Note: When I’m calling out people as bad examples, I will remove the names and instead give the size of their accounts so you can see the impact they are having — with the exception of Joe Walsh, because he’s a former candidate for President, and celebrity Rob Reiner because he’s a celebrity and has never put himself forward as a legal expert. 😉.
Do Something Twitter
There’s a thing called Do Something Twitter. These are people on Twitter who loudly demand that those in power DO SOMETHING to save democracy.
I’ll give a few examples. After this was reported about Biden:
. . . this person, who has more than 600K followers, said:
As you can see in the next Tweet, the same person called Merrick Garland a “mafia state enabler” because he “fails to take action on attacks against America”:
Here, irritated that Garland “fails to take action,” she claims says the DOJ is a corrupt institution and Garland is a corrupt institutionalist:
This person, a former Republican and Trump hater, has close to 200K followers on Twitter:
This tweet from Joe Walsh, a former Republican candidate for president received 32,900+ “likes,” and was posted on February 1, 2022:
This Tweet has a grand-whopping 37.6K “likes”:
As a result of so many large accounts tweeting about how Merrick Garland is doing nothing and should be bringing indictments, the mantra: “Indict them now!” has become what Timothy Snyder calls an Internet Meme, and what I’ve called rage-inducing simplifications. Cries of “indict someone now!” are flooding Twitter, and probably other social media platforms as well. Sometimes I engage some of them in conversation. It usually goes like this:
Person: There should be indictments by now!
Me: The DOJ has brought 768 January-6th indictments so far, including an indictment of Steve Bannon and recent indictments for seditious conspiracy. These indictments were brought in an ongoing investigation, in less than a year, during a pandemic.
Person: NONE OF THOSE COUNT because . . .
After the above conversation on Twitter, this person said:
I responded by listing some of the indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in Trump’s inner circle over the past 5 years:
Predictably, someone said:
The problem of course is that an indictment doesn’t mean prison. An indictment is nothing more than a formal accusation of a crime. After an indictment, there’s a trial, and the outcomes of trials are unpredictable.
The response that “yet Bannon is outside prison free to keep undermining the country,” is typical and indicates that many of the “indict them now” people don’t really mean “indict them now” They mean: “Put them all in prison and never let them out.” By “all” they mean anyone who is “undermining the country”:
“Undermining the country” is a vague phrase that can refer to political activity we disagree with, and you can’t put people in prison for something like that. How do we define “undermining the country?” Can you imagine making it a crime to “undermine the country”? who decides?
As our rule-of-law system is set up, to put a person in prison, that person has to commit a crime and there has to be evidence to prove each element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, after an indictment but before the trial, defendants are often released. This makes sense, right? They’re innocent until proven guilty, so until there is a trial, they are innocent, and pre-trial detention (which is often necessary if the person poses a flight risk, for example) is essentially punishing an innocent person.
The statement: “Put in prison anyone ‘undermining the country’ and keep them there,” is scary and authoritarian.
There are those who say that dangerous circumstances (like Trump and others openly embracing the insurrectionists) require “throwing out the book” and doing whatever is necessary. If you think that, see this post.
After I listed all the people who have been indicted so far, this person asked:
Wrong about what? I am not making a future prediction. Thus far, I’ve been talking about what has already happened. It’s a fact that 768 indictments have been filed so far against people who participated in the insurrection, and Merrick Garland recently said this:
Garland also described how these investigations are conducted:
My position is a safe one: I don’t know what is happening inside the DOJ, and neither does anyone else — except for the people who work there, and beyond Garland’s statement, they are not talking about ongoing investigations. Meanwhile, I have no reason to believe that Merrick Garland is lying when he said that the DOJ remains committed to holding all Jan. 6th perpetrators accountable.
Fanning the Flames
The rage against the DOJ, which leads to cries that Merrick Garland is doing nothing, is being fanned by prominent lawyers. Because these lawyers are left-leaning, they have built up trust among left-leaning Twitter, people tend to trust them and think anything they say is true. (Hint: Lawyers are not always right, and they are certainly not always right when they speculate or offer opinions without having facts to back them up.)
This prominent lawyer has more than 1 million followers and frequently appears on TV:
Notice: 15.8K “likes. And, um, perhaps Atlanta is moving faster because the facts of the Atlanta case are much simpler?
Because of this lawyer’s prominence, people take anything he says as true.
Here’s an example from this week. A member of the January 6 select committee revealed that the committee was considering what’s called “use immunity” for Trump Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who refused to answer the select committee’s questions by standing on the Fifth Amendment. (Use immunity means that the government agrees not to use any witness testimony against that witness. It is a way to get someone to testify if they are remaining silent because they are afraid speaking truthfully may get them into trouble.)
