#Storming of the US Capitol (Jan | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mariacallous · 13 days

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A symbol affiliated with former President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” fallacy was on display at Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house in 2021, a New York Times investigation found Thursday.

The symbol in question was an upside-down American flag, which supporters of Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory began displaying after he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. Neighbors who saw and photographed the flag confirmed to the Times that it flew on Jan. 17, 2021. The conservative justice admitted it but said it was his wife’s doing.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” he said in a statement to the paper. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The Times found in interviews with neighbors that Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann Alito, was having an ongoing argument with neighbors who’d put up an anti-Trump sign with an expletive on their front lawn.

You can see a photo of the flag in question in the Times’ story.

Jan. 17 was a little over a week after Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the ceremonial counting of electoral votes that gave Biden the presidency. More than a thousand people involved in the riot have been charged with crimes associated with that day.

While the flag was up, the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear several cases about the integrity of the 2020 election. Alito was in favor of hearing the arguments but was ultimately on the losing side. Currently, the court is set to rule on two cases related to the Capitol riot, including one that could give Trump presidential immunity from some of the dozens of charges he’s facing.

The Supreme Court’s code of ethics calls for the justices to avoid making political statements or sharing opinions on matters that might come before the court.

Take Back the Court, a group opposed to the conservative swing the court has taken in recent years, said this incident is proof Alito doesn’t belong on the court.

“Sam Alito has disqualified himself from legitimate service on the Supreme Court. It’s hard to imagine a more blatant f-you to the American public than proudly displaying a vestige of a failed coup attempt on the country you’re supposed to serve, right on your front lawn,” the group’s president, Sarah Lipton-Lubet, said in a statement.

Alito’s wife isn’t the only Supreme Court spouse to get caught up in an election conspiracy scandal. Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, promoted and attended Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House that preceded the Capitol insurrection. Her husband has refused to recuse himself from cases related to the attack on the Capitol.

“If the wife of one sitting Supreme Court justice helping incite an insurrection wasn’t enough for Congress to issue subpoenas to these extremists, perhaps another sitting justice proudly displaying memorabilia from that insurrection will be,” she said.

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wrestlezon · 7 months

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Legitimate Question: why hate Jericho? Did he do something?

i dont think hes done, like, a sex crime or anything that major. tho the bar for what you can get away with in the wrestling industry is pretty fucking low so i'm shrugging, i couldve missed a jericho callout post out there. i vaguely remember something about his wife being at the jan 6th storming-of-the-us-capitol thing at least lol

mainly i think he has a lot of clout, experience, and backstage reputation to have things go his way, which would be fine if i liked him but instead i find him and his work to be this perfect 50/50 split of annoying/entertaining. which is not enjoyable for me. if you dont think hes annoying then you should live in your bliss. i just really dont enjoy how his feuds pan out and every time someone i like ends up feuding with him i find it miserable. sigh. his feud with eddie............. -_-

also as someone who wanted daniel garcia to be in the bcc and was really confused when it didnt pan out that way, seein those daniel garcia interview quotes about how the reason that didnt happen was because jericho said he needed him in his group (and garcia being sad about not being in the bcc alongside his favorite wrestler of all time bryan danielson) does not endear me to the guy either. in fact it displeases me

#askzon #he does donate a lot of his wrestle-wealth to wrestler gofundmes and indie guys so like thats cool i guess.#im going to be embarrassed if it turns out he has actual wrongdoings behind him when i just dislike him because i find him annoying

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vomitdodger · 7 months

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Link to her video (part 1, 18 mins) in article. If you’ve been keeping up (not following “the narrative”) I don’t think there’s anything an awakened public doesn’t already know or hasn’t seen. Very good refresher or source of info if you haven’t been keeping up.

Video heavily involved with social media influencer “Baked Alaska” who immediately identified Epps as a Fed at the Jan 5 protests. Epps goes so far as to whisper “we’re here to storm the Capitol” to BA. This later would be the media mockingbird mantra used to describe the protestors. “ThEy StOrMeD tHe CaPiToL”.

It is a given he is a fed. And Logan even discusses that there were so many feds at the protest they lost track of the numbers and agencies involved.

