As founder Lisa Coffi recently noted, her Shakespeare by the Sea is for the common folk, who tend to show up more for the big names in the Bard’s canon. So she expects a big turnout this summer, what with Romeo & Juliet’s being one of the two plays touring SoCal this summer.
Although R&J doesn’t open until this weekend, if this past Saturday’s attendance for the lesser-known Much Ado About Nothing is any indication, Coffi’s last go-round (she’s retiring after 25 years) will be huge, because in the decade or so I’ve been getting out to Point Fermin for the shows, never have I seen a bigger crowd — nor a happier one.
In case you don’t know (Much Ado has become more popular over the last 30 years thanks partly to film versions by Kenneth Branagh and Joss Whedon, but it’s still nowhere near Shakespeare’s ten most popular), after a successful military campaign, Don Pedro (Brendan Kane) brings his men home to Messina. Among them are young Claudio (Mateo Mpinduzi-Mott), who loves the governor of Messina’s daughter Hero (Talma Quipse); the merrily acerbic Benedick (Ryan Knight), who loves being a bachelor and making sport of the smitten; and Don Pedro’s bastard brother Don John (Edward Moravcsik), who loves only discord. Plots of good and ill nature intersect, and there’s much darkness before the dawn.
Whatever nuance and subtlety can be mined from Much Ado, the park is not the best place to dig, and Shakespeare by the Sea doesn’t really try. Rather, from the slo-mo arrival of Don Pedro and co. to the strains of Harold Faltermeyer’s “Top Gun Anthem”, it’s the yuks they prize — and there’s gold in them thar hills. Knight plays Benedick like an adolescent in the throes of a voice-drop as he changes his tune on bachelorhood, which is an amusing juxtaposition to his wit; and the scheme to make him and his opposite number Beatrice (Melissa Alison Green) fall for each other comes off with slapstick aplenty. Dances are silly, Dogberry (Connor Dugard) brings the comic relief, and the entire cast plays the 17th-century jibes broadly enough to that groundlings catch their fair share.
That’s really the big takeaway from this show: from start to finish, it connects to the audience. This colorful Much Ado About Nothing, and Shakespeare by the Sea in general, may not be for purists and academics. But that was never the idea. Coffi and her many colleagues over the last quarter-century have consistently aimed to bring one of history’s great literary geniuses and his often arcane, archaic language home to today’s masses.
Mission accomplished.
Much Ado About Nothing returns toPoint Fermin Park (807 W. Paseo Del Mar, San Pedro) July 7, 9, and August 6 at 8 p.m. As always, cost is free (donations gratefully accepted). Romeo & Juliet opens at Point Fermin this Thursday–Saturday. For more dates, locations (ranging from Aliso Viejo to Beverly Hills), and details, visit ShakespeareByTheSea.org or call (310) 217-7596
Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a stark warning in her dissent to a school prayer case.
The right-wing majority ruled 6-3 in favor of a Washington high school football coach who led student prayers on the field, which the majority opinion described as a private exercise of his religious liberty, but Sotomayor’s dissent described the ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton as “no victory for religious liberty.”
“Today, the Court once again weakens the backstop,” Sotomayor wrote. “It elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual’s choosing, over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all.”
“Today’s decision is particularly misguided because it elevates the religious rights of a school official, who voluntarily accepted public employment and the limits that public employment entails, over those of his students, who are required to attend school and who this Court has long recognized are particularly vulnerable and deserving of protection,” she added.
“In doing so, the Court sets us further down a perilous path in forcing States to entangle themselves with religion, with all of our rights hanging in the balance. As much as the Court protests otherwise, today’s decision is no victory for religious liberty. I respectfully dissent.”
Joe Kennedy, a coach for Bremerton High School in Washington state, began a ritual in 2008 where he would pray on the field at the final whistle.
But the school told the Christian military veteran to bring an end to the custom in 2015 after players began joining in — arguing that he was violating its ban on staff encouraging students to pray.
He was placed on administrative leave when he defied the order and did not reapply for his job after his contract ended soon after, opting instead to sue the school district.
The Supreme Court is being asked to rule on whether the public official’s prayers amounted to government speech, or private expression protected by the Constitution.
Education officials say they supported Kennedy’s religious rights — offering him private places for prayer — but could not allow his post-game ritual, which could be perceived as the school endorsing religion.
Kennedy lost the case and a subsequent appeal in which a three-judge panel said he was “not engaging in private prayer, but was instead engaging in public speech of an overtly religious nature while performing his job duties.”
But the Supreme Court’s conservative justices backed Kennedy’s claims.
