…maybe I ought to be seeking therapy

Whatever my ambivalence about therapy, I trusted it enough to return to it several times, trying other modes that have become increasingly popular, including two versions of cognitive-behavioral therapy. More recently, I explored a form of therapy that had me locating my feelings in particular parts of my body so that I could — oh, I don’t know what, although I recall that I found it interesting at the time.

Over the decades, and especially since the pandemic, the stigma of therapy has faded. It has come to be perceived as a form of important self-care, almost like a gym membership — normalized as a routine, healthful commitment, and clearly worth the many hours and sizable amounts of money invested. In 2021, 42 million adults in the United States sought mental-health care of one form or another, up from 27 million in 2002. Increasingly, Americans have bought into the idea that therapy is one way they can reliably and significantly better their lives.
[…]
Occasionally I tried to raise the question with friends who were in therapy themselves, but they often seemed intent on changing the subject or even responded with a little hostility. I sensed that simply introducing the issue of research findings struck them as either threatening or irrelevant. What did some study matter in the face of the intangibles that enhanced their lives — a flash of insight, a new understanding of an irrational anger, a fresh recognition of another’s point of view? I, too, have no doubt that therapy can change people’s lives, and yet I still wanted to know how reliably it offers actual relief from suffering. Does therapy resolve the symptoms that cause so much pain — the feeling of dread in people who deal with anxiety, or insomnia in people who are depressed? Does the talking cure, in fact, cure? And if it does, how well?

Sigmund Freud, the brilliant if dogmatic father of psychoanalysis, was famously uninterested in submitting his innovation to formal research, which he seemed to consider mere bean-counting in the face of his cerebral excavations of the unconscious. Presented with encouraging research that did emerge, Freud responded that he did not “put much value on these confirmations because the wealth of reliable observations on which these assertions rest make them independent of experimental verification.” A certain skepticism of the scientific method could be found in psychoanalytic circles well into the late 20th century, says Andrew Gerber, the president and medical director of a psychiatric treatment center in New Canaan, Conn., who pursued the use of neuroimaging to research the efficacy of therapy. “At my graduation from psychoanalytic training, a supervising analyst said to me, ‘Your analysis will cure you of the need to do research.’”

…it’s certainly tempting to make some snarky comparison to the “do your own research” crowd…their “analysis”…& what might “cure” them…but…that might be unfair…& would probably miss the point

Over time, formal psychoanalysis has largely given way to less-​libido-focused talk therapies, including psychodynamic therapy, a shorter-term practice that also focuses on habits and defenses developed earlier in life, and cognitive-behavioral therapy, which helps people learn to replace negative thought patterns with more positive ones. Hundreds of clinical trials have now been conducted on various forms of talk therapy, and on the whole, the vast body of research is quite clear: Talk therapy works, which is to say that people who undergo therapy have a higher chance of improving their mental health than those who do not.

That conviction gained momentum in 1977, when the psychologists Mary Lee Smith and Gene V. Glass published the most statistically sophisticated analysis on the subject until that point. They looked at some 400 studies in a paper known as a meta-analysis — a term Glass coined — and found that among the “neurotics” and “psychotics” who had undergone various kinds of talk therapy, the typical patient fared better than 75 percent of those with similar diagnoses who went untreated. The finding that therapy has real benefits was replicated numerous times in subsequent years, in analyses applied to patients with anxiety, depression and other prevalent disorders.

…but…there are a lot of points…& it’s possible they aren’t as equal as advertised

Wampold is best known for research suggesting that all types of evidence-based talk therapies work equally well, a controversial phenomenon known as the Dodo Bird effect. (The effect takes its name from the Dodo in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” who, when asked to judge a race, decrees, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!”) Hash out your childhood with a psychodynamic therapist, write down probabilities of feared outcomes with a cognitive-behavioral therapist, work on your boundaries with an interpersonal therapist — they will all yield equally positive results, found Wampold and others who have replicated his work.