After the reporting that the select committee was considering offering use immunity to Jeffrey Clark, another prominent lawyer Tweeted this, sending Twitter into an uproar:
People read that tweet and thought there was evidence that the DOJ is not investigating the insurrection, and went into a spin. I know because lots of people showed me this tweet and asked some form of, “Well, Teri, what do you have to say about this?”
While it is true that the committee would not offer use immunity to Clark without consulting with the DOJ, it’s an absurd leap in logic to conclude that this is a sign that the DOJ is not investigating the coup to overturn the election.
To begin with, it appears that Clark will not be offered immunity. But even if he was, there are lots of other reasons the DOJ might agree to this:
- It’s possible Clark hasn’t committed a crime.
- If Clark committed a crime, it’s possible that the DOJ already has the evidence it needs.
- If Clark committed a crime, it is possible that his involvement was so minor that the testimony he can give against people higher up has more value than would come from prosecuting him.
It should be obvious that it’s an absurd leap from “the committee offers use immunity to Clark” to “this the best sign we’ve had that the DOJ is NOT investigating the coup.” But much of Twitter either didn’t read the Tweet carefully to see that it was pure speculation and (or) didn’t understand that the speculation was based on faulty assumptions.
This lawyer is a former prosecutor and therefore has credibility on left-leaning Twitter. The only thing I can figure is that he tweets things like that without giving it much thought.
It seems to me that lawyers (who should know better) have an obligation to put forward reasoned and thoughtful analysis instead of talking off the top of their heads and sending Twitter into an uproar.
Democracy requires a well-educated and thinking electorate. People need to learn to distinguish speculation from facts.
At the same time, I don’t blame the people who are sent into spins because of these lawyers’ tweets. I blame the lawyers. People with credentials who speak on public matters should be elevating the level of discourse instead of contributing to left-wing conspiracy theories and fear-mongering.
Save Democracy Now!
It seems to me that much of the indictment hysteria comes from believing that indictments will save democracy. Here is Rob Reiner (who did a fabulous job playing Archie Bunker’s son-in-law on All in the Family but is not a legal authority or expert in government) tweeting that he wants indictments so we can “save” democracy:
His Tweet got 42.7K “likes.” And here’s another:
That one got 53.2K likes.
Now, look, I’d love for Trump to get indicted, but indicting (or even actually convicting) Trump will not end the threat of fascism. It won’t solve our most serious problems which are (1) rampant disinformation and (2) the fact that so many Republicans still support Trump and Trump-like candidates.
Once we understand the nature of the danger and where the danger is coming from, the solution becomes obvious. So let me tell you about what’s happening in one of California’s most conservative counties, Shasta County.
The Extremists are Poised to take over a California County
Extremists, backed by outside money, are working to take over Shasta county leadership including local boards. They want to oust conservatives who are not “conservative” enough. . . meaning they are not reactionary coup-loving extremists.
Democrats and the left-wing tend to focus on national politics and national elections.
Extremists and the right-wing, on the other hand, understand the importance of focusing on local elections. Their plan now is to get control of local election boards, where votes are counted.
See the problem? Fact: Some dictators come to power through military coups. Most come to power through legal means and then, after they are in power, start battering democratic institutions and make themselves dictators. Both Hitler and Mussolini came to power through legal means.
Now we have extremists running for offices that will control local elections and school boards. Sound scary? Well, it is. And these militia-aligned groups are not going to fold up shop if Trump is indicted or even imprisoned. They know that Trump planned and supported that coup and they love him anyway. They know he supports white supremacists and they love him anyway.
Correct. They love Trump because he is a lawbreaking, democracy-bashing supporter of white supremacy. So it’s pretty silly to think that indicting or imprisoning Trump will end the danger and save democracy. Imagine the KKK and white power militias saying, “Well, Trump is indicted so we better fold up shop, and learn to love a multi-racial democracy, and start playing nice.”
The solution is to get involved in local politics. Organize. Get out the vote. Register voters. (The goal isn’t to try to change minds. The goal is to mobilize the people who want to put an end to right-wing extremism.)
The way to save democracy is with more democracy, or what Barack Obama calls “citizenship”:
In other words, we are the people who need to do something.
Do Something Twitter thinks that the alternative to yelling “do something!” is to be passive and acquiescent. Wrong. The alternative to yelling “do something” is to recognize that democracy, to succeed, requires each of us to contribute. There is no magic thing that the people in power can do to put an end to right-wing extremism. But if enough people become active, we can send the extremists back to the fringes. If everyone contributes — if everyone does their share, we can turn out the numbers to beat back the threat. This week, I did a shift on a hotline helping voters in Texas who were having trouble getting their absentee ballots.
Do you need ideas for what you can do? Click here.
Basically, we need everyone who can to do something.