As of June 24, LA County remained at the medium community level on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC COVID-19 Community Level framework. The CDC Community Level framework contains three elements: the weekly cumulative case rate per 100,000 people, and two hospital metrics, the seven-day cumulative rate of COVID-19 hospital admissions, and the percentage of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients.
This medium level is based on a very high case rate of 307 cases per 100,000 residents, well above the CDC’s 200 cases per 100,000 threshold for the low community level.
The county’s hospital admission rate is at 7.3 per 100,000 people, unchanged from the week prior. The percentage of hospital beds occupied by COVID patients is at 3.6%, slightly up from 3.5% last week. If the county reaches 10 for either of these two metrics, it will move into the “high” community level.
If the county continues its current rate of increase over the coming weeks, it may reach the COVID-19 hospital admission rate of 10 per 100,000 people threshold in mid-July, which is the high community level. However, the future hospitalization trend cannot be predicted with certainty.
If the county does move into the high level and remain there for two consecutive weeks, Public Health will implement a universal indoor masking requirement for everyone age 2 and older in LA County as a safety measure recommended by the CDC. If it were to be implemented, it would remain in effect until the county returns to the medium level for two consecutive weeks.
Carson City Council Adopts $104.9 Million Budget ‘On Time’ for Fiscal Year 2022-2023
The Carson City Council June 21, unanimously approved a structurally balanced budget for Fiscal Year 2022-2023 for the second year in a row. The total General Fund budget of $104.9 million, balanced without the use of any one-time monies, is consistent with the mayor and city council priorities. The budget makes significant investments in critical infrastructure projects, economic development and innovation, while maintaining a historically strong and healthy reserve of $39.4 million (48% above the city council reserve policy requirement). Overall, the 2022-2023 budget represents a 13.5% increase over the current year budget that ends June 30, 2022. The increase demonstrates the continued growth of the city’s revenues and the strength of the City of Carson’s economy.
The Adopted Budget furthers an annual Capital Improvement Program or CIP, funding 159 projects and requiring $81.8 million. Capital projects range from supporting parks, public safety, roadways, street maintenance and technology. The city also develops a Five‐Year Capital Improvement Program, which is a guiding document outlining all infrastructure needs of the City. Total funding is not allocated in future years beyond the next fiscal year.
Details: 310-952-1729.
Carson Voters Asked to Consider Continuing 2% Utility Users Tax
(With correction)
CARSON — The Carson City Council June 21, approved a resolution to place “Measure C” on the ballot for the November 8 General Election. Measure C will ask voters to consider continuing the 2% Utility Users Tax (UUT), until such time it is ended by Carson voters.
A UUT is a tax approved by local voters and assessed on various utilities to raise funds for that jurisdiction. In Carson, utility service providers (e.g., Southern California Edison and Southern California Gas) collect the tax from residents and businesses for electricity and natural gas, then remit the funds to the City. Senior citizens (ages 62 or older) and low-income households are exempt from the taxand commercial and industrial consumers pay the majority of the total.
The UUT revenue is approximately $8 million per year, which is about 10% of the City’s annual budget. A Citizen Oversight Committee regularly meets to make budget recommendations and to oversee the use of UUT funds.
Carson’s UUT tax was originally approved by the voters on March 3, 2009 to provide essential services for Carson residents, such as 911 emergency response, natural disaster and public health emergency preparedness, protect local drinking water, and repair streets and potholes. A recent community survey concluded approximately 68% of respondents are inclined to support maintaining these City services by continuing the City’s 2% UUT at the same exact rate.
As of January 2021, 158 cities in California have UUTs. Examples of surrounding cities’ UUT rates are:
Los Angeles: 9% on communications; 10% on electricity and gas.
Long Beach: 5% on telephone, electricity, gas and water.
Torrance: 6.5% on telephone, prepaid wireless, electricity, cogeneration, cable and gas; 6% on water.
Downey: 4.8% on Telecommunications; 5% on electricity and gas.
Details:Utility User’s Tax and exemptions; 310-952-1748. For questions regarding Measure C, contact, 310-952-1740 or email PIO@CarsonCA.gov
West Coast States Launch Multi-State Commitment to Reproductive Freedom
SACRAMENTO – The governors of California, Oregon and Washington June 24, issued a Multi-State Commitment to defend access to reproductive health care, including abortion and contraceptives, and committed to protecting patients and doctors against efforts by other states to export their abortion bans to our states.
This Multi-State Commitment affirms the governors’ commitment in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision to strip away a constitutional right that has been in place for half a century, leaving abortion regulation to the states. The sweeping decision means that for patients in more than half the country, home to 33.6 million women, abortion care is illegal or inaccessible.
