The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Did The Coup Have A Leader On The Ground? If So, Who?

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Plus, some encouraging news on the Canadian fight against Covid.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily it is monday of week 44 that's right 44 weeks now since we went daily, at least Monday to Friday, on the bridge because of COVID. That's right, it was mid-March of 2020 that we started this little journey that we thought, well, might last four weeks, six weeks, who knows. But here we are, 44 weeks later, and we're still going. Now, do we only talk about COVID? No, that's for sure. There are other things that have entered the picture. COVID is the stream. It's the main reason for this podcast, at least the daily version of it and why it started that way.

But certainly of late, the issue that has dominated our discussions a lot has been what's been going on and unfolding in Washington and continues to this moment. I mean, think of things this morning. It's been five days since the episode on Capitol Hill, the treachery, the sedition, the attempt to take over the seat of government, the coup. Five days. Incited, and there's no doubt about this, you just have to watch the speeches, incited by the outgoing president, who was defeated by almost a landslide in early November by Joe Biden, started with Donald Trump's speeches outside the White House

on that day last Wednesday, followed by the march towards Capitol Hill, which he said, of course, he said, I'm with you, I'll be walking with you. He wasn't. He went straight to his little media tent to watch things. Nevertheless, it's been five days since that moment. Five days in which the President of the United States has not spoken to the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence. And there were chants on Capitol Hill

because the Trump supporters were upset at Mike Pence because he wouldn't push for the tossing out of the election results. Many were chanting, hang Mike Pence. He had to be taken to a secure location and hustled off Capitol Hill by his security staff. Not once since then have the two men talked. That gives you some sense of how serious

the situation continues to be in Washington at this hour. And how consequential this whole next week before the inauguration is going to be. That the two most powerful leaders in the United States won't talk to each other. Now, I've been a critic of Mike Pence for the last four years, calling him a toady and other things because of the way he's sucked up to the president. Well, what's happened to that relationship now and what consequences there are

from the deterioration of that relationship at this hour are unknown. We're told that Mike Pence won't go along with the 25th Amendment, which would remove with cabinet approval the president from office. We're told that he won't go along with that, but we haven't heard him in front of a microphone or a camera say that. So that may still be an issue. We don't know.

What isn't an issue is that the beginning of the impeachment process, once again, is starting on this day. The House of Representatives is introducing its articles of impeachment to impeach Donald Trump. Now, the Democrats hold a majority in the House of Representatives, so no matter whether any Republicans vote for this impeachment process or not, it's going to pass. Now, maybe some Republicans will. There's no doubt that a lot of Republicans are very upset about what's happened in the last week, what's happened in the last two months, really.

But how much of that is leaked onto the floor of the House of Representatives is unclear. But nevertheless, the House of Representatives will impeach Donald Trump. He will become the first president of the United States to be impeached twice. And that will, you only need to have a vote in one of the two houses, the House of Representatives, to achieve impeachment. So that will happen. From there, it goes to the Senate, where there's a trial. We remember this process from the beginning of 2020.

The Senate has a trial, and either the president is convicted or not. If he's convicted, he is thrown out of office, can never run for public office again, loses all benefits. He loses everything. He loses pension. He loses salary. He loses Secret Service protection. I believe he loses all of that. So that's how this next few days is going to unfold.

The impeachment, they say, really only takes about three days, and there's a formal part where there's another vote, I think, at the beginning of next week, but it's a fait accompli. The Senate issue is a little more difficult in terms of timing before the inauguration. However, there are legal experts who say it doesn't matter whether he's out of office, you can still impeach somebody out of office after they've left office.

So that may still happen. Impeachment plus the trial in the Senate. The 25th Amendment issue seems at the moment not to be an issue. But that may change if Mike Pence changes his mind or publicly says something. Now there's another amendment that people don't talk about very often. It's called the 14th Amendment. This doesn't affect the president, but it does affect anyone else in public office who incited violence surrounding a treasonous act or an act

of sedition. That could put a number of people in real jeopardy. The two senators most talked about, Republican senators, Ted Cruz and, born in Calgary, Alberta, I might add, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. There is a push to use the 14th Amendment against both of them to have them thrown out of office. We'll see if that happens. Now, over the last few days, more and more video has appeared of what actually happened last Wednesday. And you know, I watched a lot of it this morning, and it's very, obviously, it's very disturbing.