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justinspoliticalcorner · 3 days

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Chloe Atkins at NBC News:

CINCINNATI — The group of anti-abortion crusaders showed up outside Hughes STEM High School just before 3 p.m. As students streamed out of the building, the men and women walked after them carrying large cards emblazoned with a picture of a fetus. “Pre-born children are blessings to be received, not burdens to be destroyed,” read the other side of the literature.

One man took the lead in tracking down the predominantly Black students and handing out the cards. At one point, he spent three minutes talking to a small group of girls. “I feel inspired,” a 15-year-old said afterward. But the scene took a turn when the principal, Jennifer Williams, walked out and demanded they move off the main path to the school. “The pathway to the crosswalk is being blocked and that’s not okay,” Williams said. The group moved down the sidewalk but was confronted by Williams again. “Planned Parenthood is feeding propaganda to these kids,” the head activist, Jason Storms, told her. “We are trying to counter that message.” Storms, 45, is the leader of Operation Save America, a fundamentalist Christian group that operates on the extreme edge of the anti-abortion movement. They travel around the country — to churches, schools, statehouses and abortion clinics — calling for abortions to be banned and women to be locked up for terminating pregnancies.

Storms and his fellow activists are part of a growing network of lawyers, lawmakers and pastors who have labeled themselves “abortion abolitionists.” They oppose all abortions without exceptions and promote legislation that would pave the way for women to be investigated and prosecuted for ending pregnancies. The move to criminalize the choice to have an abortion has historically been rejected by the mainstream “pro-life” movement, but Storms sees it as a necessary deterrent. “You are intentionally killing a human being,” he said in an interview. “That’s the definition of murder.” Operation Save America is certainly not the first group to push an extreme position on abortion and use in-your-face tactics. It’s a rebranded version of Operation Rescue, an organization that gained notoriety in the 1980s for blocking women and doctors from entering abortion clinics and holding sit-in protests.

[...] GOP state lawmakers around the country have introduced at least 26 so-called “abortion abolition” bills from 2022 to 2024, according to If/When/How, a national legal advocacy nonprofit group. The bills often repeal provisions that prevent women from being investigated and prosecuted over abortions or don’t include explicit language that exempts them from being charged. [...]

Storms’ group occupies a unique position in U.S. politics. Loathed by Democrats, it also represents a thorn in the side of former President Donald Trump, who has said the issue should be taken up at the state level. “They are a loud minority, but Donald Trump especially listens to the loudest voice in the room,” said Susan Del Percio, a Republican strategist and NBC News political analyst. “And that is an issue for Donald Trump running in 2024 — that they will have a voice.” Storms was a vocal Trump supporter. He attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally and took a selfie video outside the U.S. Capitol as the mob laid siege. But he’s not planning to vote for Trump this November unless the former president takes a “strong stand in defense of preborn children.” “My hope is that we’re able to pull Donald Trump in our direction,” Storms said. “And maybe I still will pull the lever for him if he comes our direction, but he’s not going to come our direction, clearly, unless we twist his arm a little bit.”

[...] Storms held various roles at Operation Save America before he took charge of the group in June 2021. The group is not just opposed to abortions. It preaches against homosexuality, vaccines, IVF and Islam. It also represents the extreme anti-abortion movement’s reverence for high-powered weaponry and its suspicion toward the federal government.

NBC News reports on the abortion abolition movement, a very militant and extreme subset of the anti-abortion movement. This movement-- led by the likes of Operation Save America-- seeks to criminalize those who obtain abortions and pressure lawmakers opposed to abortion access to move towards the abolitionist viewpoint.

#Abortion #Abortion Abolition #Anti Abortion Extremism #Operation Save America #Criminalization of Abortion #Jason Storms #Operation Rescue #FACE Act

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trumpbites · 1 year

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Opinion | No One Knows What to Do About Trump’s 2024 Campaign - The New York Times

Opinion | No One Knows What to Do About Trump’s 2024 Campaign – The New York Times

Everyone knows by now how many Trump candidates lost this year, especially the higher-profile, more hard-core ones who claimed the 2020 election was stolen. The Democrats even added on in Georgia on Tuesday, with the same, central animating force behind each development: that Donald Trump forced his party to run a candidate, Herschel Walker, who lost, weakening Mr. Trump and the party – a mutual…

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beardedmrbean · 6 months

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it will hear an appeal that could upend hundreds of charges stemming from the Capitol riot, including against former President Donald Trump.

