Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 24
What to make of last week's events, another 2020 link dump, and some hope for the future.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.
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What do we make of this?
We saw a lot last week. We witnessed an absolutely historic and disturbing attack on our nation. So, where do we start?
From last week’s newsletter:
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
From Wednesday:
I’ll be honest, I really struggled with how to put this newsletter together this week. I’ve decided to defer to people who are smarter than I am and better equipped to shed light on what happened. I understand if you’ve seen and read enough. We’ll be back next week with some happier stuff, I promise.
How it happened
First, a brilliantly written account of Wednesday’s events. Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control:
The growing crowds outside the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon sounded menacing but at bay as senators began to debate challenges to the electoral college vote. A top adviser to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stepped out of the ornate chamber for a short break.
Alone in the Capitol’s marble halls, just outside the chamber’s bronze doors, it was suddenly apparent that the citadel of U.S. democracy was falling to the mob incited by President Trump.
A cacophony of screaming, shouting and banging echoed from the floor below. McConnell’s security detail rushed past and into the chamber. The adviser began walking toward the Rotunda and came face to face with a U.S. Capitol Police officer sprinting in the opposite direction. The two made eye contact and the officer forced out a single word: “Run!”
Armed only with their phones and some of the best Rolodexes in the world, lawmakers and their aides began calling and texting anyone they thought could help — the secretary of the Army, the acting attorney general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, governors of nearby states, the D.C. mayor.
There were, of course, plenty of signs pointing to a wild day of protests. Perhaps, most importantly, instructions from the President:
On Dec. 19, he tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted. “Be there, will be wild!”
Lawmakers sounded alarms, but obviously, Capitol Police were ill-prepared for the protest and the ensuing riot.
In an hour-long conversation on New Year’s Eve, Rep. Maxine Waters said Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund told her he had a plan for keeping protesters far from the building.
Waters recalled asking Sund what intelligence the force had about how big the gathering would be. Sund, she said, didn’t have a clear answer. She hung up the phone at her home in D.C. thinking, “They don’t know who’s coming. They don’t know whether any of these are violent groups.”
On the eve of the joint session, lawmakers peppered top Capitol security officials with more questions.
In fact, three days earlier, Capitol police had told the Pentagon that it was not requesting National Guard support for the event, according to defense officials. And when masses of Trump supporters began pushing against the limited barricades around the Capitol, the agency’s officers were rapidly overrun.
Trump helped kick off the madness around noon.
By around 1 p.m., as the joint session began, the mood in the crowd outside began to shift. Trump had just given a one-hour speech to thousands of supporters amassed on the Ellipse near the White House, excoriating his enemies and reiterating his baseless claims of fraud. GOP lawmakers, he emphasized, needed to take a stand.
“We’re going to the Capitol,” he said. “We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
The president added: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump returned to the White House; he did not go to Capitol Hill. But his supporters began streaming east along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Things then started to get hairy:
Protesters would be kept outside. The doors were all locked, he told her. “Nobody can get in,” Irving said.
A seeming fortress from a distance, the Capitol contains more than 400 separate doors, entryways and ground-level windows. And police lines on all sides of the building were collapsing.
Waters placed an urgent call to Sund, who was at Capitol police headquarters two blocks away, two law enforcement officials said.
Protesters were already crossing the plaza. “What are you going to do about it?” Waters asked. “We’re doing the best we can,” came Sund’s reply, she said, and then the line went dead.
Waters was unsure if the call had dropped or if Sund hung up. She turned to a staffer: “That’s not a plan.”
Then, of course, shit hit the fan:
Shortly before 2 p.m., rioters were on all sides of the building. They waved Trump flags from landings and porticos, while the most violent and those armed with pipes, rocks and other objects trained on the many doors and windows.
In fact, Sund had just requested National Guard support from the Defense Department. It would be hours before they would arrive.
A moment later, the thunderous sounds of banging at exterior doors around the House side gave way to a crash of window glass and then shouts from rioters who had breached a second side of the building.
At 2:14 p.m., Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) had begun his speech objecting to Arizona’s electoral college results. As he spoke, Pelosi’s protective detail agents hustled her away.
As lawmakers were ushered out another side of the chamber, plainclothes Capitol Police officers dragged a desk to use as a barricade in front of the door that presidents enter to deliver the annual State of the Union address.
