Paul is asked to comment on the state of the Jan 6th inquiry and issues related to policing and systemic racism. Paul is a guest on Muslim Network TV.

TRANSCRIPT 

Saleha Faruque

Today, we're here with Paul Jay, who is a journalist, filmmaker, founder, and host of theAnalysis.news outlet. Thank you so much for being here with us today, Paul.

Paul Jay

Thanks for the invitation.

Saleha Faruque

Our pleasure. Now, as you might have heard, thirty-five Republicans in US Congress had voted to support the legislation that would establish an independent commission to investigate the recent January insurrection at US Capitol Hill.

If you can tell us from your perspective about the significant shift in thinking. When we think about how Republicans came together to vote on behalf of this bill and what this means for US politics. Especially with such race-based issues when we see such support from Republicans in US Congress.

Paul Jay

So you're talking about the thirty-five Republicans that voted for a bill to establish the January 6th commission. Well, there's kind of two big issues here. One is the split in the Republican Party that's most reflected in the removal of Liz Cheney from the leadership of the House. And that split goes back, I think, from the very emergence of Trump. Trump ran, and to some extent in the Republican primaries, in 2016 against the leadership of the Republican Party.

Of course, he represented his own section of billionaires and his own alliances within the American elites, but primarily a billionaire hedge fund guy named Robert Mercer and Sheldon Adelson - the casino billionaire who died a little while ago, but who was also very close for a long time to Netanyahu in Israel. But Trump ran a campaign, and once he got elected, and especially once he selected Pence as his vice president. Pence is a guy who more or less represented and still does, I think, the Koch brothers, as did Pompeo. They made a kind of alliance, this section of the elites that hated Trump right from the beginning. And you have to remember, even people like Lindsey Graham hated Trump from the beginning. But once he was elected and once they saw a real coalescing of what amounts to a kind of fascist movement of sorts around Trump. And when I say 'Talk about Trump supporters,' I certainly do not mean the vast majority of people who would vote for Trump are fascist or even think they're voting for a fascist. But there's a core in that. And part of that core is a far-right religious evangelical and far-right Catholic.

As we get closer to talking about January 6th, they're very strong in the military; there are actually several Opus Dei far-right Catholics in the Supreme Court. So this kind of coalescing around a section of the billionaires, starting with Mercer, Adelson, but later, the Koch brothers, certainly have a certain sway in it. I don't know that the Kochs ever loved Trump, but that's the whole point. I think that most of the elites, including those in the financial sector, many of whom are traditionally Democrats, started to go along with Trump because they got whatever they wanted out of Trump: in the financial sector, in the fossil fuel sector, and certainly the military-industrial complex. Trump gave them everything they wanted. So it honestly, excuse my language, didn't matter how batshit crazy Trump became and clearly was. He had opened up the piggy bank of the US Treasury and deregulation.

So they nurtured the megalomania of this guy. They knew they were dealing with a nutcase, but he was their nutcase as long as he was passing legislation with enormous tax cuts ...