fascism – Democracy Watch

Major media outlets, including the New York Times, are reporting that a coup plot was thwarted in Germany. It comes nearly two years after an attempted coup in the United States.

The New York Times reports:

The plan was to storm the German Capitol, arrest lawmakers and execute the chancellor. A prince descended from German nobility would take over as the new head of state, and a former far-right member of Parliament would be put in charge of a national purge.

To facilitate the coup, the electricity network would be sabotaged. Satellite phones to communicate off grid had already been bought.

That is what German prosecutors and intelligence officials say a nationwide far-right terrorist network was plotting before 3,000 police officers and Special Forces fanned out across the country on Wednesday to raid 150 homes and arrest 25 suspected co-conspirators. They included an active duty soldier, a former officer in the elite special forces, a police officer and at least two army reservists.

Among the items uncovered was a list containing 18 names of politicians considered enemies, possibly to be deported and executed, among them Chancellor Olaf Scholz, people familiar with the raids told The New York Times, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Scholz replaced Angela Merkel as Germany’s chancellor in December 2021. He leads the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which won a plurality in last year’s federal elections. Scholz has been a critic of Vladimir Putin and a supporter of Ukraine throughout their resistance to the Russian invasion.

NPR reports that the coup plotters – like their far-right American counterparts – railed against a so-called “deep state” controlling the German government. Arrests were also made in Austria and Italy. This is the highest-profile far-right plot since two German army officers were arrested in 2017 for plotting to assassinate the justice minister.

The disturbing news out of Germany follows former president Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, culminating in an insurrection at the Capitol with the support of far-right terrorist groups. The leader of the Oath Keepers was recently found guilty of seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6th.

In a sick and twisted sense, it’s fitting that white supremacists celebrate the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict the same week that House Republicans stood with Representative Paul Gosar for fantasizing about murdering AOC.

If you haven’t been following the news recently, you may not have heard that far-right Congressman Paul Gosar tweeted a doctored video of him murdering Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and striking President Joe Biden. While both of those points have rightly gotten considerable media attention, the video also featured undocumented immigrants crossing the border. The not-too-subtle suggestion from the video is that immigrants crossing the border should be treated with violence.

Apparently, those messages are A-OK with Gosar’s Republican colleagues in the House. After all, only two Republicans voted to censure him: Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). Cheney and Kinzinger are the same Republican representatives who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his coup attempt and currently sit on the 1/6 Committee investigating the insurrection.

The kid-glove approach to Gosar contrasts sharply with how House Republicans are treating other members of their conference. They have already punished Liz Cheney (formerly the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives) for daring to tell the truth about 1/6. They are threatening to punish the 13 moderate Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill. (Those same members are also receiving death threats.) Yet all but two House Republicans stood with Representative Gosar when he all-but-encouraged violence against a colleague.

Gosar – who has already been implicated in the insurrection and whose six siblings were featured in an extraordinary ad opposing his re-election – took note of that support. After initially deleting the tweet, he retweeted the video after the censure vote in an act of defiance. The lesson that he apparently learned was that his Republican colleagues had his back and that he should double down.

To be sure, not all of his Republican colleagues agree with Gosar’s extremism; some have mildly condemned it while opposing the censure on weak procedural grounds, arguing that it went too far in stripping him of committee assignments. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) expressed concern with the precedent that the censure would set. Oddly, he had less concern about the precedent set from doing little to nothing when a member of Congress threatens another member.

Aside from Cheney and Kinzinger, everyone else in the House Republican conference is either sympathetic to Gosar or too cowardly to stand up to him. They either outwardly support violence or refuse to condemn it in a meaningful way.

What does that tell us? The fascist takeover of the House Republican conference is all but complete.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, Flickr

Major media outlets, including the New York Times, are reporting that a coup plot was thwarted in Germany. It comes nearly two years after an attempted coup in the United States.

In a sick and twisted sense, it’s fitting that white supremacists celebrate the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict the same week that House Republicans stood with Representative Paul Gosar for fantasizing about murdering AOC.