On the other side, rioters began breaking small windows. The officers inside drew their guns.
We all watched what happened next, and I won’t excerpt the entire thing here. Go read the piece for the rest of the details. Warning: it will make your heart race.
The view from inside the Capitol
Sarah D. Wire wrote another piece that greatly quickened my pulse. I know Sarah. We worked together covering the Missouri State House in college. In fact, we drove to and from Jefferson City for a semester while she wrote for the newspaper and I worked for KMOX radio. I’ve since followed her career closely. She is an outstanding reporter and an equally great writer. She works for the Los Angeles Times, and she’s currently chair of the Standing Committee of Correspondents. She’s an ace.
Wednesday, she was in the press gallery watching the joint session of Congress. It’s an extremely gripping personal account from inside. From I’m in a roomful of people ‘panicked that I might inadvertently give away their location’:
I love to be in the House or Senate chambers on big days. There’s just something about being in the room where it happens. It’s more than just a news story. It’s history, and a privilege to tell people about it.
Even amid a pandemic — I have an 18-month-old son — I leaped at a chance to attend the counting of the electoral college votes.
But my husband was worried. Trump had been encouraging protests, and he feared it could grow violent.
After I put the baby to bed Tuesday night, he gently asked me to be careful. “Wear street clothes that let you blend in with the crowd,” he told me. “Jeans and a T-shirt.”
I was taking notes on my laptop when my phone buzzed at 1:41 p.m. It was a text message from a House staffer forwarding me an alert from Capitol Police.
I had been following events on Twitter and was aware that protesters were outside the Capitol. The alert unnerved me, but this is the Capitol, and threats are common.
Things quickly escalated:
Thirty minutes later, I headed up the stairs and into the press offices to see if I could learn more. The office’s emergency radio crackled to life. Then came a woman’s voice, one that seemed panicked: “Due to an external security threat located on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building, no entry or exit is permitted at this time. You may move throughout the building(s) but stay away from exterior windows and doors. If you are outside, seek cover.”
I knew what I had to do. I hustled down the stairs to my laptop. It was 2:15 p.m. After typing out an update for my editors, I looked over the railing into the chamber and noticed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), second in line to the presidency, was gone. It was obvious her security detail had spirited her to safety.
Police interrupted the proceedings to announce that tear gas had been deployed in the rotunda.
A staff member handed me an evacuation hood, a cumbersome plastic bag that filters out tear gas and chemicals. She told me to pass it and others down the row until everyone had one. Reporters were not the only ones in the gallery. Staff members were monitoring the proceedings. More than a dozen lawmakers had also taken seats in the public galleries overlooking the House floor. Now we were locked in the room together.
On the floor, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a former combat Marine, was holding up his escape hood and explaining to other members how to use it. There were about 150 lawmakers down there, and Gallego was shouting to get their attention.
“Open the first package!” he yelled.
“Then open the second!”
“The hood then inflates over your head!”
More chaos:
Pounding on the door began. The officers drew their guns.
“Crouch on the floor!” he shouted. “Get as low as you can!”
I slid behind a row of chairs and looked up as a female representative started to pray. Another member was talking loudly into his cellphone, providing a play-by-play. Several lawmakers were crying.
A loud crack split the air. It sounded like a gunshot. And then it got quiet.
Officers yelled to the lawmakers in the gallery to leave, but no one present had a key to the door. Lawmakers and police officers argued about opening the door and making a run for it. Police wanted lawmakers to make a dash for it.
I crawled over to where Rep. Norma Torres (D-Pomona) was kneeling. She hugged me and asked me about my baby, and I told her that he was fine.
She took my photo with her phone and posted on Twitter, tagging @latimes to alert my colleagues that I was OK.
Throughout the ordeal, Sarah did her job:
“Can I do the hardest part of my job and ask you what you are thinking right now?” I asked.
It took her a second to compose her thoughts. “It’s horrible that this is America, this is the United States of America and this is what we have to go through because Trump has called homegrown terrorists to come to the Capitol and invalidate people’s votes,” she said.
Police told us to follow them. We walked for several minutes, hustling down a warren to hallways and a winding staircase. I have worked in the Capitol for eight years, and I can’t tell you the path we took. As lawmakers, reporters and staffers streamed ahead, I slowed so I could speak with a visibly shaken Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles). He was livid. I pulled out my phone and hit record. He took a second to find his words.