California Protects Women and Providers from Abortion Bans by Other States
SACRAMENTO – On the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Gov. Gavin Newsom June 24, signed legislation to help protect patients and providers in California against radical attempts by other states to extend their anti-abortion laws into California.
The Governor signed AB 1666 by Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda), which seeks to protect those in California from civil liability for providing, aiding, or receiving abortion care in the state. The measure comes as lawmakers in Missouri advance a proposal to allow private citizens to sue Missouri residents who have an abortion out of state, as well as their providers and anyone who assists them in seeking an abortion. Texas has enacted a six-week ban on abortion with a private right of action enabling individuals to sue abortion providers and others. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio has introduced a federal bill to exclude employers from receiving tax breaks if they provide abortion access to their employees.
Twenty-six states across the nation, where 33.6 million women live, have laws to ban or severely restrict abortion. Twenty-two states have enacted measures to ban abortions:
Alabama
Arizona
Arkansas
Georgia
Idaho
Iowa
Kentucky
Louisiana
Michigan
Mississippi
Missouri
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Four additional states already restrict abortion and are likely to have bans in effect soon:
Can we help kids in need? Sometimes when we look at the landscape of children living in the LA Harbor Area, it can seem overwhelming to try to improve the lives of the kids. It may seem like we’re not able to meet their needs. However, this is not true and to quote a common phrase: We can make a difference!
Before COVID-19, the statistics of youth dealing with depression and anxiety and struggling to progress was high. Since the season of COVID, our children and youth are even more weighed down by the isolation and lack of connection they have gone through. Many kids are struggling to connect with other people as well as trying to catch up academically after a lost year or more with no in-person school attendance. The nonprofit youth organizations, Freedom4U and Hearts Respond aim to improve the lives of children and youth in the South Bay and specifically the LA Harbor Area. We do this through programs in creative arts, life skills, leadership and service learning. I’m writing this letter to inform the community about an opportunity to help children at Point Fermin Elementary School, a local marine science magnet school, with 67% of students who are economically disadvantaged. The plan is to improve the campus environment through educational and artistic activities that are physically applied to the playground areas and overall campus. The benefits of these activities will lead to self-confidence, character development, leadership and teamwork. We are starting with Point Fermin Elementary as an example of the impact we could make at many schools. Thus, we are hosting Point Fermin Day featuring live music, family activities for kids and an opportunity to benefit these children.
Again, our goal is to improve the school campus environment and then adopt another elementary school to do the same thing in the LA Harbor Area. We’re hoping businesses, individuals and families would join us as supporters of this exciting day.
Her foolish fascist father is a fraudulent liar, or so said Ivanka Trump in her testimony. Donald Trump knew damn well that he lost! Diabolical Donald is a dishonest, total phony.
Who in the Hell actually believes Trump won? You’d have to be brain dead to buy that stuff. All the polls all along said it’s President Biden, and Joe Biden won in a landslide sure enough. Trump is a loser!
Deranged Don is just a con, and his violent lunatic goons just can’t go on. They weep all over their evil assault weapons, not for the dead in Uvalde, but for their guns.
Kiss those machine guns goodbye, neo-Nazis! The fat lady Trump has sung, the GOP is done! Racist Republicans will choke on all their hate, while we the people all vote on Nov. 8.
The GOP has planted their flag deeply into the soil of fear and hate, right up to and including a call to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — this year we must vote as if our future depends upon it
The Texas GOP’s state party meeting last week gave America a clear insight into Republican thinking going into this year’s election and the 2024 presidential race. They’ve planted their flag deeply into the soil of violence, fear, white supremacy and hate right up to and including a call to repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Democratic candidates across the nation, on the other hand, show that the party is leaving behind the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and moving forward with a futuristic “Freedom Agenda.” They should brand it as such, taking a lesson from Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America” strategy that put Republicans solidly in charge of the House for the first time since the Republican Great Depression.
The GOP “Hate and Fear Agenda” is straightforward: Republicans and GOP media like Fox tell their voters to fear:
LGBTQ people, who the Texas Republicans say have “chosen” an “abnormal lifestyle.”
Non-white people.
Immigrants from anywhere except Europe.
Atheists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and non-evangelical Christians.
Women who want to control their own bodies or demand equal rights.
Books that talk about racism, sexism, or the true racial history of America.
Labor leaders and their unions.
Taxes above 3% on billionaires.
Free and fair elections where every citizen can participate.
Journalists, teachers and the League of Women Voters.
Laws that might keep assault weapons out of the hands of terrorists.