But there are things, there are some questions that arise as you watch these videos. And here's one that I had, which may indicate just how close we came to losing everything last Wednesday. I say we in the sort of collective spirit of that. Obviously, it's mainly Americans who would have lost everything. But keep in mind, this is just happening on the other side of our border. And who knows what would have happened if the government had fallen that day. The powers of government had been taken over by this mob. Anyway, here's what I noticed. And I think it's interesting to consider this.

You know, in any successful attempt at a coup, you need a leader. Somebody has to be leading on the ground, in the moment. Now you can say, well, Donald Trump was the leader of that coup. Well, yeah, he was in many ways. He called for it. He asked for it. He incited it. But when he said, I'll be walking with you, I'll be on the way to the Capitol with you, he wasn't.

He never was. He never intended to. It's his normal way of operating. Says one thing, does another. So who was the leader on the ground of this mob of thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who marched up to Capitol Hill and then smashed their way into the building, took over certain parts of the building.

Who was the leader? Or was there a leader? And if there wasn't a leader, is that why it kind of, well, it didn't peter out, but it didn't seem to have an organized way of going about things. Obviously, there was enough organization to get them to the hill and smash their way in. But if you watch the individual pieces of video, there didn't seem to be any real organization going on. There was just people doing their thing and smashing windows,

getting into confrontations with the Capitol Police officers and some public servants. But there didn't seem to be anybody directing things. And not only that, in the five days since, you haven't heard authorities say, we're looking for so-and-so who was the main instigator of everything that happened on Wednesday. They've isolated certain people who they've seen on the videos and knew who they were. But in terms of one person or one kind of leadership structure, I haven't heard that.

Doesn't mean there wasn't. It's just I haven't heard that. And if there wasn't, it may be part of the reason why it kind of fizzled out, because there's no point at a certain time the rioters, the seditionists, the domestic terrorists had the upper hand. Then they lost it. And did they lose it because they were outnumbered, or did they lose it because they were disorganized?

There was no sort of command structure. I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's going to be one of the questions that comes up in the next while. You know, there was something else that happened over the weekend that I found. And I'm sure many of you did too. Found appalling. This White House, the Trump White House, the Trump administration, Trump himself, has made great claims over the last four years

that they are the administration that supports police, that they are police's, you know, best friends. Well, if that's the case, what was going on with the flag on the White House? And why was it not lowered in memory of the police officer who lost his life defending the Capitol building? Died defending democracy. While flags were at half mast or half staff, depending on where you come from and how you use that description,

flags were lowered on a lot of buildings in Washington in respect of the dead officer. Not on the White House. And it took constant discussion about that and publicity about that and complaints about that before the flag was finally lowered. Now, somebody asked me on the weekend, can you ever remember something like that happening before? Well, not in a circumstance anything like this one. I do remember when, and really this is a very different situation, but it was the same argument about why isn't the flag lowered. When Diana died in the plane crash in Paris, flags were lowered all over Britain, not on Buckingham Palace.

It's complicated, the story, because the flag that flies above Buckingham Palace is a Union Jack when the Queen is not in residence, and it's the Queen's flag when she's in residence. Well, she was in Scotland, and the Union Jack was flying over Buckingham Palace, but it would take her orders to lower it. They didn't lower it. And for four or five days after Diana's death,

there was much discussion about why it wouldn't be lowered and a lot of coverage. And finally, it was lowered. So, as I said, it's a very different kind of situation, obviously, but that was the only other time I can remember some kind of debate or discussion like that as to why hasn't the flag been lowered. Now, you know, I talked earlier about watching the videos, a lot of videos that keep coming out. You know, we know the world we live in. The world we live in is everybody has a camera.

