Not just in U.S., Germany has it's far right conspiracy militia trying to overthrow government

Or at least until yesterday they did. I can't help but believe they  followed the reporting about January 6th attempted coup and its aftermath in the Untied States and were determined to succeed where they failed.

By Hal Brown

Read article on BBC.com

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

This is the story that Germans woke up to today:

Reich citizen terror group apparently wanted to eliminate the rule of law - police with 3000 officers on duty

The article, translated from Germany Google Translate, begins as follows:

In Germany, the Reich Citizens' Scene is in the sights of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Thousands of police officers have now gone out at the same time in eleven federal states for a major raid. According to the federal prosecutor's office, a group planned the state coup - and trained for "Day X" with weapons.

They are said to have planned a coup and also trained in part with weapons: On Wednesday morning, the federal prosecutor's office had 25 people from the so-called Reich citizen scene arrested in the course of a raid. Around 3,000 officials are deployed in eleven federal states, a spokeswoman for the Karlsruhe authority told the German Press Agency. She accuses the accused of having prepared the overthrow of the state. According to information from "Spiegel", the officers searched more than 130 apartments, offices and storage rooms.

Shades of The Oath Keepers, The Proud Boys, people with the disparate beliefs of QAnon and belief in the deep state.. They even had a leader like Trump set to take his place as dictator. They were a group Germans including those with a political ideology that rejected the government formed after World War II, according to this article. They not only included armed trained militia, some who were recruited from the police and army, but also adherents of QAnon, and Covid deniers. They were planning to storm the German Parliament Building.

History of the Bundestag

Again there's the similarity to those who want to initiate a coup in the United States. They planned to storm their version of the U.S. Capitol and take over the government by violent means up to and including murder. The group's  own version of Donald Trump was Prince Heinrich XIII.

,

Acceding to this article the group "allegedly believed in a ‘conglomerate of conspiracy theories consisting of narratives from the so-called Reich Citizens as well as QAnon ideology. Prosecutors say the group think Germany is ruled by a so-called ‘deep state’ – echoing the baseless claims made by former President Donald Trump about the US.

This is more from The Mirror:

Germany's internal intelligence agency believes there are arond 16,500 members of the group across the country - many of whom are ready to commit "serious acts of violence". 

Deutsche Welle previously reported that the majority of them are over 50 years old and come from disadvantaged communities.

A district court judge in Saxony-Anhalt has described them as "conspiracy theorists" and "malcontents," DW adds. 

Several high-profile acts of extreme violence have shocked Germany and earned them the attention of law enforcement agencies. 

The group has an affinity for stockpiling ammunition and firearms - which have been discovered during previous raids.

This is the German Trump wannabe:

His family say he’s 'a confused old man caught up in conspiracy theories' (read article)

Like Trump he has a much younger wife:

Unlike Trump he's never been arrested and loaded into a police vehicle in handcuffs:

It is all beginning to sound more and more like déjà vu all all over again, only this time an attempted coup against a democracy is happening in the country whose NAZI regime was brought up by so many Democrats and anti-Trump republicans who invoked the spectre of Hitler. They recounted the early days of Hitler in the 1930's and how he positioned himself to take over Germany, and then take on the world in an attempted military conquest that would establish his 1000 year Reich.  This is what Trump and his cult hope to achieve in 2024 by any means necessary.

The arrest of those who are the 25 presumably top leaders of this German moment  which has 16,500 members hopefully will at least temporarily set back their plans and that German police, military, and intelligence agencies will begin the arduous legal and investigative process to dismantle this group.

I assume that they will be working with their law enforcement  counterparts in the United States and other democratic countries wherever there are right-wing groups made up of a witches brew of hate and off the wall conspiracy theories. I don't think it is a far stretch of imagination to believe these groups have relationships with similar foreign groups. I am afraid there are leaders around the world who want to achieve their fascist and autocratic rule just the way Hitler tried to do and came close to succeeding.

Update:

Most recent blog stories here:

• The GOP Bizarro World Dream 2024 Ticket
• My new US House rep. mouths standard GOP answer wh...
• Forego social media and bring back press release
• Pot and psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon
• From The Twilight Zone to The Outer Limits to Twil...
• Hershel Walker and Dissociative Identity Disorder
• One person train wrecks and a huge traffic pileup
• The rising star of the GOP will be Jim Jordan
• This might be the first day in a long time I have ...
• What to expect from the Donald Trump Comeback Tour
• Here's an example of the blog from prior to my getting banned from Daily Kos when I used it to post photo essays of both scenic vistas and interesting eateries around Portland often venturing far afield. As in all my blogs, when clicking on an image that doesn't link to a story you will enlarge it to full screen. For example click this small image to enlarge it to see what's sitting on the sign:
  
  
  
• 
  
• 
  

The GOP Bizarro World Dream 2024 Ticket

 The GOP Bizarro World Dream 2024 Ticket

By Hal Brown

Democrats are eager for Joe Biden to run against Donald Trump. He's easily the most beatable candidate, and if he continues to careen down the road he's been on ever since his meeting with Ye and Fuentes and his "suspend the Constitution" Truth Social rant he'll be even more beatable. 

Even if he slip-slides his greasy ass this way and that through all the legal traps that could ensnare him all it will take for President Joe Biden to beat him handily is for Trump to be Trump.

The venomous once and never again former president has, like all other poisonous creatures from scorpions to golden dart frogs, until now has been immune to his own toxin. 