Public schools and unionized school teachers.
Science, from pandemics to global warming to electric vehicles.
The Democratic Party’s agenda is equally straightforward: Civil and economic rights lay the foundation for expanded freedom. Which is why Democrats proclaim that liberty requires people have:
Nutritious and affordable food.
Decent housing and a safe place to live.
A living wage that can support a family.
Economic security in retirement and old age.
Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you.
Equal rights, both political and economic, regardless of gender, race, or religion.
Debt-free college and trade school.
Quality public schools for all children.
News and information free of bias or manipulation by algorithms.
Universal access to voting for all citizens of voting age.
Family planning healthcare including abortion access.
A planet that’s no longer in danger of climate chaos.
Opportunity to start small businesses without destruction by monopolies.
The freedom to live your life without fear of getting shot.
In Congress and state houses across the nation Republicans push laws to put more guns on the streets, cut workers’ ability to unionize, strip low-income working people of access to Medicaid, protect monopolies, shut down programs supplying food and housing, cut taxes on the morbidly rich, privatize our schools and military, ship our jobs overseas, and lock students into loans they can never legally escape.
Republicans promote their fear and hate agenda with daily doses of faux outrage served up to them by a multi-billion-dollar media machine including over 1,500 rightwing radio stations (300 or so in Spanish); three “conservative” TV networks; the nation’s largest network of local TV stations; thousands of websites, many pretending to be local news; and massive efforts (often coordinated with Russian troll farms) to manipulate social media.
Democrats, on the other hand, have a century of legislative accomplishments and efforts that highlight their commitment to their Freedom Agenda.
They include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, free public schools, Pell Grants and other higher education support, food and nutrition programs, housing subsidies, the Wagner Act legalized unions, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, two GI Bills, creating agencies to insure clean air and water, COVID vaccination, and support for democracies around the world.
It’s no coincidence that the (red) states with the lowest taxes, most poorly funded schools, lowest pay scales, and who lack access to Medicaid are also those with highest levels of gun deaths, STDs, teenage pregnancies, deadly police encounters, barriers to voting, COVID, divorce, domestic violence, child abuse, drug addiction and political corruption.
It’s similarly no coincidence that the (blue) states with higher taxes, better schools, livable wages and widespread access to medical care have the highest per-worker productivity, the most inventions and new business formation, the best economies, the most well-educated workforces, the safest streets and the highest levels of life satisfaction.
Today we face a stark choice.
Will hate and fear win like they did in Hungary, Russia, and the Philippines? Or will hope and prosperity flower, as will happen if we get two more Democratic senators and can thus pass voting rights and Build Back Better legislation?
Are we going to follow the Republican Party’s 40-year trajectory of gutting the middle class and enriching the top 1% until we resemble a banana republic and “freedom” is a luxury only enjoyed by the morbidly rich?
Or are we going to join the free world and embrace straightforward quality-of-life solutions pioneered by Europe and Canada like a national healthcare system, quality free public education including college, fair taxation and a unionized workforce?
It should be a simple choice to make, but this is a country that’s been under assault by rightwing billionaires and foreign oligarchs ever since the Supreme Court legalized political bribery and kicked off the 40-year torture we call the “Reagan Revolution.”
To further complicate things, only about half of Americans typically bother to make that choice in a midterm election. This year we must vote as if our future depends on it. Because it does.
Half a lifetime ago, 27-year-old Lisa Coffi needed a meaty thesis project to complete her MFA at Cal State Long Beach. Not sure what she wanted to write about, she decided to stage her own outdoor Shakespeare festival to see what would happen.
Today the 52-year-old Coffi is a little hazy on the details of what she wrote — “It was 25 years ago!” — although she knows it had something to do with coming down against the idea that theatre emerges from chaos, finding that the process comes down to a well-defined series of steps.
What is sure is that in 1998 over 1,000 came out to Point Fermin Park to see nine performances of The Comedy of Errors spread out over three weekends, the first iteration of Shakespeare by the Sea, an unbroken tradition that is embarking on its 25th season of bringing the Bard to communities all over Southern California at no charge.
What’s also sure is this will be Coffi’s last.
Her departure has been a long time coming. She started thinking about it in 2017, she says, but did not have a solid succession plan in place to enable Shakespeare by the Sea to press on without her. But now, with Stephanie Coltrin and Suzanne Dean — who have a combined 35 years’ experience as Coffi’s producing partners at both SbtS and Little Fish Theatre (which Coffi retired from in January) — set to take the reins, Coffi is ready to step away, although for now she will remain on the Board of Directors and help with recruitment, fundraising, and advisement.