And everybody's recording, either taking stills or video. And so a lot came out right away. A lot came out, video shot by professionals, by news crews. But what's been happening since is you're seeing a lot of video from people who were just holding their phones in their hands. A very interesting article over the weekend by the website that is run by Vice. It's called Motherboard.

And they had a piece on how archivists are preserving Capitol Hill riot live streams before they're deleted. Now, this is stuff that was shot from handheld phones, but it's different than the sort of, I'm shooting this, and later I'll look at it, and maybe do something with it. These were live streams by protesters who hooked up to the ability through whatever platform

to live stream their event so anybody anywhere could watch it as it was happening. So Motherboard, this vice organization, writes over the weekend, many easily identifiable MAGA personalities streamed their raid on the Capitol. Baked Alaska, for example, that's the code name for one of these people,

took photos and streamed himself inside Nancy Pelosi's office. I think he's already been arrested, by the way. Many of these streams have been deleted by either the streamer or the social media platforms where they were hosted. So a number of users started a thread on the Data Hoarder subreddit on Wednesday. That's a platform. To assemble archiving efforts where they initially stored data in a torrent. Open source research and journalist collective Bellingcat put out a call for people to start saving social media content from the protests as they see it. Just like after Charlottesville in 2017, many of those who are streaming

will delete their streams once they realize how incriminating the footage is. The high demand for the files was taxing their bandwidth, however, so they moved it to a mega file. That database, which Mega deleted due to reports of child exploitation material, violent extremism or bestiality contained more than 124 gigabytes of photos and videos from multiple social media platforms, including Twitch live streams, others in the subreddit platform, created mirrors of the database so it's not lost. Okay, so you've got all this stuff in the archives, and people are having to go through it to see what, in fact,

was applicable to last Wednesday. The European search engine called Intelligence X also opened a file doing the same thing. Social media platforms, I'm still reading from this article, social media platforms can and do remove posts and entire accounts whenever they want, making preservation of historically important contextual content a

challenge. Two final things. Both platforms and users will remove a gigantic chunk of these materials within a day or two of their upload. Sometimes this is no big deal. Some random blurry video may not provide anything useful that isn't in a hundred other live streams. But one video might show something with an angle or lighting that all the others don't. The more raw materials researchers and forensic analysts have, the more they have to work with. And this is how the article concludes.

Many MAGA protesters streamed themselves and attempted to go viral on social media as a brand-building exercise. People who ransacked the Capitol walked out of the building with federal property, walked back to their hotels and gathered masklessly as though they'd just been to a fun party. Black Lives Matter organizers noted the difference in police response and the comfort that the largely white capital stormer protests enjoyed while interrupting democracy versus the often militaristic police response last summer against Black Lives Matter protesters. You know, to me, that further underlines this issue of leadership. Who's leading these groups? Was anybody leading these groups?

And if there weren't, maybe that explains why it did kind of peter out into this situation where people were going back to their hotels and celebrating about all the accomplishments they'd made with the trophies they'd hauled out of the Capitol building, as opposed to something if it was a military-like organized assault on the Capitol building, there would have been all kinds of different protocols in place. But that's not what happened. And thank God it didn't happen.

Because what did happen has left a trail of evidence. I think yesterday I heard there were already more than 50 people arrested, and there are going to be lots more. I'm assuming hundreds more. And then the challenge will be what happens to these people when they're charged. Are they real charges? Will they be real sentences? Will the people be going to jail for a long time?

This was treason. This was sedition. This was domestic terrorism. So what will the penalties be? And will there be pardons? Can you imagine? what will the penalties be? And will there be pardons? Can you imagine? Okay, this is two more things.

