Free Speech, Responsibility, and a Caution

 

I take potshots at VP JD Vance, as is my right as an American, and I do so only with a little guilt that he's a barrel of fish--a target-rich environment. All the same, something about him irritates me right in the patriotism.  I have described him as being if chewing on tin foil with a mouthful of fillings was a person, and I am not backing down from that. 

Take today as an example--he weighed in on Margaret Brennan asking Secretary of State Marco Rubio (a man chained in a dungeon of his own making, performing Trump's foreign policy while I guarantee you knowing better at any instance) if there was anything amiss in Vance's Munich speech regarding the "enemy within" and meeting with AfD where "free speech" led to the Holocaust. 

I' m going to help everyone out by stipulating that the Nazis were not big fans of free speech. They banned books, you know. "Un-German" books regarding different races, people who were considered deviant, people who were liberal or Communist. They would have really hated DEI. 

If Fascism is Baked in, Why Choose Fascism?

 

Q. Hearing John Kelly's disturbing revelation about Trump's admiration of Adolph H!tler, does it change how you feel about Trump?

Chris Sununu: No. We've heard a lot of extreme things from Trump. With a guy like that, it's kind of baked into the votepic.twitter.com/sMTbZicUrJ

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 24, 2024

So, I wanted to get this off my chest--fascism being "baked in" is the reason you REJECT a candidate, not the reason you support him. 

I might charitably presume Chris Sununu thinks this is Trump saying "extreme things" that he does not mean, and that he can differentiate the extreme things Trump says from what he intends to do, and from what those who surround him want to do. If this is how he is looking at it, he is deeply stupid, because people who support extreme words do so because they like them and want them to be so. Trump says them because he gets away with saying them and presumes that he can do what he likes later on, because he has persuaded enough people that the previously unthinkable is permissible. 

Sununu tells himself this is the direction that he believes people are going. So--he is following a multitude to do evil?  He is being a go-along-to-get along, imagining someone else will fix the problem of fascism? Or is he willing to get his hands dirty, too?

Guess Who Lauded a Hitler Enthusiast?

 

NEW:

Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf club hosted a convicted Jan. 6 rioter and alleged Nazi sympathizer twice this summer, where he was celebrated and gave speeches.

At one event, Trump sent a video praising the attendees as “amazing patriots.”

At the other, he won an award. pic.twitter.com/g7EMJiIvfg

— Tom Dreisbach (@TomDreisbach) September 12, 2024

If I know my readers, you probably guessed "Trump" with a quickness and only wondered "Which Hitler enthusiast, though?"  But this is where Trump's "MAGA movement" is right now, with Trump clearly saying "we" when referring to the 1/6 insurrectionists during the very revealing debate (because he did want to be there--and also did not turn up and he did tell them to be there and they understood the assignment).  

But the answer is the guy who was most obviously Hitler cosplaying as if that was natural.  Which Hitler enthusiast even being a question, just like sitting down with obvious antisemitic clowns Kanye and Nick Fuentes, or cozying up to Laura Loomer today, or spreading a blood libel about legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio, is a hell of a sign that Trump has gone mask-off. Or maybe that needs to be: "hood-off"? 

Did Russia Pay a "Meaningful Fee?"

 

Russian Telegram channels reported that the interview with Carlson and Carlson himself was not to Putin's liking, and the interview itself was considered a failure:

"The Kovalchuk clan sharply criticizes the idea of an interview with the American journalist Carlson. They say… https://t.co/sCql6QuhkW pic.twitter.com/iyPZDTP2JW

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) February 9, 2024

Well, I'm just throwing this bit from twitter here without knowing anything more about it--would I believe Tucker Carlson accepted a fee for a friendly interview? Let me think about that; it would be very unethical, so I'm going to go ahead and say yes, I do believe Tucker Carlson would do that. I also think he would do it for free, but getting paid if you can is so much nicer, isn't it? 

It also appears that Putin wanted to just give one of his history lectures, about which he is weird and wrong. The idea that Poland was basically asking to be invaded by Germany (and I guess USSR was just standing innocently by like choirboys) is the kind of peculiar revisionism that goes so well with authoritarian states.  There's an analogy there for Ukraine, I guess (about which Putin has his own badly contorted self-justifications) but I just think, if I were Poland, I would like Putin not to be mentioning Poland so much.

I'm not sure who exactly is fooled enough to think Putin is stopping at part of Ukraine. I mean, people might vocally express their "doubts"--I just find it hard to think they are "fooled." 

"Vermin"

 

To honor our great veterans (for whom Trump has done exactly Not. Shit.) the former president (a twice impeached and four time indicted one term wonder--let it EVER be said--until those stats are somehow adjusted) Trump decided to tell us he was going to root out the leftist vermin. Yes, very much echoing Hitler. It's very much shades of : "First they came for the socialists".  (For supporting Biden, I guess "trade unionists" might even be next on his list. His ruminations are all too familiar and frightening. Some of his associates talk about "shock troops"--very knowingly.) 

