The Craziness of January 6, 2025
A harbinger of things to come?
Traditionally January 6 marks the official end of the Christmas holiday season. This day is known alternatively as Feast of the Epiphany, Orthodox Christmas, Three Kings Day, Twelfth Night, and Little Christmas. Depending on where you live and your own family traditions, observations generally range from a minor affair where you might get only one small present all the way to actually celebrating Christmas on January 6 instead of December 25.
In recent years January 6 has taken on a new meaning here in the United States because it is the anniversary of the day that Donald Trump called a rally on the same day that the 2020 election would be certified in the US Capitol and it ended in a deadly riot in that building which killed two people that day and injured many others. The Lincoln Project released this short one-minute video for the fourth anniversary of that incident.
For January 6, 2025 things got really crazy, starting off with the relationship between Elon Musk and British far-right leader Nigel Farage. Musk has been helping Farage's Reform UK party elected. But now that relationship is in jeopardy.
When we last left off, Musk spent Saturday morning tweeting about Muslim rape gangs in the UK while also saying that another far-right leader, Tommy Robinson, is a political prisoner. (Robinson is currently in jail for contempt of court charges that stemmed from a libelous video in which he falsely claimed that a Syrian refugee teenager was a violent thug.)
Elon Musk, Nigel Farage, and Tommy Robinson are all far-right fans of Vladimir Putin so you'd think all three would be buddies given their common interest, right? Wrong! Farage is no fan of Robinson and he indicated this in his tweets. Basically Farage and other right-wing British activists don't trust Tommy Robinson because Robinson has admitted to being a police informant, he is ideologically to the left of Farage, he has a history of cocaine use, and he has been in prison a few times not because of his politics but because he broke the law.
Farage's tweets about his problem with Robinson led to a fallout between Musk and Farage and Musk is now calling for Reform UK to replace Farage, its original founder, with a new leader because Farage “does not have what it takes.”
The best illustration of this story comes from a series of tweets from Ian Miles Cheong, the Malaysian man who pretends to be an American even though he has never been to the US. When Musk still liked Farage, Cheong tweeted “Nigel Farage is England's last hope. Support this man.” When Cheong subsequently tweeted “Nigel Farage should be in charge of the UK right now tbh.”, Musk responded with “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn't have what it takes.” Cheong's response: “Spineless and self-serving. Nigel Farage isn't the leader Britain needs.”
Only time will tell about the outcome of all this but the silver lining is that if this feud ends up hurting Reform UK, the British people will be saved from fascism.
January 6 is also the day that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced his resignation. There will be more on that in the future. In the meantime here's a video by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen about the resignation that's worth watching.
The biggest event that day was in Washington, DC. The day began with a huge snowstorm that began in the middle of the night and has shut down much of the Baltimore-DC area. Here's a shot I took of my backyard.
While much of DC has been paralyzed, the traditional certification of the votes fron the 2024 election went on as scheduled. (Most of the lawmakers live within walking distance of the US Capitol building so dealing with snarled traffic isn't an issue.) But Mother Nature had nothing to do with the fact that the entire US Capitol building is now fortified with fences, as this video shows.
That's one unfortunate legacy of what happened four years ago.
For the past several weeks my newsfeed on Twitter/X has been inundated by this person whose name is Michelle Baker but her Twitter handle is Michell33650674 where she kept on tweeting that something is going to happen, the election won't be certified, Donald Trump won't be sworn in on Inauguration Day. It's like she's selling hope for social media clout or something. Given the string of numbers after the first half of her name, there's a part of me that wonders if she's some kind of a Kremlin bot who is playing around with the minds of anti-Trump people as some part of a twisted psyop. Having a first name with a string of numbers is a common way of detecting a Russian troll farm bot, as this meme states: “Hi, I'm FirstNameBunchOfNumbers, great admirer of Vladimir Putin. You might know me from yesterday's ‘Covid is a lie’ and ‘Eh, what climate change?’”
Here are two tweets that she made close together on January 5. The first one was made at 5:37 am where she tweeted:
HOLY FUCKING GUACAMOLE, GUYS! 21 states have not yet certified the election results! There were far more Russian bomb threats on election day than we previously knew about! The 2024 election may NOT be certified tomorrow! Pay attention! Repost everything about this! WHOAA!
Just nine minutes later she retweeted an earlier tweet she made where she said that even if certification happens it won't be over because there's always a chance that the hacked election will be thrown out until January 20 when Donald Trump gets sworn in. She added this message to her retweet:
I have more hope, today, that the election WON'T be certified tomorrow! Holy shit! 21 states have not yet certified the results, and there were far more Russian bomb threats than we knew about!
Here is what she posted at 1:20 am on January 6:
Do you think Biden is just BLUFFING when saying he's handing over the keys in a “free and fair election”? WTF? Is he trying to keep MAGA PSYCHOPATHS calm before declaring a Presidential Emergency to stop the certification??? That's the only HOPE I have! Please let it be TRUE!
Well Vice President Kamala Harris certified the election results, thus paving the way for the man who defeated her on Election Day to become the 47th president of the United States. So much for the false hopes that Michelle Baker a.k.a. Michell33650674 has been frequently promoting on her account for the past several weeks. Of course that's assuming that Michell33650674 is a real person and not some Kremlin bot who is playing mind games on Democrats by promoting false hopes that become dashed when reality happens.
At this point, unless Donald Trump suddenly drops dead (which is a real possibility with his advanced age of 78, his cognitive decline, his unhealthy fat and salt-laden fast food diet, and his lack of exercise), it looks like he will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on January 20 and the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland.
As a total palette cleanser to the litany of bad and crazy news, here's something that will put a smile on your face. Recently the National Zoo in Washington, DC received two new pandas from China named Bao Li and Qing Bao. Like I wrote earlier, there was a major snowstorm on January 6 that paralyzed most of the Baltimore-DC region. The panda bears reacted joyfully to their first snowstorm in DC as they ran around and tumbled in the snow.
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