One of them is kind of related. I mean, the inauguration is next week. Security for that will not be in the hands of the Capitol Hill Police. It will be in the hands ofations next week. Security for that will not be in the hands of the Capitol Hill police. It'll be in the hands of the Secret Service. And you can bet it's going to be absolutely rigid. It's going to be tough. But there are changes going on inside the Secret Service

as Joe Biden takes power. And what do you think those changes are? Do you think he's just going to have the Donald Trump Secret Service people just transfer to the Joe Biden detail? No, that's not going to happen. First of all, there was much criticism of the Secret Service, or some of it, around Donald Trump, because they felt, some of the critics of the Secret Service felt, presidential detail members urged other agents and Secret Service officers not to wear masks on presidential trips this year, against the administration's own public health guidance,

as the president felt wearing masks projected weakness. The Secret Service also took the unprecedented step of allowing the former detail leader to temporarily leave his job to become a White House political advisor. That's one of Donald Trump's guards taking the little thing out of his ear and sitting instead at the policy advisor desk. So what's Joe Biden doing? Well, Joe Biden had a good relationship with his Secret Service when he was Vice President. And some of those officers are moving towards the White House to be involved with the new President's security detail.

And what's interesting about that is it rarely happens. The addition of the vice president's former protective agents to the presidential detail after such a long gap in time, eight years, right? Sorry, four years since Biden was vice president before he becomes president. In fact, the last time a former vice president became president after a gap like that was 1968, when Richard Nixon, eight years

after he'd lost the presidency to John Kennedy, won the presidential election when he won in 68 against Hubert Humphrey. All right. As I said at the top of this podcast, we started the daily version of the bridge in March because of COVID. So let me end this Monday of week 44 with a COVID update. And this one's an encouraging one at a time when the numbers look horrid. And they are horrid. And the sense that we're going to get much tougher restrictions in many parts of the country is imminent.

So what could possibly be good news in light of all of that? Well, as you know, we're into vaccines. And one of the concerns about the vaccines is that people are hesitant. They didn't want to take it. They don't want to take it. They're afraid of it. They haven't been convinced it'll work. And they've become, in some sense, anti-vaxxers.

That appears to be changing. If you believe in research. And Angus Reid, our friend Angus, has a new poll out today, a new research study, that shows just in the last month, which has been the month where the vaccines have come on stream, and we're starting to see them go into people, a month ago, the beginning of December, only 48% of Canadians said they were comfortable with the idea of getting a vaccine against COVID-19.

That number has gone up 12 percentage points. It's now 60%. Now, the experts, the Dr. Fauci's of this world, would like to see 75% to 80% of people taking the vaccine, that that rate would have an impact. Well, we're well on our way there. If you can jump in a month from 48 to 60, one assumes you're on the right path. So let's take that as some good news on this first day of week 44.

Looking ahead to tomorrow, here's the plan for tomorrow. You know, unless something goes crazy in the United States, the plan tomorrow is to take a break from all of this. Take a break from COVID, take a break from Trump, and talk about something that Canadians will, or many Canadians will be into starting Wednesday night. And that's the reopening of hockey, NHL hockey. Hockey starts Wednesday night.

Seems weird. It is weird. Hockey starting in the middle of January when we're used to it starting at the beginning of October, but COVID has changed everything, right? So tomorrow night here on the Bridge Daily, we're going to do a hockey show and we're going to do it with somebody who's pretty special because he is known already as a person who's having tremendous influence on the hockey world. He's not a current player. He's not a manager.

He's a former player who didn't make a big splash as a player, but he's certainly made a big splash since. He's part of the Spittin' Checklets podcast, which is hugely popular in the hockey world. His name is Paul Bissonette. His handle is BizNasty. And we're going to talk about a lot of different things tomorrow night in terms of what to expect

as this new hockey season begins. Everything from COVID to Joe Thornton. So I'm looking forward to it. It should be fun. It is nasty on the bridge. That's tomorrow. Wednesday, of course, smoke mirrors on the truth, and I'm sure Bruce and I will have lots to talk about on,

on that day as well. And by the end of the week, we'll have your thoughts and comments and questions on whatever we decide to ask you for. Um, and we'll do that for the Friday weekend special. But this was Monday. Looking forward to Tuesday.

Looking forward to talking hockey with you. Can you believe it? The old boy talking hockey. All right, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been the Bridge Daily. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.