Trump is in charge of the DC National Guard, and indirectly in charge of a lot of the same federal groups that were there for the BLM protests this summer.
So, yeah...
Apparently the DC cops were under orders to not escalate to violence from the Mayor, in hopes of diffusing the situation. It was not DC cops who were involved in the atrocities this summer. [Spouse was reading from an NPR article just now - we'll of course see what investigations bring up.]
Also, I really want a list of every seditious member of Congress; House and Senate, so I can start a petition to call for their resignation. Might get more traction than just calling on my own lying pos congresscritter to resign.
Yeah, I remember the news talking about the national guard a lot yesterday.
As for the list... finding lists of assholes like this is an involved project, but not impossible. I have done this kind of thing before, and built email lists that made change happen.
This explaination could get a little long, but here's how I would approach this, if I were to get involved (I'm not getting involved):
Start with the votes. I believe that
this is a list of how everybody voted yesterday, with regard to throwing out votes from Arizona, and maybe Pennsylvania. Govtrack doesn't seem to have the text of the objections in question posted yet. I think they have the Pennsylvania objection
posted as being voted on today, maybe? It's kinda fogs of war stuff for the next day or two, unless you want to go through C-SPAN videos (I have done that in the past, it's tedious work). I think that things will be more clear in a day or two.
Once you have that list, though, the big question is how do you want to use it?
I don't think these assholes care about letters to the editor of the local paper. They don't care if you call their offices and tell them they're assholes, either. They are way beyond that.
If I were motivated enough, I would check their campaign finance reports. I know, a lot of the money in question is dark, but you don't have to trace every penny. Just look up the biggest publicly known donors.
Here's a starting lead for Scott Perry, for example.
Scott Perry takes a lot of money from the House Freedom Fund. Who are they? Trace it back, it shouldn't be that difficult. If you can't find the financial reports, maybe find out who works there. Do they seem to hire people with a particular company in their work history a lot? Which company executives speak at their annual or quarterly conventions? Do any of their press releases tip their hands as to which company's special interests they cater to? Maybe coca-cola is behind them? That's wild conjecture, by the way, I don't know what coca-cola donates to, but I assume they donate to a lot of people.
Once you get a list of companies who are backing these assholes, you dig one level deeper. You must get real email addresses of their company officers. In my experience, change never happens when you talk to media, or PR flaks, or even buy ads to shame a big company. Change happens when the C-suite of a fortune 500 company is flooded with emails to their personal email addresses, demanding change. Big things happen if you can make the aristocrats at the top uncomfortable.
How you get these email addresses might be a little shady. You don't necessarily need to hit the dark web, but that is one source for this kind of information. There are a lot of web sites out there on the open web that post personal email addresses of important people, with varying degrees of reliability. Personally, I've never used the dark web for this kind of information. Huge note here: DO NOT BREAK THE LAW! Some people social engineer or hack to get what they want, and that's not what I'm advocating for here at all. You don't need to break the law to get what you need. The information is all freely available.
This kind of information is always a bit messy. You need to take a shotgun approach, by getting as many good email addresses as you can, but in the back of your head know that some of the email addresses will be bad. Even if you get a few email addresses wrong, you can still move a company. I mean, lets say you have contact info for the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, CCO, and so on... half a dozen email addresses. If only one or two are accurate, you still hit one or two big movers and shakers. Sometimes that's all you need.
I've seen this kind of research called open source intelligence before. I think that's a marketing buzzword for impressing people on Linked In and selling udemy courses, but you know, if you look up open source intelligence, you will find lots of interesting tricks to get the information you need.
So you build a mailing list that is lazer targeted on the big money that these assholes are funded with, then you post it everywhere, and hope that people find it and use it to hit them with a massive email writing campaign. What then?
You have a major company, like, Coca-Cola, making big press statements condemning the coup, and maybe even begging forgiveness for funding assholes like Scott Perry. That is when the assholes in congress will really start to freak out, because congressmen do not see you and me as their power base. They see Fortune 500 companies as their power base. You and me can scream till we are blue in the face, but nobody will care. When a company like Coca-Cola starts making these kinds of statements, things happen.
Why does Coca-Cola care, though? Honestly, I think they care because they have misgivings about their position in the world. They worry that you and me have more power than them, and maybe they are right to worry. By contacting them about this, we are acknowledging that they are more powerful than us, and they like that, so they want to feed into it, by giving us what we want, to reward us for rightly acknowledging their clearly superior power. That's fucked up, but that's just how America works right now. I'm not saying that every big company will jump to attention as soon as they get a single email. Some are bound to be like Chick-fil-a, who openly doesn't give a shit what you think about gay rights. You just need enough companies who do care what consumers think to oppose the coup to put a dent in republican election prospects.
I'm too busy to do this kind of digging right now. For now, I'm just happy to sit back and watch it all unfold, rather than get involved. If I wanted to get involved, though, this is how I would do it. Who knows, maybe I'll get stuck at home with corona and dig a bit later on, but I don't have any plans to start building big mailing lists like this right now. If you do, then more power to ya! I'll cosign in any mailing list you create for this cause.