But there are reasons to think that this picture of therapy overpromises. As is true of much research, studies with less positive or striking results often go unpublished, so the body of scholarly work on therapy may show inflated effects. And researchers who look at different studies or choose different methods of data analysis have generated more conservative findings. Pim Cuijpers, a professor of clinical psychology at Vrije University in Amsterdam, co-wrote a 2021 meta-analysis confirming that therapy was effective in treating depression compared with controls, but he also found that more than half of the patients receiving therapy had little or no benefit and that only a third entered “remission” (meaning their symptoms lessened enough that they no longer met the study’s criteria for depression). Given that the patients were assessed just one to three months after treatment started, Cuijpers said he considered those results “a good success rate,” but he also noted that “more effective treatments are clearly needed” because so many patients did not meaningfully benefit. A blunter assessment of short-term therapies appears in a 2022 paper published by Falk Leichsenring and Christiane Steinert, psychotherapists and researchers affiliated with universities in Germany, who surveyed studies comprising some 650,000 patients suffering from a broad range of mental illnesses. “After more than half a century of research” and “millions of invested funds,” they wrote, the impact that therapy (and medication, for that matter) had on patients’ symptoms was “limited.”

Such different interpretations of the data persist in part because of some of the field’s particular research challenges, starting with what constitutes a suitable control group. Many researchers put half the people who sign up to participate in a trial on a waiting list, in order to use that cohort as a control group. But critics of that method argue that languishing on a waiting list puts patients in an uncomfortable state of limbo, or makes them less likely to seek help from other sources, thus inflating the difference between their well-being and the well-being of those who received care. Other researchers try to provide a control group by offering a neutral nontherapy therapy, but even those are thought to have some placebo effect, which could make the effect of therapy look smaller than it really is. (One researcher, in trying to devise a neutral form of therapy to serve as a control, even managed to stumble on a practice that improved patients’ well-being about as well as established therapies.)

…it’s an interesting piece…but…might end up providing more questions than answers…which…well…I might find to be a familiar feeling

Most studies do not break down the results of various psychotherapies by type of patient — by gender, for example, or comorbidities, or age of onset of illness. The trials are too small to generate statistically meaningful results for those categories. Driessen and colleagues are undertaking the ambitious task of going back to the researchers on at least 100 trials to procure identifying details about patients, so that their samples will be large enough to allow them to determine whether certain kinds of people are more likely to respond to one kind of therapy or another. The project will most likely be underway for a decade before they can tease out matches between practice and patient.

Another growing school of research, meanwhile, hopes to move practitioners away from adhering strictly to one school or another, by identifying the most effective components of each — the practice of exposing patients to the sources of their fears, for example, or examining relationship patterns. But Wampold believes that eventually these researchers will simply land, with their collection of techniques, on yet another form of therapy that proves about as effective as all the others.

…either way…did not expect it to take a turn in the direction of jeet kun do…though…I guess there are other things that approach might bring to mind

The answer struck me as yet another frustrating unknown in the field. I had perhaps — as a longtime consumer of therapy in search of reassurance — hit my limit with the disputes among the various clinicians and researchers, the caveats and the debates over methodology. “The research seems very … baggy,” I said, not bothering to hide my frustration. “It’s not very satisfying.” I could practically hear a smile on the other end of the phone. “Well, thank you,” Anderson said. “That’s what makes this research so interesting. That there are no simple answers, right?”

A handful of well-chosen words — and I felt soothed, even touched by his positivity, which included, with that question mark at the end of his sentence, a hint of inclusiveness. Confronted with my clear annoyance, he had offered me a nondefensive, constructive and positive response. We were in this together.

The exchange made me think of the best hours I have spent in therapy, times when I felt the depth of a therapist’s caring, or experienced the reframing of a particular thought that I hadn’t even known could be cast in so different a light. The therapist Stephen Mitchell has described therapy as a “shared effort to understand and make use of the pains and pleasures of life’s experiences.” Therapy, in his language, is not a practice that tries to fix any one thing, but one that aspires to help its participants build the most out of the challenges that face them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/magazine/does-therapy-work.html

…&…opinions differ…hence that scene in archer where three of the guys “talk it out” when they’re supposed to be supporting a mission…leading to a bit of dialogue it’s too early for me to have enough brain online to find online as a clip…but…goes approximately “you did it without therapy […] with something better…informal guy talk”…which, according to their self-diagnosis…”is like therapy, but with fewer credentials, and a completely random success rate”…though…some days…I’m not altogether sure that less random or more credentials are necessarily indications of an improved rate of success…or even degree…but…as with so much…that might depend on who you ask

This shift is striking.

