Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

 November 17, 2021 (Wednesday)

Today the House of Representatives voted to censure (not censor) Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and to strip him of his committee assignments. The vote was 223 to 207, with 1 representative, David Joyce (R-OH), voting “present.” Three other representatives—Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), Scott Perry (R-PA), and Morgan Griffith (R-VA)—did not vote. Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) joined Democrats to vote in favor of the resolution censuring Gosar.

At stake was what to do about the fact that Gosar posted on his official Twitter account an anime video that showed a character with his face photoshopped onto it killing a character wearing the face of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The “Gosar” character also slashed with swords at a character wearing the face of President Joe Biden.

Democrats have been outraged at the video, while Republicans have largely kept mum about it, focusing instead on attacking the Republicans who voted with the Democrats to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Today, Democrats tried to recall their Republican colleagues to a common agreement on the principle that Congress should not be an arena of violence. “Threatening and showing the killing of a member of this House,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said to the Republicans. “Can't that appall you? Even that act? Do you have no shame?”

Indeed, censuring Gosar should have been an easy vote for Republicans. He is a problematic colleague: he has embraced white nationalist and neo-Nazi culture, and six of his nine siblings have cut ads urging voters not to support him. (He retorted that they are “leftists” of whom “Stalin would be proud.”) One of his brothers said on television today: "My brother is unhinged. He needs to be more than censured. He needs to be expelled. And if it is determined that criminal charges need to be filed, then they need to be filed."

But only Kinzinger and Cheney were willing to call out Gosar’s behavior, while four others avoided the vote. “This is not an issue about party,” Cheney told reporters. Gosar’s post was “completely unacceptable.” “I think that it’s really important for us to be very clear that violence has no place in our political discourse,” she said.

The rest of the House Republicans backed Gosar, attacking Democrats—sometimes screaming at them—as totalitarians, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) calling the resolution “an abuse of power.” (In reality, censure is a tool the House has used throughout our history.) Gosar never apologized for the video showing him killing the Democratic representative, although many of his colleagues talked as if he did.

As many people have pointed out, sharing an image of yourself killing a colleague would get you fired from virtually any job.

This is an important moment. It appears that all but two Republican lawmakers are willing to embrace violence against Democrats if it will lead to political power.

There is a subtle difference between their willingness to defend the violence of the January 6 insurrectionists, and today’s stance. When Republicans have defended the insurrectionists, they did so with the argument—false though it was—that the rioters simply wanted to defend the country from a stolen election. Today there was no pretense of an excuse for Gosar’s violent fantasy; it was defended as normal.

The march toward Republicans’ open acceptance of violence has been underway since January 6, as leaders embraced the Big Lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election, and then as leaders have stood against mask and vaccine mandates as tyranny. Those lies have led to a logical outcome: their supporters believe that in order to defend the nation, they should fight back against those they have been told are destroying the country.

When Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization devoted to promoting right-wing values on campuses, spoke in Idaho last month, the audience applauded when a man asked when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” the man said. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk denounced the question not on principle, but because he said it would play into Democratic hands. He agreed that, as he said, “We are living under fascism.”

The vigilantism of the current Republican Party is evidence that its leaders know they cannot win free and fair elections—if they could, there would be no need for terrorizing opponents—so they are working to rig the system. In Idaho, Kirk went on to encourage his audience to retake control of the country by using their power in the states.

They can do so through measures like Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called “heartbeat bill” prohibiting women from exercising their constitutional right to abortion, and calling on individuals within the community to enforce that law.

And they can also do so by taking control of state election procedures. Since the Democrats won control of the House and Senate and the White House in November 2020, Republicans have used their power in Republican-dominated states to pass laws that will suppress Democratic votes and transfer control of the counting of election results from non-partisan officials to partisans, along with the right to exclude votes they claim are “fraudulent.” Had such measures been in place in 2020, Trump would currently be in the White House.

They are also gerrymandering their states to cut Democrats out of representation. So, for example, according to Ari Berman, who studies voting rights, Georgia has written new congressional maps that would give Republicans 64% of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in a state Biden won with 49.5% of the vote. In the Georgia state senate, Republicans would take 59% of seats.

In Wisconsin the legislature passed a map that would give Republicans 75% of U.S. House seats and 60% of legislative seats in a state Biden won. The Ohio senate has passed a map giving Republicans 80% of seats in state Trump won with 53% of the vote. In North Carolina, which is 40% non-white and evenly split politically, the Republican legislature passed redistricting maps giving Republicans 71–78% of U.S. House seats.  