“It is a mixture of sadness and pride to talk about Lisa’s retirement,” says Coltrin. “It is a tribute to Lisa’s tenacity that she has created an organization that will continue past her tenure. It’s vital to keep Shakespeare by the Sea and Little Fish Theatre alive and well. For 13 years I’ve personally witnessed the impact of our work in our artists and our audiences — and in myself. The magic of SbtS bringing the greatest words ever written into communities all over SoCal and seeing people develop or hone a lifetime love of theatre because of their SbtS experience is priceless.”
But Coffi will be as active as ever during her final season at the helm. She talks to me for this article at 9:30 p.m. two weeks before the season kickoff at Point Fermin, unable to connect during the afternoon after being called away to deal with staffing issues at the tour’s Santa Ana and Mission Viejo sites; and she’ll be helping paint the Point Fermin set the following day — work that was supposed to be complete by now. “We’re way behind,” she says. “But it’ll all come together. It always does. That’s the magic of theatre.”
The build-up to her final season, however, has been less than magical. In January her father passed away, and her mother temporarily moved in with Coffi and her husband in the Sacramento house that’s been home since 2003, leaving Coffi to play catch-up as summer approached. Moreover, she’s also been increasingly buried in administrative work over the years (“I’m not going to be sad to leave that behind”), a task made all the more onerous by AB 5, the 2020 law that required theatre troupes to process every single actor — even those coming on board for only one show — as a company employee, which Coffi estimates increased the necessary paperwork ten-fold.
Despite her joy at Shakespeare by the Sea’s reaching its silver anniversary, Coffi says that this season “does bring a lot of emotional upheaval, because I am going to miss a lot of people. For me coming out to the shows [in Southern California] is a lot like Thanksgiving. It’s like seeing a huge family once a year at all the tour sites, so it’s heartbreaking [to leave it].”
It is estimated that over the course of its 25-year history Shakespeare by the Sea has brought the Bard to over 350,000 people — all for free. Although SbtS hasn’t produced all of Shakespeare’s plays (generally shying away from the histories), they have staged several of his lesser-known works, including King John (2013), Cymbeline (2016), and The Winter’s Tale (2018). And while more often than not SbtS favors a traditionalist bent (at least if you don’t count the music that usually plays during scene changes), they’ve been far from afraid to bend the rules. For example, rather than use Shakespeare’s very weak finale for Cymbeline, they substituted an alternate ending written by George Bernard Shaw (to my mind, a great improvement).
Along those lines, while purists might kvetch at how much cutting Coffi and co. sometimes do to get the plays they present down to two hours including intermission (for comparison, Hamlet, which they staged in 2006 and 2014, runs four hours sans cuts), the result has sometimes made Shakespeare’s weaker plays shine a bit brighter. Plus, as Coffi found during SbtS’s sophomore year when they staged an unabridged Taming of the Shrew, the park simply ain’t the place to try people’s attention spans.
“That’s when I went, ‘You know what? I don’t want to sit out there ‘til 11:30 [p.m. …] as I watched audience members leave the park because they were cold or it got too late,” she recalls. “I don’t think the attention span of today’s audience in our environment, out in a park, is going to sit that long. […] Shakespeare by the Sea is for [the] everyman.”
Coffi’s also learned that people turn up for what they know.
“When you pick shows where people are familiar with the titles, people will come and watch it,” she says. “So, like, Cymbeline was not particularly well attended because people didn’t know the title. But you pick Romeo and Juliet (which opens June 30), and we’re going to have a huge year this year.”
One plus from the COVID-19 pandemic, when SbtS stayed active by producing straight-to-streaming shows staged on Little Fish’s outdoor backlot (“There was a temptation to stop producing the festival, but as always with SbtS it seemed right to push through the dark times and back into the light”), was the opportunity to do the early, obscure Titus Andronicus, a show Coffi says they never would have mounted in the park due to its over-the-top grotesqueness, including rape, mutilation and feeding a mother a pie made of her sons’ ground-up bodies.
“We would never have been able to take a play like that out to the parks,” she laughs. “It’s just evil. […] ‘Free! Family-friendly!’”
Without getting into detail, Coffi notes that there have been ups and down in SbtS’s relationship with San Pedro and Los Angeles. She’s learned the value of diligently keeping a paper trail (electronic or otherwise), because on more than one occasion the city has repeatedly asked for a form she’s already submitted.
“I think we’ve had a few little hiccups, but we’ve been able to make our way through,” she says. “[…] It depends on who the [Department of Parks and Recreation] person is. So let’s just say some years have been more difficult than others. Some years it feels like you’re banging your head against a brick wall, other years it’s just easy peasy. […] We haven’t really had any issues with the park for quite a few years.”