In 2012, for example, white evangelicals — a hard-core Republican constituency — made up the same proportion of the electorate as the religiously unaffiliated: agnostics, atheists and the nonreligious. Both groups stood at roughly 19 percent of the population.

By 2022, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (better known as P.R.R.I.), the percentage of white evangelicals had fallen to 13.6 percent, while those with little or no interest in religion and more progressive inclinations had surged to 26.8 percent of the population.
[…]
“I think it’s a real shift,” [Brian] Schaffner [a political scientist at Tufts who oversees the study] wrote in an email, quoting an analysis from December 2022 by John Burn-Murdoch of The Financial Times, “Millennials Are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics”:

If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative and in both Britain and the U.S. are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.

[…]

Because the population is very big and turnout rates tend to be much higher for older adults, these trends can be slow to lead to significant gains. For example, in 2018, I applied a life expectancy model to our C.E.S. data and using that model I calculated that it would take more than 20 years for Democrats to gain just 3 percentage points on their vote share from differential mortality.

[…]

Those gains could easily be offset by Republicans doing a bit better among other groups. For example, part of what has helped them in recent elections is that even while the share of the population who are non-college white people is in decline, it is still a large group that (1) has come to vote more Republican in the past decade and (2) has seen its turnout rate increase during the same period.

…begs a question or two

So why haven’t Democrats returned to the kind of majority status the party enjoyed from the 1930s to the mid-1960s? Why does the conservative coalition that emerged in the late 1960s remain a competitive force in 2023?

One answer came from Geoffrey Layman, a political scientist at Notre Dame, who noted in an email:

As whites’ and white Christians’ numbers have declined, their sense of threat and anxiety over losing their dominant position in American society and culture has increased, making conservatism and the Republican Party (particularly Republican candidates like Trump who promise to restore that dominant position) more attractive to them.

Layman cited 2000 and 2020 data from American National Election Studies to prove his point:

White working-class people, white evangelicals, white Catholics and white Christians in general all voted significantly more Republican in 2020 than in 2000. White people with no college education: 56 percent for Bush in 2000, 68 percent for Trump in 2020. White evangelicals who regularly attend church: 75 percent for Bush in 2000, 89 percent for Trump in 2020. White Catholics who regularly attend church: 56 percent for Bush in 2000, 67 percent for Trump in 2020.

[…]
The big picture, Layman concluded, “is that religious, demographic and socioeconomic trends that seem to bode very well for the Democrats and very poorly for the Republicans have not yet had the expected effects because there has been a countermobilization toward the G.O.P. among the declining groups.”
[…]

Those countervailing trends have left the two parties in about the same competitive balance as in 2000. However, as the pro-Democratic sociodemographic trends continue, it will become increasingly difficult for the G.O.P. to stay nationally competitive with a base of just white working-class people, devout white Christians and older white people. The Republicans are starting to max out their support among these groups.

The white backlash to the growing strength of liberal constituencies not only prompted conservative voters to back Republicans by higher margins; they also turned out to vote at exceptionally high rates to make up for their falling share of the electorate.

Robert Jones, founder and president of P.R.R.I., pointed out by email that both white Protestant and white Catholic Christians punch well above their weight on Election Day: “Key white Christian subgroups — which strongly supported Trump and Republicans — were significantly overrepresented in the electorate compared to their proportion of the population.”

He cited poll data that showed

White evangelicals: proportion of population in 2020, 14 percent, proportion of voters, 22 percent. White Catholics: proportion of population in 2020, 12 percent, proportion of voters, 16 percent.