The justices will review an appellate ruling that revived a charge against three defendants accused of obstruction of an official proceeding. The charge refers to the disruption of Congress' certification of Joe Biden's 2020 presidential election victory over Trump.

That's among four counts brought against Trump in special counsel Jack Smith's case that accuses the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner of conspiring to overturn the results of his election loss. Trump is also charged with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.

The court's decision to weigh in on the obstruction charge could threaten the start of Trump's trial, currently scheduled for March 4. The justices separately are considering whether to rule quickly on Trump's claim that he can't be prosecuted for actions taken within his role as president. A federal judge already has rejected that argument.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in March or April, with a decision expected by early summer.

The obstruction charge, which carries up to 20 years behind bars, has been brought against more than 300 defendants and is among the most widely used felony charges brought in the massive federal prosecution following the deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a bid to keep Biden, a Democrat, from taking the White House.

At least 152 people have been convicted at trial or pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding, and at least 108 of them have been sentenced, according to an Associated Press review of court records.

A lower court judge had dismissed the charge against Joseph Fischer, a former Pennsylvania police officer, and two other defendants, ruling it didn’t cover their conduct. The justices agreed to hear the appeal filed by lawyers for Fischer, who is facing a seven-count indictment for his actions on Jan. 6, including the obstruction charge.

The other defendants are Edward Jacob Lang, of New York’s Hudson Valley, and Garret Miller, who has since pleaded guilty to other charges and was sentenced to 38 months in prison. Miller, who’s from the Dallas area, could still face prosecution on the obstruction charge.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols found that prosecutors stretched the law beyond its scope to inappropriately apply it in these cases. Nichols ruled that a defendant must have taken “some action with respect to a document, record or other object” to obstruct an official proceeding under the law.

The Justice Department challenged that ruling, and the appeals court in Washington agreed with prosecutors in April that Nichols’ interpretation of the law was too limited.

Other defendants, including Trump, are separately challenging the use of the charge.

More than 1,200 people have been charged with federal crimes stemming from the riot, and more than 700 defendants have pleaded guilty.

#nunyas news

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shakespearenews · 4 months

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Why Jan. 6 insurrectionists sent a letter to the Folger Shakespeare Library

While insurrectionists were plotting to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, they took time to write and send a letter to an institution two blocks from their target: the Folger Shakespeare Library, the world’s largest collection of material related to the English playwright.

“We will be blocking access to your building … to prevent our persons of grievance from using you as a loophole,” read the insurrectionists’ letter, which circulated on a pro-Trump message board called TheDonald before the insurrection and was published this month in the Folger’s online archive.

"[we] are only involving you by happenstance."

#shakespeare #william shakespeare #folger shakespeare library #january 6 #politics #history #letters #archives

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tomorrowusa · 6 months

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A special election has been set for February 13th to fill the vacancy in NY-03 left by George Santos's expulsion from the US House of Representatives. The winner of this election will serve until early January of 2025.

There will not be a primary for the February special election. Party leaders will choose the candidates. Democrats have already chosen former Rep. Tom Suozzi as their candidate. Suozzi gave up his seat for an unsuccessful run for NY governor in 2022. He previously represented much of the largely suburban area which is now in NY-03.

Republicans are having a much harder time finding a candidate for the February election. As of Friday evening, they still don't have one.

An individual who has put himself forward as a possible GOP candidate in the regular November 2024 election in NY-03 is one of the pro-Trump terrorists who attacked the US Capitol on 06 January 2021.

A man who has filed to run in 2024 for the seat held, up until last Friday, by ex-Rep. George Santos (R-NY) was found guilty of crimes related to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol this week. Philip Sean Grillo, a 49-year-old man from Queens who in May filed the paperwork to run for office in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, was found guilty of “felony obstruction of an official proceeding and other charges related to his conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol,” the Department of Justice announced in a news release this week. Grillo, who was arrested in February 2021, was not only accused of entering and exiting the building several times — including once through a broken window near the Senate wing door — he was also accused of pushing up against police as he carried a megaphone throughout the riot and was recorded on video saying, “I’m here to stop the steal” and “it’s our fucking House!” He also took time to get high during the attack.