Although Coffi admits to regrets, her recollections of the last quarter-century are dominated by pride: patrons who donate year after year, castmembers who have become lifelong friends, letters from people who may not have seen Shakespeare or any theatre without an admission-free festival in their neighborhood, mothers who brought their children who now bring their children.
“I’ve definitely had nights where I go to sleep remembering […] some things I wish I had done differently,” she says. “Maybe I was too snarky to someone or fired someone and then two years later wished I had talked it out with them. As you get older, you’re not as hot under the collar as you were at the beginning. I’m not sure whether it’s maturity or your passion is lessening. […] There are some things I regret, but there are a lot of shows that I can hold up and say, ‘Here we are. This is what we did.’ And it’s really nice to know that this will continue beyond me, which is something I always wanted to have happen.”
Shakespeare by the Sea kicks off its 25th season with Much Ado About Nothing at Point Fermin Park (807 W. Paseo Del Mar) on June 23 to 25. For a complete list of dates and locations visit ShakespeareByTheSea.org.
When was the last time a bad word wasn’t bleeped out on a national broadcast? The shocker came when former attorney General William Barr testified at the Jan. 6 Congressional hearings on the Capitol insurrection. I frankly found the profanity refreshingly blunt, to the point and an unadulterated truth.
This is exactly what Barr said:
I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit. I didn’t want to be a part of it.
This he testified was said just before he resigned in December 2020 before the attack on the Capitol.
And I think he repeated it a couple more times and then called his former boss delusional and out of touch with reality. Well welcome to the club Mr. Barr. Most of us have been calling BS on Don-the-Con long before he tried to steal the election. But why is it only now that you come off the bench to say this publicly?
Oh, yes. Not telling the truth after swearing an oath can result in a felony conviction and a five-year sentence in prison. If every Republican who has testified and will testify were asked, “Why didn’t you say something back when the crime was being committed?” Democrats would likely have veto-proof control of congress.
Now with the circle of justice narrowing around the real conspiracy to steal the election, all of the rats are starting to jump ship. The testimony of leading conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig reveals the threat:
The war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies on Jan. 6 was the natural and foreseeable culmination of the war for America. It was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor, the next president of the United States instead. Knowing full well that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his allies and supporters falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost. The treacherous plan was no less ambitious than to steal America’s democracy.
Again Judge Luttig just didn’t wake up yesterday with this epiphany and say “Ah hah, insurrection!” However, he did come to the late conclusion that the ex-president is a “clear and present danger” to our democracy, something any good lawyer would call prima facie evidence.
So now the Mar-a-Lago house of cards is starting to collapse, but the grifter is still doubling down on his failed attempt with his unhinged speech recently at a conservative Christian political conference in Nashville, Tennessee where he repeated his false claims of election fraud which now sound even more bizarre than before.
The conclusion becomes increasingly clear as most major media sources (except Fox News) are repeating that, “The former president was directly involved in a scheme to put forward false pro-Trump electors in states won by President Biden,” the Jan. 6 committee revealed.
The testimony couldn’t be more clear in this report from the New York Times,” The committee played deposition video from Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, who testified that Mr. Trump had personally called her about helping further the scheme. Mr. Trump put the conservative lawyer John Eastman [the one who got shot down by Judge David O. Carter] on the phone with Ms. McDaniel “to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors,” she testified.
Still, there will be die-hard Trumpsters who will just never admit, like the Grifter-in-Chief himself, that he actually lost. This is very reminiscent of both Richard Nixon’s and Ronald Reagan’s legacy and followers who dismiss their crimes of Watergate and Iran Contra scandals and fawn over opening trade with China or 1980s tax cuts with trickle-down voodoo economics. Just look around at what both of these have left us. We can’t let the crimes of Trump go unpunished.
It’s time to end this sad saga of betrayal and just get to the indictments — not just of Trump but of everyone who was in on his game of Three-card Monte.
His truest believers will now sign on to attacking any Republican who tells the truth like a circular firing squad — Republicans who told the truth out of conscience or loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and who just couldn’t bring themselves to abridge the law and their oaths of office. The next six months will be some of the most viscously strained political campaigns since perhaps the ones leading up the American Civil War. And if Trump is not convicted and jailed, he would likely follow the path of Confederate President Jefferson Davis promoting his lost cause for the rest of his life.
People, it’s time to call it like it is. The next time somebody starts going on about the stolen election, just end it by saying BS and walk away!