In contrast, Jones wrote, nonreligious voters are somewhat underrepresented on Election Day: “Religiously unaffiliated: proportion of population in 2020, 23 percent, proportion of voters, 21 percent.”

White Christians are, in effect, engaged in a herculean struggle to maintain political power.

“As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54 percent) white Christian country,” Jones wrote. “By 2014, that proportion had dropped to 47 percent. Today, the 2022 Census of American Religion shows that figure has dropped further to 42 percent.”

The Southern Baptist Convention, Jones continued, “the largest white evangelical denomination, has now lost more than 3 million members since its peak in the early 2000s.”

…not that you’d know it from all the thoughts & prayers doing the rounds…but…you’ll never guess what queers the pitch

In addition, [Ryan] Burge [a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who has conducted extensive research on partisan trends among various religious denominations] argued, it’s important to distinguish between consciously secular atheists and agnostics and more passive men and women who have simply lost interest in religion.
[…]

Most of the nones — around 60 percent — are nothing in particular. They are incredibly disengaged from the political process. They don’t go to school board meetings. They don’t put up political yard signs. Which means that their voter turnout is very low. They also aren’t die-hard Democrats. In 2020, they were no more than 64 percent for Biden.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/opinion/voting-trends-democrats.html

…how is it at every turn it seems like people who don’t much care keep handing the reins to people who…shouldn’t be in charge of shit?

I first saw it while working the rope line at a monster-truck rally during the 2016 campaign by my husband, Tim, for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat. As Tim and I and our boys made our way down the line, shaking hands and passing out campaign material, a burly man wearing a “God bless America” T-shirt and a cross around his neck said something like, “He’s got my vote if he keeps those [epithet] out of office,” using a racial slur. What followed was an uncomfortable master class in racism and xenophobia as the man decanted the reasons our country is going down the tubes. God bless America.

I now understand the ugliness I heard was part of a current of Christian nationalism fomenting beneath the surface. It had been there all the time. The rope line rant was a mission statement for the disaffected, the overlooked, the frightened. It was also an expression of solidarity with a candidate like Donald Trump who gave a name to a perceived enemy: people who do not look like us or share our beliefs. Immigrants are taking our guns. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. You are not safe in your home. Religious freedom is on the gallows. Vote for me.
[…]
What’s changed is the rise of Christian nationalism — the belief, as recently described by the Georgetown University professor and author Paul D. Miller, that “America is a ‘Christian nation’ and that the government should keep it that way.” Gone are the days when a lawmaker might be circumspect about using his or her faith as a vehicle to garner votes. It’s been a drastic and destructive departure from the boring, substantive lawmaking to which I was accustomed. Christian nationalists have hijacked both my Republican Party and my faith community by blurring the lines between church and government and in the process rebranding our state’s identity.
[…]
Rural states are particularly vulnerable to the promise of Christian nationalism. In Wyoming, we are white (more than 92 percent) and love God (71 percent identified as Christian in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center) and Mr. Trump (seven in 10 voters picked him in 2020).

The result is bad church and bad law. “God, guns and Trump” is an omnipresent bumper sticker here, the new trinity. The evangelical church has proved to be a supplicating audience for the Christian nationalist roadshow. Indeed, it is unclear to me many Sundays whether we are hearing a sermon or a stump speech.

Christians electing candidates who reflect godly values is a good thing. […] Yet Christian nationalism has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with control.

In last year’s elections, candidates running on a Christian nationalist platform used fear plus the promise of power to attract votes. Their ads warned about government overreach, religious persecution, mask mandates, threats from immigrants and election fraud. A candidate for secretary of state, an election denier named Chuck Gray, hosted at least one free screening in a church of the roundly debunked film “2,000 Mules,” about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. (He won the general election unopposed and is now next in line to the governorship.)
[…]
Yet fear (and loathing for Ms. Cheney, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump and dared to call him “unfit for office”) led to a record voter turnout in the August primary. The Trumpist candidate, Harriet Hageman, trounced Ms. Cheney. Almost half of the Wyoming House members were new. At least one-third of them align with the Freedom Caucus, a noisy group unafraid to manipulate Scripture for political gain under a banner of preserving a godly nation.