Republicans have made it clear that they are comfortable with violence, and they are rigging elections to gain power. Unless Congress chooses to protect our votes with the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, the Republican performance in the House today will become our norm.

Part of the ceremony of censure is that the censured representative stands in the House well as the censure is read. Gosar was joined in the well today by a group of Republicans, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) read the censure.

Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), were sitting in the front row.

Immediately following his censure, Gosar retweeted the video.

  November 19, 2021 (Friday)

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where more than 23,000 men had been killed or wounded the previous July defending the United States of America from those who would destroy it.

He rooted the nation in the Declaration of Independence, in which the nation’s founders announced that they “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But in 1863, Lincoln was afraid the idea “that all men are created equal” was no longer “self-evident.”

In 1863, it was a “proposition.”

He told the crowd, “met on a great battle-field,” that they were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

This morning, at 9:46, the House of Representatives passed the “Build Back Better” bill by a vote of 220–213. The bill provides $555 billion to fight climate change by providing jobs in clean industries. It devotes $400 billion to universal pre-kindergarten education for 3- and 4-year-olds, easing the costs of child care and reducing gaps between children when they enter kindergarten. It extends for a year the child tax credit the Democrats put in place in March in the American Rescue Plan, providing parents with $300 per month for every child under age 6 and $250 for every child from 6 to 17. It appropriates $150 billion for affordable housing to build more than 1 million new homes.

The United States is one of the few nations that does not provide paid family leave for new parents, and the Build Back Better bill appropriates $200 billion for 4 weeks of paid family or medical leave. It also sets aside $150 billion to expand affordable home care in hopes of reducing the backlog of more than 800,000 people on waiting lists for state Medicaid. If passed into law, the bill will also reduce health care premiums and the cost of medication.

The Build Back Better bill, also known as the Reconciliation bill because if it gets through the Senate it will have to do so through the reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered, is a huge deal. It reorients our national investment away from a wealthy few and toward ordinary families, much as Lincoln insisted in 1859 that the country should not invest in elite enslavers, but rather in ordinary men, who would innovate as they worked to provide for their families.

When the House passed the bill, Democrats recognized the extraordinary skill of House Speaker Pelosi in nailing together a coalition to get this measure to a positive vote, chanting: “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy.”

Every single Republican voted against the measure.

This afternoon, a jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin, found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty of intentional homicide, reckless homicide, and attempted intentional homicide in the killing of Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and in the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz, 27. Rittenhouse shot the three men with an assault rifle on August 25, 2020. Then 17, he traveled from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha to, he later said, protect businesses there that he thought were under threat from those gathered to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by law enforcement officers.

The defense presented evidence that the men Rittenhouse killed made him afraid for his life. Wisconsin permits deadly force if a person reasonably believes they are in imminent danger of great bodily harm.

The case has national implications. Although protesting is a constitutional right protected by the First Amendment, members of the right wing hailed Rittenhouse as a hero who righteously took up arms against protesters they insist are dangerous to America. Immediately, the white nationalist, neo-Nazi website VDARE reversed victim and offender, tweeting: “Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we’ve been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020, where a Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Bolshevik revolution has our country on the brink of total chaos.”

With Rittenhouse’s acquittal, we learned that Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson had a film crew creating a documentary about Rittenhouse during the trial. Carlson will interview Rittenhouse on Monday night.

Even more ominous than the public praise of Rittenhouse, Republican lawmakers also celebrated his acquittal, inviting a young man without any qualifications other than involvement in a deadly shooting of protesters to accept a position in our government. Former president Trump sent out a fund-raising email, cheering the acquittal and claiming the trial was “nothing more than a WITCH HUNT from the Radical Left,” who “want to PUNISH law-abiding citizens, including a CHILD, like Kyle Rittenhouse, for doing nothing more than following the LAW.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) cheered that Rittenhouse is one of the “good guys” who “help, protect, and defend.” Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) all publicly offered Rittenhouse a congressional internship. Cawthorn told followers that Rittenhouse was not guilty and told them to “be armed, be dangerous, and be moral.”

Across the country, Republican lawmakers are backing violence and attacking voting.

Wisconsin, where the Rittenhouse trial just took place, is leading the way in trying to rig elections so Democrats cannot win. Senator Ron Johnson is spearheading an attempt to get rid of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, created by Republicans, and to charge the members of the commission with felonies, while giving control of federal elections to Republican lawmakers. Johnson says that the Republicans need to control state elections because Democrats cheat. Johnson has admitted that Biden won Wisconsin fairly in the 2020 election but is arguing for the Big Lie to justify rigging the system in Republicans’ favor.