“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” said retired appeals court judge Michael Luttig — an icon of the conservative legal establishment. “That’s not because of what happened on Jan. 6,” but because they’ve pledged they’d do it again in 2024, he testified in the third hearing of the January 6 Select Committee, on June 16. The January 6 hearings have accomplished two main things so far: First, they’ve demolished former president Donald Trump’s twin big lies about the stolen election and the J6 insurrection he mounted. Second, they’ve begun to expose key elements of what Trump was actually trying to do — nothing short of using violence to subvert the orderly transition of power. They’ve shown that the timing of actions by indicted members of the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers revealed that the violence was pre-planned, not the result of an innocent demonstration “getting out of hand.” But what they haven’t done is counter the threat Luttig highlighted. The twin lies were demolished in the very first hearing. Trump insiders provided clear evidence that Trump certainly knew his claims of having won the election were bogus — and thus he had criminal intent in trying to hold onto power. Former attorney general William Barr called claims of software manipulation “complete nonsense” and “crazy stuff.”
“You can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election,” Barr said.
And Ivanka Trump followed his lead.
“I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying,” she said in a taped deposition. Former Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon and others confirmed the picture.
Trump Lost. They All Knew
Further details were fleshed out in the second hearing. A key trigger to how things unfolded was Fox News calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. A multi-witness tape covering the election night response set up the main distinction of that hearing: the virtually unanimous majority of Trump insiders who took evidence seriously versus a mere two who did not: Donald Trump and an inebriated Rudy Giuliani.
“There was surprise at the call,” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Sepian said. And the atmosphere shifted “Completely,” according to Trump senior advisor Jason Miller. Somewhat later, “There are suggestions by, I believe it was Mayor Giuliani, to go and declare victory and say that we won it outright,” he recalled, but “It was far too early to be making any calls like that,” Sepian said. “It was becoming clear that the race would not be called on election night,” said Ivanka Trump.
Just two people disagreed.
“Mayor Giuliani was saying we won it. They’re stealing it from us,” Miller recalled. “Anyone who didn’t agree with that position was being weak.”
Only Trump felt the same. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” he said early the next morning.
That pattern, set on election night, persisted for the next two months, as the utter lack of evidence of any election fraud gave rise to ever crazier theories. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Barr said.
A detailed look at Georgia, with testimony from Trump’s U.S. Attorney there, B.J. Pak, was illustrative. Giuliani had shown a Georgia State Senate subcommittee a clip from a security tape at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta which he claimed was a ‘smoking gun’ proving voting fraud. But “Mr. Giuliani only played a clip” from a surveillance tape. “Nothing irregular happened in the counting and the allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false,” Pak said.
Another Giuliani fantasy was that 8,000 dead people voted in Pennsylvania — specifically Philadelphia — a claim refuted by Al Schmidt, the only Republican member of Philadelphia’s three-member city commission. “Not only was there not evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania, there wasn’t evidence of eight,” Schmidt told the committee.
He’d received generalized threats before Trump tweeted about him by name, calling him a RINO (Republican in name only) “being used big time by the fake news media.” But, “After the president tweeted at me by name, calling me out the way that he did, the threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name but included members of my family by name, their ages, our address, pictures of our home. Just every bit of detail that you could imagine,” Schmidt said. “That was what changed with that tweet.”
The Red Mirage and the Big Grift
A key component in driving the narrative was Trump’s exploitation of the “red mirage,” a decades-old phenomenon due to Democrats voting more by mail than Republicans do. As a result, “You see the Republicans shoot ahead” on election day, former Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt explained, “But it’s not really a lead.”
Stirewalt’s team at Fox tried to counter Trump by educating viewers, “because the Trump campaign and the president had made it clear that they were going to try to exploit this anomaly,” he said.
Trump actively discouraged Republicans from voting by mail to expand the mirage, ignoring Sepian’s entreaties to the contrary. For Trump, it was less important to actually win the election than to appear to win it on election night, so that he could cry “fraud” when the Democratic votes came in. This was but one example of a broader pattern that the committee has yet to highlight as such: the role of deception as a key element of Trump’s plan — especially deceiving his own base.
They have highlighted examples of it — such as the outlandish conspiracy theories without evidence, or the $250 million raised from small donors for the Official Election Defense Fund, which the committee discovered did not exist, leading committee member Zoe Lofgren to remark, “The big lie was also the big grift.”
The televised hearings of the January 6 Select Committee. Photo courtesy of C-SPAN
Blocking Certification
But deception was also the key subject of the third hearing, the attempt to block certification of the election on Jan. 6, relying on a legal theory its leading proponent didn’t actually believe. John Eastman, who once clerked for Michael Luttig, advanced the theory that Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, was free to reject electoral votes from states Biden won that Trump had contested.