The impact of this new breed of lawmakers has been swift. Wyomingites got a very real preview this past legislative session of the hazards of one-size-fits-all nationalized policies that ignore the nuances of our state. ‌Last year, maternity wards closed in two sparsely populated communities, further expanding our maternity desert. Yet in debating a bill to provide some relief to new moms by extending Medicaid’s postpartum coverage, a freshman member of the State House, Jeanette Ward, invoked a brutally narrow view of the Bible. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” she said. “The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.”

I recently attended a conference devoted to spiritual maturity. Of the attendees, a large percentage were pastors. Some had flown in, seeking anonymity for fear of job loss or reprisal. Many had dared to raise hard questions, challenging their congregation to think deeply about immigration, puzzle through the church’s treatment of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, to dive into Scripture and to find answers.

For some, just making the suggestion had put their neck on the line. One pastor was recently fired. Another, who was nearing the end of his career, lamented: Where did I go wrong in my teaching? Am I complicit in this movement? Have I created this monster? I have failed my flock.

I can think of no better illustration of the calamitous force of Christian nationalism than a room full of faith leaders, regret lined deep in their brows, expressing shame and disappointment in those they were called to lead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/opinion/wyoming-republicans-christian-nationalism.html

…much like company…which sort of faith you keep can be…enlightening

For those who don’t know, Sean Feucht is affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, which promotes dominionism and the Seven Mountains mandate. Their extremism is being mainstreamed. Screenshot h/t @KiraResistance 1/ pic.twitter.com/lPtcrgj1NF

— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) November 26, 2022

…so…where was I?

The World Meteorological Organization, in an updated report, tallied nearly 12,000 extreme weather, climate and water-related events over the past half-century around the globe that have killed more than 2 million people and caused economic damage of $4.3 trillion.

The stark recap from WMO came as it opened its four-yearly congress among member countries, pressing the message that more needs to be done to improve alert systems for extreme weather events by a target date of 2027.

www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/extreme-weather-killed-2-million-people-half-century-un-says

…god damn it?

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that American schools have turned into “killing fields” in the year since a mass shooter gunned down nineteen students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
[…]
“Too many everyday places have become killing fields in communities across America,” Biden said in somber remarks marking the anniversary of the shooting. “And in each place, we hear the same message: ‘Do something. ‘For God’s sake, just do something.”

www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-says-many-schools-become-killing-fields-uvalde-shooting

…just who’s god are we talking?

No?

I am absolutely fascinated by your version of when America was great. Well, actually, I'm intrigued by the part of America that's NOT in that picture of white suburban 1964 America on the verge of Vietnam, birth control pills, the Civil Rights Movement, et al. pic.twitter.com/p7w8DRlb3Q

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) May 20, 2023

The responses, a Thread: pic.twitter.com/ivWpoYLElQ

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) May 20, 2023

…some people…will take any old shit on faith, apparently

Does this guy realize that anyone ever near Palantir and/or Thiel have Pegasus on their phones?

— Don HB (@Don_HB) May 24, 2023

…&…well…misery loves company

"We need paid verification to stop bots and foster discourse."

It's going great. Not since the days of Socrates and Plato, etc. pic.twitter.com/3A5bptlNtU

— A.R. Moxon (@JuliusGoat) May 20, 2023

Neil Gorsuch Has Given Himself Away [NYT]

…& judging by the incidence of short-term memory loss…way more folks on the right are smoking inadvisable quantities of weed…might even be passing that dutchie, too

Am I the only one who remembers that Trump pardoned his way out of the LAST criminal investigation?

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 24, 2023

GOP has spent 3 years whining about a potential tax charge against Hunter Biden and complaining about the cost of the Mueller investigation.