Grillo certainly has the type of mentality to be a House Republican.

Grillo also recorded videos of himself during the riot and smoked weed inside the building. Grillo proceeded to enter and exit the Capitol three more times and can be seen in multiple instances pushing up against police officers,” DOJ said in the news release. “In another recording from his cell phone, he can be seen smoking marijuana inside the Capitol. In this video, Grillo stated, among other things, ‘Our House!’ He asks, ‘Who’s smoking grass?’ and, ‘Can I get a hit it of that s—?’ Another video depicted Grillo high-fiving other rioters after smoking marijuana inside the Capitol.” During the trial, Grill claimed he had “no idea” that Congress met in the Capitol building — even though he is running for Congress — and his lawyers argued he was under the impression that he was allowed to behave how he did that day. Grill hasn’t yet been sentenced so it is unclear if he will still be able to run for Santos’ seat next year. It’s also not clear if he will be a candidate in the Feb. 13 special election to fill the seat, now that Santos has been expelled.

Republicans in NY-03 do understand that they have an image problem because of George Santos. Though it's fun to imagine Donald Trump campaigning for a clueless MAGA stoner.

#new york #ny-03 #special election #george santos #us house of representatives #tom suozzi #assault on the us capitol by pro-trump terrorists #philip sean grillo #donald trump #election 2024

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ridenwithbiden · 6 months

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Military.com "Dozens of Troops Suspected of Advocating Overthrow of US Government, New Pentagon Extremism Report Says. An annual Pentagon report on extremism within the ranks reveals that 78 service members were suspected of advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. government and another 44 were suspected of engaging or supporting terrorism.

The report released Thursday by the Defense Department inspector general revealed that in fiscal 2023 there were 183 allegations of extremism across all the branches of military, broken down not only into efforts to overthrow the government and terrorism but also advocating for widespread discrimination or violence to achieve political goals.

The statistics indicate the military continues to grapple with extremism following its public denunciations and a stand-down across the services ordered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in 2021. Furthermore, the numbers do not make it clear whether the military's approach is working. In 2021, the year the data was first released to Congress, there were 270 allegations of extremist activities. In 2022, that figure dropped to 146 before rebounding over the past year.

The Army had the most allegations in fiscal 2023 with 130 soldiers suspected of participation in extremist activity. The Air Force suspected 29 airmen; the Navy and Marine Corps reported 10 service members each. For the first time, the inspector general also reported numbers for the Space Force as a separate entity from the other services -- it suspected four Guardians of extremism.

The IG report also included instances of alleged criminal gang activity: There were 58 allegations of gang activity across the military.

However, the report did note that, out of all the suspected extremism and criminal gang activity, 68 of the total cases were investigated and cleared or deemed unsubstantiated.

In the U.S., extremist activity, including neo-Nazi, white supremacist and anti-government movements, has been growing, and numerous violent plots by veterans and even active-duty troops have been thwarted in recent years. Experts on extremist movements have warned about the growing potential of more violence and future attacks, similar to the Oklahoma City federal building bombing in 1995 that killed 168 and was carried out by an Army veteran.

In February, a former National Guardsman, Brandon Russell, who founded the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi hate group, was charged with plotting to blow up Baltimore's electrical grid and cause as much suffering as possible. Russell, who allegedly kept a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 after an arrest in Florida for possessing explosives.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol building, the Pentagon tried to make a show of dealing with the problem of extremism among troops after it became clear that veterans as well as some active-duty troops were among the mob that stormed the halls of Congress in an effort to halt the certification of the 2020 election.

Military.com has reported that many of those efforts -- including the military-wide extremism training stand-down ordered by Austin -- were largely symbolic and were widely considered as just another box for commanders to check.

One active-duty noncommissioned officer said that, aside from the fact that no one was paying attention at the stand-down briefing he attended, the commander giving the lecture was "talking about what he thought were radical groups like Black Lives Matter."