But Luttig told Pence it was nonsense and tweeted a warning against it on Jan. 5: “The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast.” In the hearing, he reiterated, “There was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States at all for the theory espoused by Mr. Eastman at all. None.”
What’s more, “No vice president in 230 years of history had ever claimed to have that kind of authority,” said Greg Jacob, Pence’s lead counsel, who studied the matter in depth for Pence. He recalled arguing with Eastman, citing the example of Al Gore in 2000 and the prospect of Kamala Harris having such power in 2024, and he recalled Eastman’s response, “Al Gore did not have a basis to do it in 2000, Kamala Harris shouldn’t be able to do it in 2024, but I think you should do it today.” So he knew his own theory was bunk. A pretext, nothing more.
Eastman also admitted to Jacob that “we would lose nine nothing” if his theory went to the Supreme Court, but he also believed the Court would decline to hear it as a “political question.” Jacob also witnessed Eastman admit to Trump that his theory violated the 1887 Electoral Count Act. Thus, both men knew that Trump’s plan was illegal and that Pence had no choice. Yet Trump still used it to incite the crowd against Pence — even tweeting another attack as they were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
But if Pence had gone along, Eastman was prepared for much wider violence. Eric Herschmann, a top White House lawyer, recalled telling him what would happen if 78-plus million people had their votes invalidated by one man. “I said, ‘They’re not going to tolerate that. You’re going to cause riots in the streets.’ And he said words to the effect of there has been violence in the history of our country, Eric, to protect the democracy or protect the republic.”
In short, there was no legal or factual foundation for Trump’s attempt to hold onto power, there were only lies and violence — and the threat of it.
It could have been much worse, author/journalist David Neiwert noted on Twitter, providing some insight into why Eastman was so untroubled. “The non-appearance of antifascists on the scene Jan. 6, played a critical role in the failure of Trump’s coup attempt,” Neiwert, an expert on extremism, violence and propaganda, wrote. “Trump had been building the ‘Antifa/BLM/Violent Left’ narrative all year, but he focused on Antifa particularly after he lost the election, and stepped up the vitriol.”
On Jan. 5 he issued a memorandum declaring Antifa a “terrorist organization.” The Oathkeepers, Proud Boys and QAnon activists were preparing for a battle that never came, because “Antifascists were able to see Trump’s scheme from miles away, and encouraged all their colleagues to avoid the capital city on January 6,” Neiwert wrote. Pence refusing to accept Biden electors was just the first step, which fell apart, he explained. “Then, Trump’s plans to use intended violence between his army of ‘Patriots’ and Antifa as the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act vanished back into the mists of their imaginations.”
It doesn’t seem likely that the committee will pursue this aspect, but the Jan. 5 Antifa memorandum underscores how serious Trump was, and how much worse the violence could have been.
Lies and Violence in the States
The fourth hearing focused on how Trump used false claims of fraud to pressure state and local officials, laying the groundwork for his pressure campaign against Pence. In the process, he endangered their lives and their families.
In a Dec. 1 press conference, Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling dramatically pushed back. “It has to stop it,” Sterling said in a replayed clip. “Mister president, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions,” he said. “It has to stop. This is elections, this is the backbone of democracy and all of you who have not said a word are complicit in this.”
Rusty Bowers, GOP Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives described a extensive effort to get him to overthrow the election. Giuliani had claimed 200,000 illegal immigrants had voted, along with thousands of dead people. He asked for names, and Trump told Giuliani, “Give the man what he needs, Rudy.” Bowers testified. But did he get anything? “Never,” Bowers said. It was all hot air.
Besides, the legislature, having established popular election for presidential electors, “it becomes a fundamental right of the people,” that the legislature can’t simply revoke, he explained. “It is a tenant of my faith that the constitution is divinely inspired — of my most basic foundational beliefs. So for me to do that because someone just asked me to? It’s foreign to my very being,” Bowers said.
But the most terrorized individuals were Fulton County election worker Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who assisted her as a volunteer. They were both on the misleading tape Giuliani played, after which Trump doubled, attacking Freeman 18 times by name. Moss testified in person, but her mother’s taped testimony cut the deepest. She’s virtually withdrawn from public life out of fear.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman said. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States targeting you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, the small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen, who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.”
There’s a word for what Trump has done to Ruby Freeman: terrorism. But she’s not the only one. Shaye Moss has quit her job as an election worker after 10 years. What’s more, she said, “There is no permanent election worker or supervisor in that video that is still there.”