Welp, Trump's pardon of a guy whose convicted tax cheating was several orders of magnitude worse meant taxpayers had to pay for Mueller

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) May 24, 2023

…I mean…I get it…a lot’s been going on…it’s hard to keep track…much less keep up…not least when you consider we might only be seeing the tip of that iceberg

2/ Some of you will recall that the first House January 6 Committee hearings were actually in 2021, not 2022. But they were largely ignored. Why? Because they amounted to little more than confusing public squabbling between Pentagon officials and D.C. law enforcement officials.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

4/ Moreover, the hearings simultaneously focused on events at the Capitol and events at the Pentagon—which was confusing, as in many ways these were two separate narratives: separate casts of characters and political intrigues at the Pentagon only dimly understood at the Capitol.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

6/ The April 2021 Pentagon self-assessment hadn’t yet been revealed. The November Pentagon Report hadn’t yet been published. Witnesses key to the coup plot at the Pentagon hadn’t yet been interviewed—or taken the Fifth, or dodged interviews or challenged their subpoenas in court.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

9/ One reason we needed more data on the coup plot at the Pentagon than we had when the House January 6 Committee held its very brief hearings touching on the Pentagon is that with more reports and more witness testimony and more major-media reporting we could see who was lying.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

11/ The narrative that unfolds in Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection is *vast*. There are chapters on Kash Patel, Ginni Thomas, Michael Flynn, Christina Bobb, Alex Jones, Mark Meadows, Trump, and a host of people less well-known but *just* as key to the story.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

13/ In fact, Trump had engineered the entire day—January 6—as an event that would transform what it was possible to do with and through the Pentagon, and he prepared for that eventuality by arranging all the pieces at the Pentagon he needed immediately after he lost the election.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

15/ As PROOF OF COUP painstakingly details across 25 chapters, 250 pages, and hundreds and hundreds of major-media citations, the Pentagon plot began *within hours* of the end of Election Day and it extended until the final 120 hours of Trump’s presidency. https://t.co/dQigVf2wjO

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

20/ So let’s do it: let’s talk about the January 6 coup plot at the Pentagon, a plot that was almost successful. And let’s talk about it at a level of granularity worthy of major media—understanding here that I can’t unpack a dense, 250-page political thriller in a single thread.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

30/ You may recall that one (of several) bases for the American Civil War was a long-simmering battle over states’ rights (particularly on the matter of slavery). If you understand that basic fact, you understand what a state-federal showdown over voting machines would look like.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

32/ Specifically, Trump expected that he would have to declare martial law in the United States—likely through the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807—for him to get his hands on the voting machines he so desperately wanted.

*That’s* how hard they were going to be to get.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

36/ The members of “Team Kraken”—all of whom are listed in PROOF OF COUP but the list is so long I can’t name them all here (and many of them are names you’ve never heard before in major media)—also understood this. Especially former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

39/ The Proud Boys understood it. The Oath Keepers understood it. The Three Percenters understood it. The 1st Amendment Praetorians understood it. The Eighty Percent Coalition understood it. The Boogaloo Bois understood it. Stop the Steal understood it. And so did Trump advisers.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

41/ How do we know this? Because the invocation of the Insurrection Act was *everywhere* in the Stop the Steal movement in November/December 2020. It was, in fact, I dare say, *commonly* understood that Trump could not remain in power without declaring martial law pre-January 20.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

…look…you can go check the whole 250 page deal out for $5 over substack way…or read the whole thread…which I’ve barely gotten in to…of which more, anon…or you can assume you already know it all…which you might…if you’ve been paying close enough attention to the less loudly declared aspects of various investigations…it’s not like there weren’t plenty of flags on the play

45/ This first scheme was *so illegal*—{big breath here}—it led *William Barr* to resign.

Barr may well have been the most corrupt Attorney General in U.S. history—and Trump’s first (most legal, if you can believe it! and still wildly illegal!) voting-machine plot made him quit.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

48/ If I delve into the coup plot inside *DOJ* here—it is covered in PROOF OF COUP, but is not the focus of the book—this thread will be 500 tweets long, so suffice to say that the *entire* failed DOJ coup plot had as its aim the eventual seizure of voting machines by DOJ agents.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

50/ *Before* the “fake elector” plot media (rightly) has reported on regularly—and which federal judge David Carter says more likely than not was a criminal conspiracy involving (at least) Trump and Team Kraken member John Eastman—Trump had a *different* ask for GOP legislators.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

53/ Like, do I even need to explain the *nationwide insanity* that would’ve resulted in?