This is where the comparison between Trump and animals ends because his poison isn't literally created by a physical mechanism. It didn't develop over time as it did in venomous species through natural selection. His developed he deployed it more and more frequently because it was not only in his character and satisfied his need as a malignant sociopathic narcissist but because it appealed to his base.

That hard-core base has been and will continue to be stable to matter what he does or what happens to him. However to beat Joe Biden he cannot depend on his base. He must have independent voters and never-Trump Republican voters, and turn off that voters who refuse to vote for a Democrat so much they just don't vote for president at all.

This presents only only course of action for Republicans who know that Trump is their party's likely 2024 candidate. 

They can't run a campaign again Joe Biden. They have to convince voters that a vote for him is a vote for Hunter Biden.

The Republicans are downright drooling over their plan to investigate Hunter Biden and try to tie him to then vice president Joe Biden and make the case that the vice president somehow colluded with his son in what amounted to treason against the United States.

The more one looks at Hunter Biden's past behavior the more an objective observer with a modicum of empathy who is not blinded by a zealous quest to hurt President Biden the more they will feel sorry for the president.

The saying I am not my brothers keeper, shades of Billy Carter, can be reworded to say I am not my son's keeper.

Joe Biden lost his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015 when he was only 45. Most people don't know that Biden had a daughter with his first wife Neila. Their daughter Naomi passed away in 1972 after being involved in a car crash with their sons Beau and Hunter critically injured. 

To say Hunter had a troubled past fraught with bad decisions and a cavalier disregard for how they might hurt his father personally and politically is an understatement.

Currently there are no plans to call President Biden to testify but I think Hunter will be called. If I had a say in the matter I would make sure he testified without an attorney and answered all the questions candidly. The committee has no power to indict him if he admits to breaking the law, only the Department of Justice can do that. As the New York Times notes, "the Justice Department inquiry into the business dealings of the president’s son has remained active, with a grand jury seeking information about payments from around the world."

Hopefully he will come across as a sympathetic figure, especially compared to his GOP interrogators some of whom are likely to try to intimidate and badger him in their attempts to score points with their MAGA base.

I'd say to the rabid GOP MAGA representatives slavering to get to President Biden through his son "bring it on" because when it comes to a there being there all they have is a president unlucky enough to have a very troubled son. 

My new US House rep. mouths standard GOP answer when asked about Trump running

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

My new US House rep inside Trump's mouth in a DonkeyHotey caricature

I was very much invested in my Oregon elections this year because there was a chance that two Democrats in our most blue state I supported might loose. One was Tina Kotek running for governor and the other was  Jamie McLeod-Skinner running to represent our newly redrawn 5th Congressional District.

It was a huge relief when Kotek beat her far right challenger Christine Drazen, but businesswoman and former large suburban Portland city mayor Lori Chavez-DeRemer won her race.

Click above to read and view video

I read the above article (afterwards I watched the video that went with it). Just from reading the article I began to think that perhaps she won't be that bad:

For example these are the responses that seemed hopeful:

“That’s one of the things I focused on as mayor. You’re a non-partisan mayor. You’re representing everyone in the city. We have to do the same here,” Chavez-DeRemer said. “I will always reach across the aisle to make sure I’m listening to the other side.”

Notably her response to one question was not in the website article, but was in the video. She was asked about her opinion about the conviction of Oath Keeper Stuart Rhodes. It was almost unbelievable that she said she hadn't been following this and had no comment. Either she was lying or hopelessly out of touch. I vote for the former.

Then I got to the last part of the article (at six minutes on the video):

Looking ahead to 2024, in light of Donald Trump announcing his presidential bid, Chavez DeRemer stated her support for whoever ends up at the top of the Republican ticket.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of Republicans running and we’ll see if he becomes the top of the ticket for the Republican party. I will support the nominee, but at this point I think it’s wide open for us to make those decisions early,” Chavez-DeRemer said.

This might as well come from a GOP talking point 3-5 card because it is pretty much word for word what other Republicans are saying when asked the same question.

After reading the article I watched the video on the website to try to be fair in my judgment that the interviewer was, to put it mildly, utterly horrible and an example of the kind of softball interview that would get a student fired from a college newspaper. 

This interview by Ken Bodie, a local TV station morning anchor, was published and aired on Dec. 3rd. Online it was updated on Dec. 4th. I think it came after Trump's appearance with Ye and Fuentes and possibly before his "suspend the Constitution" post. She should have been asked about her opinions about these if either had already occurred.

This is what Jennifer Rubin wrote in The Washington Post (summarized here on RawStory):

"It should not be too much to ask that serious media outlets label the GOP accurately as a threat to constitutional government and to democracy," she added, "No member of the media should allow Republican candidates, officeholders or operatives to escape an interview without declaring whether they would support for president a self-described opponent of the Constitution."

Here's a comment similar to what Chavez-DeRemer said from this ABC News article:

Trump's call to suspend Constitution not a 2024 deal-breaker, leading House Republican says

Republican Ohio Rep. Dave Joyce said Sunday that he didn't want to be drawn into commenting on Donald Trump's recent call to suspend the Constitution over baseless claims of 2020 election fraud.

Joyce, the chair of the Republican Governance Group, a centrist group in the House, was asked by ABC "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos to respond to Trump's post on Saturday on his Truth Social platform. The former president wrongly asserted that the "massive fraud" -- which did not occur -- "allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

Joyce initially declined to respond, saying he didn't know what Trump said on social media and that the public wasn't "interested in looking backwards." But Stephanopoulos pressed further, and Joyce ultimately said that Trump's comment should be taken "in context" but that it wouldn't prevent him from supporting Trump if he ends up winning the nomination.  

Addendum: This would be my version of this article.