“This shouldn’t happen in the United States,” he said, his eyes rimmed with tears.
I went looking for California lawmakers and began interviewing them. After each, I uploaded the audio to my colleagues in my bureau to add to stories on our website.
A member pleaded with colleagues not to do interviews with reporters. They were worried we might accidentally betray our location.
Kimbriell Kelly, my boss, sent me a message asking for a first-person video of what it was like in the room. I said I couldn’t. Lawmakers were “panicked that I might inadvertently give away their location,” I told her. “I’ll do in writing if that’s ok?”
That detail “just hit me in the gut,” she wrote back.
An hour passed. My husband sent me a photo of my baby smiling. It teared me up.
Forty-five minutes later, more than four hours after being locked inside, I was permitted to leave. There was only one place for me to go.
I headed upstairs back in the gallery — to chronicle history.
Thank you, Sarah.
Next, some perspective from elected leaders
Democrat Cory Booker got it right.
Some Republicans aren’t afraid to tell the truth. From Libertarian magazine Reason:
Rep. Peter Meijer (R–Mich.), had quite the week. On Sunday, the 32-year-old Iraq/Afghanistan veteran and supermarket heir was sworn into office. On Tuesday, he joined a dozen GOP lawmakers in objecting to Republican attempts to delay or oppose the certification of Joe Biden as president-elect.
And on Wednesday? "Definitely didn't expect to be donning a smoke-inhalation hood and having to get down under some chairs because there were concerns that they might start shooting into the House chambers," Meijer told me in a phone interview Thursday afternoon.
"They were being lied to. They were being misled," he said of the demonstrators. "Some of my colleagues in Congress, they share responsibility for that. Many of them were fundraising off of this Stop the Steal grift. I don't understand how you can look in the mirror and go to sleep at night without that weighing on your conscience, I fundamentally do not. I'm just at a loss for words about how some of them have acted in ways that are just knowingly, provably false. And they know they're lying, too.
I mean maybe I'm coming in here with too naive an expectation of human capacity and decency, but I also was an interrogator in Iraq, so it's not like I'm a Pollyanna.
But what to me was the most bewildering was folks giving speeches that were written that morning as if we weren't in a body that had windows broken in just a few hours earlier, law enforcement drawing weapons. As if a woman hadn't been shot and killed 100 feet from where they stood, right? There was still dried blood out there. And they were giving the exact same speeches, the exact same arguments, telling what they thought their people wanted to hear rather than telling them what they needed to hear.”
So, why did this happen?
Conspiracy theories? Power-hungry politicians? White grievance? Social media echo chambers? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. But, as with most things in life, the answer is money. Follow the money.
The Stop The Steal campaign had no chance to actually overturn the election, but as Meijer said, it certainly gave politicians and other grifters an opportunity to raise money from upset followers.
It also allowed an assortment of thieves and con-men the opportunity to prey on a defeated electorate. Philip Bump details the decade-long scam to wring money out of conservative victimhood.
Ali Alexander is a right-wing personality who has worked with a rogue’s gallery of notorious characters in that world: Alex Jones, Roger Stone, Jacob Wohl, Laura Loomer, you name it. A decade ago, he was flitting around on the fringes of the conservative movement where his past legal troubles contributed to scrutiny of his efforts to raise funds for an online publishing venture. Now, he identifies himself as “national organizer” for “Stop the Steal,” an organization which adopts the tagline of President Trump’s ploy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Alexander’s group isn’t linked to the Trump campaign. Instead, as CNN reported last week, his “Stop the Steal” website solicits contributions that aren’t bound by nonprofit rules or constraints and which, at least in its initial iteration, went straight to him.
Bup argues that this is perhaps an inevitable culmination of years of insistence on conservative victimhood. Using this tactic, opportunists, including Trump, have gained tremendous political power and money.
At a political rally last Saturday in support of two Republican candidates for Senate, Trump was explicit in outlining this point.
“The system will be fixed when these people get in,” he assured the crowd in Georgia. “They’ll get in, and we’ll fix the system. Because we’re all victims. Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims, every one of you.”
Don’t forget that this is the same promise that Trump offered when he accepted the Republican nomination in 2016.
The system was broken, he told voters, and he alone could fix it. Four years later, it remains broken and the new cure-all is electing these particular Republicans to the Senate.