At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln reminded his audience of those “who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” And he urged them “to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

[Image from Library of Congress. Lincoln at Gettysburg, hatless and standing facing the camera in front of the tall man in the top hat.]

  November 20, 2021 (Saturday)

As ever, the tide comes up and the tide goes down, and the sun will rise again tomorrow.

I'll see you then, better rested and ready to carry on.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

I fucking give up

brianlux said:

mickeyrat said:

I fucking give up

Why, M?  Because of a little thing like the end of Democracy?
Yeah, I get it.  What we are living through is hard to fathom, even harder to deal with.  Throwing one's hands up is mighty tempting.  It might even be a good thing to do now and then.  Just say, "Fuck it", and step back a while and not let it overwhelm and consume you.
You can always re-engage when ready.

phone issues.....

  November 23, 2021 (Tuesday)

On this date in 1876, William “Boss” Tweed, who had stolen between $25 and $200 million in his corrupt years at the head of New York City’s government and then fled to Spain to escape prison, was delivered up to authorities and sent back to jail.

One hundred and forty-five years later, the law is in the news again.

In Virginia today, a jury decided that the leaders of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 violated state law by conspiring before the event “to intimidate, harass or harm.” The jury ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, five women and four men, including four people injured when James Fields rammed his car into protesters and killed 32-year-old protester Heather Heyer.

The plaintiffs sued five white nationalist organizations and 12 individual defendants, including prominent white supremacists Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler, and Christopher Cantwell, (known as the “Crying Nazi),” for engaging in a conspiracy to harm others. Over three weeks, the plaintiffs produced evidence that the defendants had talked of hitting protesters with cars at a party in Spencer’s apartment—known as the “Fash Loft” (short for fascist)—before the riot.

In their brief defense—their lawyers rested after a day and a half—the defendants tried to blame the deadly outcome of the riot on Fields alone and claimed their pre-event planning was just chatter amongst people who did not even know each other. Their talk of killing was just, as Spencer testified, “very juvenile and silly.” They said that they were simply exercising their First Amendment rights, that they acted in self defense, that the police should have kept the protesters apart, and that none of them knew Fields.

But the judge explained to the jury that a conspiracy did not require that the defendants committed violence themselves or even knew each other. It required only that they had the same goal and could foresee that violence would occur. Since it was a civil and not a criminal trial, they needed only to find “a preponderance of the evidence,” rather than guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” as in criminal trials.

The jury awarded the plaintiffs $26 million in damages. As Dahlia Lithwick noted in an article in Slate.com, this is no small thing, even though the defendants are unlikely to be able to pay. Fields is in prison for life for killing Heyer; Cantwell is serving a prison term for threatening to rape a man’s wife in front of their children unless the man gave Cantwell information he wanted about someone else. Spencer is also broke; his wife accused him of violent abuse before she left him. As Lithwick put it: “This isn’t about squeezing blood from a stone. It’s about widespread agreement that the stone sucks.”

Conspiracy is on other minds today as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas for three groups and associated individuals who were involved in the violence of that day. Proud Boy International, LLC, and its chair Henry “Enrique” Tarrio; the Oath Keepers and their president Elmer Stewart Rhodes; and 1st Amendment Praetorian, along with the organization chair Robert Patrick Lewis, all got subpoenas.

Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said: “The Select Committee is seeking information from individuals and organizations reportedly involved with planning the attack, with the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, or with efforts to overturn the results of the election. We believe the individuals and organizations we subpoenaed today have relevant information about how violence erupted at the Capitol and the preparation leading up to this violent attack.”

Roger Stone, whom the committee subpoenaed yesterday, is already fundraising off the demand, and Alex Jones, also subpoenaed, today said that he will plead the Fifth—the constitutional amendment that protects an American citizen from being “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”—because he “doesn’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison.”

Today Texas Senator Ted Cruz tried to turn the horrific killings in Waukesha, Wisconsin, into political points. On Sunday, a man fleeing another crime scene plowed his SUV into a Christmas parade, injuring at least 48 people and killing six, so far. With reference to the fact that suspect Darrell Brooks was out of custody on bail, Cruz tweeted: “Across the country, radical Leftists are releasing violent criminals from jail—with little or no bail—only to see them commit yet more violent crimes…. This horrific mass murder is the latest example. And it was fully preventable.”

Cruz’s tweet recalls the Willie Horton ad of 1988, when the George H. W. Bush campaign pinned on then–Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis responsibility for the weekend furlough of a murderer who raped a woman and assaulted a man while on furlough, despite the fact that the parole law had been passed by Dukakis’s Republican predecessor.