If the guy who gave you a speeding ticket at a speed trap yesterday could interfere in federal elections because he loves Trump and believes that John F. Kennedy Jr. has risen from the dead?

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

57/ Keep in mind that this is a desperate man—and a career criminal—who believes in nothing, doesn’t care about America, and apprehended (correctly) that if he lost the DOJ-OLC protections of being the sitting President of the United States he could be indicted on *many* grounds.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

59/ Trump advisers associated with Team Kraken floated to him a wild—bad faith—reading of a federal regulation which, they said, would allow DHS to seize state voting machines if there was clear-cut evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election (note: this is all false).

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

61/ But that’s *not* the best part.

It turns out that the anonymous source Team Kraken used for all this supposed intelligence was a Dallas-area IT consultant and former Army mechanic who’d washed out of basic intel courses and worked—through a subsidiary—*for* (wait for it)…

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

63/ So early on (still November 2020) Trump went to political appointee Ken Cuccinelli, the sort-of-but-not-really acting DHS head—long story—and, convinced Cuccinelli would say yes because he’s one of the most rabid GOP partisans in America, asked him to seize voting machines.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

67/ But that wasn’t all. He sent his 2016 presidential campaign manager (Lewandowski) and 2016 deputy presidential campaign manager (Bossie) to the Defense Business Board (appointments later nixed by Biden). And he installed a well-known yes-man—Chris Miller—as Defense Secretary.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

69/ The folks devising and/or editing such plans were Trump’s people. Trump lawyer Christina Bobb. Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Trump lawyer Katherine Friess. Trump surrogate Michael Lindell. Trump even pardoned Flynn on December 8 in part as compensation for his work on all this.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 14, 2022

…skipping ahead a little

78/ This is where things get confusing, but suffice to say that this wasn’t the only angle being played at the time—nor was Trump in any sense disengaged from the effort. And I don’t say this only because Bolsonaro visited the White House *twice* during Insurrection Week in 2021.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

82/ Instead, there were, in Trump’s view in late 2020, two options:

1⃣ Proof of foreign election interference (no matter how manufactured) from foreign sources—just as he’d sought in the Trump-Ukraine scandal—rather than secret campaign sources; or
2⃣ a major national emergency.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

96/ So Trump siccing Giuliani on Cuccinelli and DHS via an EO written by—did I mention?—a former DHS employee (Bobb) was Trump confirming that his desire to seize voting machines continued unabated post-December 18 and he wanted two avenues to remain “live”: the Pentagon and DHS.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

99/ Giuliani began lobbying DHS. Lindell helped set up a trip by Bolsonaro to the U.S. that’d be falsely billed as a “vacation.” Trump ordered Mark Meadows to onboard Powell. Patrick Byrne continued working at Team Kraken HQ, which—did I mention?—was in Trump International Hotel.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

101/ Team Kraken fake-election-data impresarios Navarro and Ziegler—both in Trump’s employ at the White House—began working furiously on their second report falsely alleging election fraud, a work of grotesque fiction that was timed to drop 2 days before the big day (January 6).

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

103/ Stone convinced Trump to return to D.C., where he tapped Alex Jones (who’d spent the last 45 days with armed extremists in the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who wanted January 6 to go off in such a way it’d give Trump a pretext for martial law) to lead his big January 6 march.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

105/ For instance, consider the mountain of evidence that Trump wanted his Vice President to be assassinated on January 6. Would that have postponed the joint session? Eh—maybe? For a day? But would it have let Trump declare a national emergency? Hell yes. https://t.co/lJJpftkiOf

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

…as must by now be obvious…one of the problems with trying to outline something that’s too big a picture to fit comfortably on the page…or in the mind…let alone on fucking twitter…is that when it’s also utterly fucking batshit crazy…you…tend to sound like a crazy person well before you get to the end

109/ In the video, Giuliani uses false and manufactured evidence—and when you see how the book debunks it you will be greatly amused, I assure you—to suggest that the January 6 attack was a premeditated attack on the *2020 presidential election*. (Yes, I know… it’s… bizarre).