The idea that far-left groups are just as problematic as far-right ones is a popular talking point among conservatives and Republican lawmakers. However, law enforcement officials and experts who study the topic have consistently noted that far-right groups espousing anti-government and white supremacist views are the biggest threat to the U.S. today.

The report also revealed that other efforts such as screening prospective recruits before enlistment are not working as well as intended.

Some recruiters did not complete all of the screening steps and "as a result, military service recruiters may not have identified all applications with extremist or criminal gang associations," according to the inspector general report.

"Further, the audit found that one military service entered data indicating applicants disclosed extremist or gang associations even though the applicants had not made such disclosures," the IG said, but it did not reveal which of the services falsely accused some of its recruits of having extremist ties.

What the report does make clear, however, is that when allegations are made, they are being referred for investigation, and when allegations are substantiated, some action is taken.

Of all the extremist and gang activity allegations, 135 were reported to military or civilian law enforcement, and 109 of the allegations were reported to another DoD organization or official.

Furthermore, 69 of all the allegations were substantiated at the time the report was written and the vast majority of those -- 50 -- were handled through administrative actions. That included involuntary discharge for 19 and counseling in three instances, while 17 more were handled by nonjudicial punishment and two went to court-martial.

There were no substantiated cases of extremism or gang activity where no action was taken.

While these figures, compared with the overall size of the services, are small, research and experts say that military service members and veterans pose an outsized danger to communities when they go down the path of extremism, given their increased familiarity with firearms and ability to organize and plan effectively.

In 2020, an Air Force sergeant at Travis Air Force Base in California pulled up to a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, in a white van and opened fire on security guards, killing one before going on the run and murdering a county sheriff's deputy a week later as part of a larger plan to incite a civil war.

Also in 2020, members of a group that included two Marines and styled itself as a "modern day SS" were arrested on allegations that they were plotting to destroy the power grid in the northwest. U.S. court records in that case say members discussed recruiting other veterans, stole military equipment, asked others to buy explosives, and discussed plans to manufacture firearms."

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mariacallous · 10 months

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The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta—Spartaganda, as it were—is alive and well.

Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises—an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.

Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth.

The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War.

Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.

But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved.

The ancient sources are effectively unanimous that the helots were the worst treated slaves in all of Greece; helotry was an institution that shocked the conscience of Athenian slaveholders. Critias, an Athenian collaborator with Sparta, was said to have quipped that it was in Sparta that “the free were most free and the slaves most a slave,” a staggering statement about a society that was mostly enslaved (and about Critias as a person that he thought this was praise). Plutarch reports the various ways that the Spartans humiliated and degraded the helots, while the Athenian orator Isocrates argued that it was a crime to murder enslaved people everywhere in Greece, except Sparta. Sparta, with both the most slaves per capita and the worst treated slaves, was likely the least free society in the whole of the ancient world.

Nor were the Spartans particularly good stewards of Greek freedom. While their place in popular culture, motivated by films such as 300, puts the Spartans at the head of efforts to defend Greek freedom from the expanding Persian Empire, Sparta was not always so averse to Persia. Unable to deal with the Athenian fleet itself, Sparta accepted Persian money during the Peloponnesian War to build its own, selling the Ionian Greeks back into Persian rule in exchange for humbling Athens. That war won the Spartans a brief hegemony in Greece, which they quickly squandered, ending up at war with their former allies in Corinth.

Unable to win that war either, Sparta again turned to Persia to enforce a peace, called the “King’s Peace,” which sold yet more Greek city-states to the Persian king in exchange for making Sparta into Persia’s local enforcer in Greece, tasked with preventing the emergence of larger Greek alliances that could challenge Persia. Far from being the defender of Greek independence, when given the chance the Spartans opened not only the windows but also the doors to Persian rule. They also refused to join in Alexander the Great’s expedition against Persia, for which Alexander mocked them by dedicating the spoils of his first victories “from all of the Greeks, except the Spartans.”

Instead of a society of freedom-defending super-warriors, Sparta is better understood as a place where the wealthiest class of landholder, the Spartans themselves, had succeeded in reducing the great majority of their poor compatriots to slavery and excluded the rest, called the perioikoi, from political participation or citizenship. The tiny minority of Spartan citizens derived their entire income from the labor of slaves, being legally barred from doing any productive work or engaging in commerce.

