the Executive Order required their dismissal because they were based on information discovered by the government during January 6 related searches," Terpening wrote. "Mr. Daniel’s pardon in the DC Case requires dismissal of the unrelated charges in this case because the evidence allegedly supporting the instant charges was discovered during a January 6 related search."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World