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

111/ But to be clear, Team Kraken didn’t give up on the DHS angle just because Giuliani was focused on the Pentagon angle. Indeed, it was on January 7 that Team Kraken produced a new plan for Trump—delivered to him on January 15—that focused on moving Kash Patel over to the CIA.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

114/ (…or else are fighting in court to keep their communications hidden? Well, they did and are. The coverup is real. Waldron is fighting subpoenas; so is Friess; the list of those pleading the Fifth Amendment or getting their stuff deleted or fighting in court is very long.)

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

116/ I mean can you imagine, against *this* backdrop, that Flynn’s brother—who works at the Pentagon but shouldn’t have been in the chain of command on January 6—was put in the chain of command; lied about it; lied about those lies; and all the while the *Pentagon* lied about it?

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

119/ So let’s simplify things (he says in Tweet #119): there was a premeditated plot inside the Pentagon to only deploy the D.C. National Guard if doing so would contribute to the narrative that Trump needed to declare a national emergency. And this plot was *on Trump’s orders*.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

121/ The Pentagon was on *some* level of alert (a long story) for 13 hours on January 6, but the D.C. National Guard was finally deployed to the Capitol—after *hours* of delay…

…13 *minutes* after Trump announced the coup attempt was over (“go home”). https://t.co/S5VQyXyaGG

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

123/ While I can’t go through all the evidence of premeditation in one Twitter thread—this is, after all, why I wrote a 250-page book (and a dense one with hundreds of critical linked citations, at that) rather than just a thread—suffice to say it includes private Trump meetings.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

124/ It includes internal discussions at the Pentagon. It includes reports, documents, briefings, presentations, and—yes—it encompasses, too, the current document-destruction-and/or-removal scandals at the White House, Mar-a-Lago, the Pentagon, DHS, *and* the U.S. Secret Service.

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) August 15, 2022

…so…on the one hand…I feel like I know how seth feels…even if I’m not planning on publishing “the long version” of any of these interminable posts I keep throwing up…but…on the other hand

Trump to appear by video to hear order barring him from disclosing evidence [Guardian]

…won’t somebody please think of the children

US surgeon general issues advisory on ‘profound’ risks of child social media use [Guardian]

…or…failing that…just quit listening to snakes peddling snake oil

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/24/conspiracy-theories-moggologues-and-zombie-stats-all-in-a-weeks-work-for-gb-news

…pay attention when those flags pop up

NAACP says Florida travel warning to minorities is to get people to ‘buckle in’ [Guardian]

…not fall for the same shit over & over

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/24/chevron-carbon-offset-climate-crisis

…not least when it’s completely predictable

Google is failing to uphold post-Roe privacy pledge, Democrats say [WaPo]

…because this shit ain’t headed anyplace I’d think of as good right now

US lawmakers blame each other for debt ceiling standoff: ‘They are not negotiating’ [Guardian]

…& we’ve seen how that impacts fucking idiots who think they have all the answers & have no interest in what anyone or anything might have to say about why they’re so entirely full of shit it’s a god-damn miracle they haven’t exploded like a beached orange whale left in the sun too long

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/24/trump-language-policy-2024-race

…& much like that whale…cleanup is gonna be a cast iron bitch…so…I guess it’s once more time to put [this] up & shut up…& go look for something better to listen to…to fill the gap between me going on again…& anything better minds might have to say today?

This is very interesting, mainly because of how easy it is to tell which one is by a real writer https://t.co/kKF00t0WGk

— iucounu (@iucounu) May 23, 2023

so I totally endorse this take https://t.co/KTZ0x1YIL8

— iucounu (@iucounu) May 23, 2023

…wish it didn’t sound like an echo of a reasonably-founded take on media coverage of complicated shit with all manner of devils in the details…but…at least the band plays on?