Letters from an American - Heather Cox Richardson - As usual, this Letter is chock full of important information, including this about the January 6 attempted coup de etat on the United States government:

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol also has a great deal of information; it has now interviewed more than 800 people...“The evidence so far points to the fact that Donald Trump knew and oversaw what happened on Jan. 6,” Lowell told DeVega (The Guardian). “Trump knew in advance about these different elements that came together to form both the political element of his plan, which was to have Pence throw the election, and the violence that took place on Jan. 6.”

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD)...“This was a coup organized by the president against the vice president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” Trump’s role in that coup will be the centerpiece of next month’s public committee hearings.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-19-2022?s=r

Letters from an American:

Since the American Civil War, deciding who pays taxes—and for what—has been shorthand for who belongs in our nation and what we care about. Curiously, Biden’s policies echo those of the early Republican Party.

The Republicans invented our national income taxes during the Civil War. As costs for uniforms, guns, food, mules, wagons, bounties, and burials rose to as much as $2 million a day...By the end of the war, Congress had imposed 5% taxes on manufactured goods, and income taxes of 5% for incomes between $600 and $5,000, 7.5% for incomes from $5,000 to $10,000, and 10% for incomes of more than $10,000.

Shortly after imposing taxes, Congress stopped selling the “public lands”—Indigenous lands in the West—to land speculators to raise money and instead gave them away to poor men to farm. “Every smoke rising from a new opening in the wilderness marks the foundation of a new feeder to Commerce and the Revenue,” wrote newspaper editor Horace Greeley.


https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-18-2022?s=r

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/15/politics/tapper-zelensky-interview-cnntv/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/15/politics/tapper-zelensky-interview-cnntv/index.html

"...a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., joined a conference call with a group of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters and made an urgent plea...Mr. Sullivan told them that they had to go to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 — and “descend on the Capitol. Mr. Sullivan claimed that he was “not inciting violence or any kind of riots,” he urged those on the call to make their presence felt at the Capitol in a way that would intimidate members of Congress...He also pledged that Mr. Trump was going to take action on his own; the president, he said, was going to impose a form of martial law on Jan. 6 and would not be leaving office."

The recording of the call, which took place on Dec. 30, 2020, emerged as the Justice Department has expanded its criminal investigation of the Capitol attack. It is unclear if the Justice Department is aware of Mr. Sullivan’s conference call; the department declined to comment. The House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 was provided with a copy of the recording some months ago by the woman who made it, Staci Burk, a law student and Republican activist from Arizona."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/us/politics/jan-6-capitol-riot-sullivan-trump.html?referringSource=articleShare

You can access the entire article through this link: https://archive.ph/x2f4o#selection-533.0-533.176
My apologies if this link is not permitted. Assuming it is ok to share.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-15-2022?s=r

I don't think excerpts will do this 'Letter' justice, but I will do my best.

"The bullet that killed Lincoln...delivered by John Wilkes Booth, ...poisoned by the belief that Lincoln’s use of the federal government to end human enslavement...was tyranny. Since the 1830s, southern Democratic leaders had gotten around the sticky problem of the Declaration of Independence, with its insistence that “all men are created equal,” by insisting that democracy simply meant that men could elect their leaders at the state level...there was nothing the federal government could do to change them.

Since January 6, the Republican Party has shifted its focus to the states to undermine the federal government. Nineteen states have changed their election laws to enable Republicans to win their states regardless of the will of the voters...Encouraged by the Supreme Court’s “originalist” majority, which denies the ability of the federal government to protect civil rights in the states, Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas have all overridden the constitutional right to abortion, and Republican lawmakers have indicated they are gunning for birth control and interracial marriage as well."

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-14-2022?s=r

This is what stood out to me in this morning's newsletter:

Democracies are at risk from authoritarianism today in large part because centralizing power in a few wealthy people permits those people to continue to pocket disproportionate shares of the national wealth..

According to Forbes, the wealth of the richest 25 Americans rose more than $400 billion from 2014 to 2018, giving them a combined wealth of $1.1 trillion.. It would take the wealth of 14.3 million ordinary American wage earners to get to that number. During those years, those 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes, a true tax rate of 3.4%....It is also behind the outcry today over the proposal of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, allegedly the richest man in the world, to buy Twitter for a cash offer of $43 billion in a hostile takeover of the popular platform. (According to ProPublica, Musk paid no income tax in 2018.)"

Ukraine was able to thwart potentially devastating and irreversible eclectic grid shut down. Russia eyeing North America for potential targeted cyber attacks.