That is a feature of the grift. The suffering and victimhood is eternally existent and also eternally fixable, and with just a few more dollars and just a few more votes, everything can be resolved once and for all.
To sum it all up:
To wring value out of the Republican base, the temperature needs to continue to rise and the urgency to increase. The country can’t take much more heat without tragedy.
Who saw it coming?
Arieh Kovler knew. A tweet from Dec. 21:
GQ caught up with Kovler Thursday. The political consultant studies extremist Trump message boards, and in his telling, it wasn’t difficult to see the writing on the wall.
“Once Trump said be there,” Kovler said on a phone call Thursday morning, “they interpreted that as a call to action, as their marching orders.” As one Trump supporter on Reddit interpreted it: “DADDY SAYS BE IN DC ON JAN. 6TH.”
As terrible as Wednesday was, Kovler thinks it could have been much worse.
“They imagined that this was the day there were going to be mass executions of Congressmen,” Kovler said.
They thought, "This is the thing we have been asked to do. Trump is telling us to do this, so we have to do it." Because why would he ask us to come to Washington if it wasn't part of the plan? It wouldn't make any sense. There's a trend among the Trump fans—it's almost religious—to see him as basically infallible and any mistakes are caused by bad people around him. He wouldn't be calling us to Washington unless there was a purpose that would ultimately end in him winning the election.
So they saw that, and are convinced they're coming in order to win the election. Or perhaps they're going to be an army. You can see the discussions around this: “Why has he asked us to come? Surely there's a reason.” They would say, “Should we bring guns? Is he asking us to bring guns? But maybe he doesn't want us to be armed because if we're armed we'll get in trouble, and we need to be there.”
You could see the discussion become less abstract. By last week, these people were sharing maps of D.C. They were talking about having enough of them that they would be able to erect basically their own cadre around the entire area of Congress. They had a map of the tunnels [in the basement of the Capitol], and they were talking about how they're going to be able to stop Congress from leaving. They imagined that this was the day there were going to be mass executions of Congressmen.
If you knew this was going to happen weeks ago, it seems reasonable that we should expect that people in power should have known and prepped for this.
Yeah. I don't understand how things went as badly as they did. My only thought is that they were maybe expecting people to be more armed and when they didn't see a bunch of people carrying AR-15s they thought, “Aw, that's all right, it's just a normal protest,” and then failed to understand the gravity of the situation. But this was absolutely predictable.
Is there any hope?
Stop what you’re doing and watch this.
Shameless podcast promotion
These events can’t be covered in a one minute IG story or a hot-take sound bite. I did a podcast Thursday sharing my thoughts on the situation the day after. It’s 26 minutes long. You can listen to it below on Spotify.
I also did a fun podcast with my friend John Duda that dropped today. Check that out as well. Subscribe to Mind of Micah on Apple Podcast here and get new episodes as soon as they are released.
2020 link dump pt. 2
Below is a list of pieces I enjoyed last year but didn’t feature in this space. In the interest of starting fresh, here are a bunch of great stories presented without commentary.
Check out last week’s newsletter to see the first set of links.
'I don't wish either of them well': The demise of the Southwest Conference, 25 years later
'They're in a deep, deep hole': Inside the 6-year unraveling of Florida State football
George Clooney When We Need Him Most
The actor, director, and GQ Icon of the Year is the one thing we can all agree on—at a time when we can’t agree on anything.
The $2 Billion Mall Rats
The inside story of a black sheep hedge fund, their massive bet that shopping malls would crash, and how they proved Wall Street wrong.
Confessions of a Pandemic Risk-Taker
Well, not THAT risky. But riskier than I’ll admit on social media.
The forever grievance
Conservatives have traded periodic revolts for a permanent revolution
Deion Sanders is inspiring hope at Jackson State. But what happened at Prime Prep?
Voices From the Aisles
The people who have kept America’s grocery stores open
Where else can I find Micah content?
Podcasts: Mind of Micah, Back Door Cover, Too Much Dip
Twitter: @micahwiener & @producermicah (Why two twitters? It’s a long story)
Instagram: @micahwiener
LinkedIn: @micahwiener
Peloton: #badboysofpelly @micahwiener
Email: micahwiener@me.com
Solid update of what happened last week. What a sad day for our country though.