Today, as civil rights lawyer Scott Hechinger said: “There is no ‘bail reform’ in Wisconsin. There has been no significant change to bail laws in Wisconsin in a decade. Bail was set in this case. Yet still, prosecutors, police, & right wing politicians are convincing everyone ‘bail reform’ is to blame. And media amplifies the lie.”

In another piece of legal news, yesterday Attorney General Merrick Garland swore into office a new U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the office that oversees Manhattan and all the many financial transactions therein. The new U.S. attorney is Damian Williams. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Williams was educated at Harvard for college, the University of Cambridge for a master’s degree, and Yale Law School for law school. He is the first Black American to run the SDNY.

Williams clerked for Garland when the attorney general was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Garland presided at Williams’s investiture yesterday. He used the opportunity to remind the attorneys and staff of the SDNY that the Department of Justice keeps our country safe from enemies both foreign and domestic and protects civil rights as it was chartered to do in 1879.

Above all, the Justice Department upholds the rule of law. It must treat everyone alike, Garland said. There must not be “one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans; one rule for friends and another for foes; one rule for the powerful, another for the powerless; one rule for the rich, another for the poor; or different rules, depending upon one's race or ethnicity.”

In the two years that Tweed ran the city of New York unchallenged, he bought off opponents, extorted rivals, and pocketed millions from public contracts. He operated with impunity until members of his own party joined with reformers to replace his cronies and cut off Tweed’s access to funds. Voters turned against his gang, many of whom fled the country.

In November 1873, Tweed was found guilty of larceny and forgery, fined the equivalent of almost $300,000 in today’s money, and sentenced to a year in prison. Upon his release, the state sued him in civil court to recover $6 million he had embezzled. Unable to raise bail, Tweed escaped the country. Returned to the U.S on a warship in 1876, he died of pneumonia two years later in prison.

  November 24, 2021 (Wednesday)
 
The Biden administration has announced it will convene the first of two virtual “Summits for Democracy” on December 9 and 10, 2021. The gatherings will bring together leaders from 110 countries who work in government, civil society, and the private sector, to come up with an agenda to renew democratic government and work together to keep the ideals of democracy strong.  

Authoritarianism is growing around the world, including in America, and the administration is hoping to create practical ideas and strong alliances to defend against authoritarianism, fight corruption, and promote human rights, all values central to democracy.
 
That this announcement comes at Thanksgiving is fitting, since Thanksgiving is rooted in a defense of democracy during the Civil War.

The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.

In 1841, a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
 
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
 
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
 
New York Governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
 
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15, he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
 
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
 
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
 
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation. They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming. And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

In 1863, November’s last Thursday fell on the 26th. On November 19, Lincoln delivered an address at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He reached back to the Declaration of Independence for the principles on which he called for Americans to rebuild the severed nation:

​​”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln urged the crowd to take up the torch those who fought at Gettysburg had laid down. He called for them to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
 
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
 
And they won.

My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2021.

  November 26, 2021 (Friday)

On Wednesday, November 24, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, a jury found Gregory McMichael (65), his son Travis McMichael (35), and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan (52) guilty on 23 counts in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, near Brunswick, in Glynn County, Georgia.

Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, 25, was a former high school football player who ran every day. On February 23, he was running through a primarily white neighborhood about two miles from his mother’s house when the McMichaels saw him go by. Gregory McMichael had retired from the Glynn County police force and had been an investigator for the Brunswick District Attorney’s office. He picked up a .357 Magnum revolver, Travis grabbed a shotgun, and they hopped into a pickup truck and followed Arbery. Bryan followed the McMichaels and recorded what happened next on his cellphone.

The video shows Arbery jogging toward a white truck with Gregory McMichael standing in the truck bed on a quiet, flat, somewhat rural looking street. Arbery moves to go to the right of the truck, and when he reaches the front, just out of sight, a shot fires. Arbery comes back into view on the left side of the truck and moves toward the left side of the road, where he begins to struggle with Travis McMichael, who is holding a shotgun. Two more shots and Arbery staggers to the middle of the road in front of the truck before falling forward.

Police responded to the scene after a call saying there were “shots fired and a male on the ground ‘bleeding out.’” Mr. Arbery died at 1:08.

Law enforcement officers arrived minutes later and found the McMichaels standing over Arbery’s body. Bryan was in his vehicle. The officers took the McMichaels in for questioning and called the office of the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, to ask for legal advice. Assistants there told the officers that the McMichaels should not be arrested.