And rather than spending their time in ascetic military training, they spent their ample leisure time doing the full suite of expensive, aristocratic Greek pastimes: hunting (a pastime for the wealthy rather than a means of subsistence in the ancient world), eating amply, accumulating money, funding Olympic teams, breeding horses, and so on. Greek authors such as Xenophon and Plutarch continually insist that the golden age of Spartan austerity and egalitarianism existed in the distant past, but each author pushes that golden age further and further into that past, and in any event, archaeology tells us it was never so.

And that lavish lifestyle was clearly very important to the Spartans because they were willing to sacrifice all of their other ambitions on the altar to it. Beginning in the early 400s, the population of Spartan citizens, defined by being rich enough in land to make the mess contributions that were a key part of military and social lfie, began to decline as Spartan families used inheritance and marriage to consolidate holdings and increase their wealth, from 8,000 Spartan citizens in 480 B.C. to 3,500 in 418 to 2,500 in 394 to just 1,500 in 371. The collapse in the number of Spartans who qualified for citizenship had disastrous effects on the manpower available for the Spartan army, causing Sparta’s strategic ambitions to all crumble, one by one. Yet efforts by Agis IV (245-241 B.C.) and Cleomenes III (235-222 B.C.) to arrest the decline were foiled precisely because the Spartan political system denied any political voice to any but the leisured rich, who had little incentive to change.

Sparta is no inspiration for the leaders of a free state. Sparta was a prison in the guise of a state and added little to the sum of the human experience except suffering. No American, much less any U.S. soldier, should aspire to be like a Spartan.

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 1 year

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Bolsonaro’s Surreal New Life as Florida Man—And MAGA Darling

One month ago, he was leading the fifth-largest country in the world. These days, he is wandering around Florida supermarkets, eating fried chicken alone at fast-food restaurants, and holding court for supporters from the driveway of a modest home owned by a former ultimate-fighting champion in a gated community south of Orlando.

Jair Bolsonaro’s re-emergence in Florida is a bizarre spectacle, even for a state with a long history of providing haven to eccentric characters. The embattled ex-President of Brazil, who refused to concede his electoral loss in October, left the country for the U.S. on Dec. 30, two days before the inauguration of his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On Jan. 8, his supporters stormed the Brazilian Parliament, Supreme Court and Presidential Palace, violently threatening police and destroying property in an assault with eerie echoes of the attack on the U.S. Capitol carried out by supporters of Donald Trump.

Meanwhile Bolsonaro, once dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” has been hanging out just a couple hours’ drive up the Florida Turnpike from his former presidential counterpart. While Trump is camped out at his own waterfront estate plotting the opening moves of his next presidential campaign, it’s still unclear what Bolsonaro is planning during his stint in the Sunshine State. His TikTok account broadcasts carefully curated videos to his 74 million followers— smiling families wearing Brazilian jerseys delivering baskets of bread, strawberries, flowers, and Nutella; time-lapse montages set to emotional music, showing Bolsonaro hugging children and long lines of people waiting to snap a photo with him.

What is the ex-President of Brazil doing in Florida with his country—and his own legal future—enmeshed in turmoil? His original visa, thought to be an A-1 designation meant for diplomats and heads of state, would have expired after 30 days. Bolsonaro has now applied for a six-month tourist visa to stay in the U.S. and is waiting for the “desired results,” Felipe Alexandre, a Brazilian-American attorney representing Bolsonaro, told TIME. “He would like to take some time off, clear his head, and enjoy being a tourist in the United States for a few months before deciding what his next step will be,“ Alexandre said in an email statement.

Yet the prevailing theory among both opponents and supporters is that Bolsonaro’s self-exile from Brazil is a maneuver to evade legal trouble. Bolsonaro, who, like Trump, blamed unfounded voter fraud conspiracies for his loss, is facing at least half a dozen investigations which could disqualify him from holding political office or result in a criminal sentence. These include allegations that Bolsonaro—who last year vowed “For God in heaven, I will never go to prison!”—leaked classified information, used “digital militias” to coordinate political disinformation campaigns, and attacked Brazil’s electoral system.

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