The Liberty Mommies Got Too Comfortable (UPDATED)

 

The Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty's first newsletter, which was posted on Facebook last night, quoted Adolf Hitler. Here's what you need to know. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/vCW9wfzJyM

— IndyStar (@indystar) June 22, 2023

They apologized*, but it wasn't an accident. It was an accident on purpose to just let the mask slip and see who responds.  The SPLC is right, they aren't any different from the Proud Boys (who they do hang with). And leaving aside the Orwellian name (whose "Liberty" is anti-LGBT book banners for?), the idea that any child's mind is "owned" is appalling. They complain about indoctrination in schools--they only want their own special kind of indoctrination.

Only fascists and complete imbeciles would think they are good faith actors. 

UPDATE: I wanted to get back to what constitutes an apology*, though: the organization Tweeted that the newsletter should not have quoted Hitler without condemning him, but it's the fault of the lying media that it was presumed that their quote was intended favorably. I mean, really? Because Mary Miller used that very same quote saying "Hitler was right about one thing..." and used it to say the unspoken bit aloud: yes indoctrination, but our indoctrination. This isn't even the first time for the mommies.

Sometimes Celebrities are Stupid People

 

Today, the artist currently known as "Ye" went on Alex Jones' show and made a man who owes about a trillion dollars in defamation money and has only ever doubled down on his assholery actually become very uncomfortable like "Okay Jewish space lasers and Jewish weather machines we can takl about, but this shit--this is too far!" 

And just like with the infamous dinner with notorious edge lord former president Trump, Ye brought Nick Fuentes, who the Balenciaga-balaclava'd rapper really seems to like. 

But not as much as he likes Hitler, amirite? I mean, we have known this, but he was just blossoming with love for the guy who apparently invented highways and microphones.  And whose culpability for the Holocaust is just, like, your opinion. 

Don't get too deep into this. Yes, this is a racist man who happens to be Black. This is a conspiracy theorist spouting nonsense. This is a disturbing glimpse into the faux-cancellation/Streisand-effect pipeline, where admonition raises a profile enormously among the exact people you would rather not be subject to 1) disinfo and 2) anymore reason to ignorantly pill themselves over some bullshit. 

But I don't think I'm reaching too hard to point this one idea out: Ye is obviously grasping onto fascism/Hitler/Trump as a way to express where he is right now--hating. He wants disapprobation. He wants revilement. 

And as for me, Wilco. 

But to get where he is, you have got to be astoundingly uninformed. Like mind-bogglingly dumb. Like flat-earth-accepting, how the fuck do magnets work dumb. 

And it's okay. the dumbasses walk among us all the time. It's when people live their whole lives and never read Clockwork Orange or know what the movie is about and decide it's about something it isn't and don't know Stanley Kubrick is Jewish. 

Or maybe he knows better and decided not to care. Fash aren't fans of facts. 

People can excuse what Kanye West is doing by talking about his apparent mental illness or divorce or whatever. I think he's just dumb and recognizes he gets attention for being dumb out loud and on purpose.

But this is really not a long-term pose and also, too, nice job giving up on Parler--after the careful cultivation by Candace Owens.  I don't think we need to see or talk about him anymore.

Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling Buds of May

 

Meanwhile on Russian state TV, military experts are concerned that Russia's current economy is unfit to meet the needs of its Armed Forces. One expert advocated the urgent need to move on to "military socialism" and a "wartime economy," with government in charge of everything. pic.twitter.com/vQf9uSV4Pr

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) May 7, 2022

There's a terrible thing to note, which is that everything old is a little bit new again in Russia, and "Zed" seems to stand for what once was deemed dead. It might be to encourage confidence in the Soviet surplus materiel being dispensed to the folks who have been deployed to what is starting to look like a meat-grinder for under-prepared and over-enthused youths. But the understanding that Putin's sockpuppets are now suggesting that people get onboard with a reality their grandparents/great-grandparents well understood suggests a kind of bottoming out. 

We seldom refer to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact I think in the US education system in high school history because our education system seldom advances US history students past the Gilded Age and laissez-faire economics (and never really talks about the labor movement except as a sidebar--the schools are full of the descendants of wage slavery and actual slavery, and we all know who doesn't want people to get ideas about that) and we like to think Yalta wasn't another cynical turkey-carving exercise. The detritus of colonialism, the fallout of fuckups. 

I believe, because I am not a dumbass, that people learning from history is an improvement because we are building upon what came before when we take these lessons to heart. However, strongmen, because they are dumbasses, try to use history as an exercise they would very much like to repeat because if it happened before it could work for them again, and they never learn from downfalls. Putin is living this lie. He thinks he can rectify Stalin. He can be the ultimate patriot if he makes Russia Great Again. 

He is destroying what is good, though. The Russia of Sakharov and Shostakovich should tell us that great Russian people were held back from what they might have been. And I tremble to think what Putin and his trembling hand has in store because it is easier to destroy than build anything. And Putin wants a legacy, and he has built so little. And there is so much he could destroy--just to make a mark, 

He won't prosper. But failures are also a kind of mark. And can be most terrible.