The police report of the incident, taken largely from an account by Gregory McMichael, said that Arbery had “violently attack[ed]” Travis McMichael and had been shot when the two men fought over a shotgun.

The assistants in Johnson’s office had also told the police officers that the office had a conflict of interest in the case and would need to bring in another prosecutor. Before he retired in 2019, Gregory McMichael had worked as an investigator in her office for more than 30 years. Phone records show he called Johnson shortly after the shooting.

When she heard of what had happened, Johnson immediately contacted George E. Barnhill, the district attorney for Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit. Barnhill watched Bryan’s video and, the next morning, told Glynn County police that Georgia’s citizens arrest law enabled the men to chase Arbery and that they had shot him in self-defense. Glynn County commissioners blame Barnhill’s early advice to the police for delaying the case.  

On February 27, Johnson officially recused herself from the case, and the next day, Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr appointed Barnhill to prosecute the case. Carr did not know Barnhill had already reviewed evidence.

Arbery’s family protested Barnhill’s appointment, since Barnhill’s son works as an assistant district attorney in Johnson’s office.

By April 2, Barnhill acknowledged he had a conflict of interest in the case, and yet on April 3 he issued a letter to the Captain of the Glynn County Police Department saying that the McMichaels were within their rights to chase Arbery under Georgia’s law permitting citizen’s arrests, that they were legally allowed to carry guns, and that Travis McDaniel had fired the shotgun out of self defense. “We do not see grounds for an arrest of any of the three parties,” he wrote.

Barnhill officially recused himself on April 7. Carr said he should never have agreed to prosecute the case in the first place, and he began an investigation into Johnson, who had recommended Barnhill without disclosing that she had already had him talk to police about the case.

​​On April 13, Carr appointed Tom Durden, the district attorney for Liberty County, one county over from the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, to prosecute the case. “We don’t know anything about the case,” Durden told reporters. “We don’t have any preconceived idea about it.”

And there, things might have rested, much as they have so often rested in our nation’s long history when white men have killed Black men.

But in the weeks since the shooting, the community had become increasingly insistent on hearing answers. A local journalist for the daily Brunswick News named Larry Hobbs noted right away that police were not forthcoming about what had happened. He stayed on the story.

Arbery’s family and friends kept up pressure on the Glynn police department, which was already under investigation for corruption on a different matter, and on the prosecutors.

Their outrage went national on April 26, when the New York Times reported on the murder, noting that there had been no arrests.

Finally, on May 5, the case broke open. Apparently thinking that since Barnhill had found Bryan’s video exonerating, everyone else would, too, Gregory McMichael worked with lawyer Alan Tucker to take the video to a local radio station, which uploaded it for public viewing.

The station took it down two hours later, but not before a public outcry. Carr promptly asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to take over the case. Two days later, on May 7, 74 days after Arbery was killed, GBI officers arrested the McMichaels.

On May 11, the case was reassigned to Joyette M. Holmes at the Cobb County District Attorney’s office and transferred to Atlanta, about 270 miles away from Brunswick.

On May 21, 2020, Bryan was arrested.

And on Wednesday, November 24, after a 13-day trial, a jury with only one Black person found Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan guilty of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit a felony. In February, they will face federal charges of committing hate crimes.

Also on Wednesday, Johnson turned herself in to officials after a grand jury indicted her for violating her oath of office and obstructing police, saying she used her position to discourage law enforcement officers from arresting the McMichaels.

Today, Cobb District Attorney Flynn D. Broady Jr. issued a statement claiming that the jury’s verdict “reflects a new direction for our communities, this State, and the nation, to denounce hate, division and intolerance and promote unity.” We must never forget our past, he said, but instead “understand our prior shortcomings and work to the goal enumerated in our founding documents, ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ and may we add Justice. In order to do that it takes strength and courage, to demand the rights entitled to us by our Constitution and laws.”

Broady called out Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, and his father, Marcus Arbery, for their courage in insisting on justice for their son, and claimed “the citizens of this state and this nation stood with Wanda and Marcus and their family.”

That local Georgians refused to let Arbery’s case go, and that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation brought charges immediately as soon as they were brought into the case, and that an overwhelmingly white jury found the three men guilty all lend credence to Broady’s statement.

But there is one sticking point: if Gregory McMichael had not produced that video, it’s entirely possible that the crime and its coverup would never have been prosecuted.

  November 28, 2021 (Sunday)

And, just like that, we are already in the last quiet days of fall.

And since the news was relatively quiet as well, I'll see you tomorrow.