Trump Revealed Himself at the Debate

This. This is Donald Trump's America. https://t.co/wld2mmGTwe

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 30, 2020

When given an opportunity to condemn white supremacy, Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" because something needed to be done about antifa. I think he may genuinely see them as his Black Shirts, and that is horrific.

Trump supporters and Trump himself have tried to gaslight us a bit about whether he said there were "very fine people on both sides". At this debate, it's clear to me who he sees as "his people."

The debate was a shitshow. Trump was belligerent and interrupted frequently and lied about as much as one might suspect. He blathered about the dirty California forests being the reason for the yearly wildfires and threatened about the potential deprivations of the Green New Deal. But the most important thing he demonstrated is that he is not now and will never be a president for the whole of America. There are, in fact, whole swathes of it, people in Democratic cities, in particular, that he despises.

What I hear, and what the Proud Boys themselves are hearing, is Trump telling them they'll have their time. And, just like Trump saying he'll accept the results of a "free and fair election"--he's not giving us too many illusions that that means anything other than whether he says it's time, or whether he considers something fair. He's been hinting at Civil War for a long time, appearing at times heedless to the violence that his language could cause, but maybe he is not actually altogether unaware of the potential for violence, just unbothered.

In the way he is unbothered by 205,000 Americans dead by COVID-19, bothered only when the blame threatens to settle on him?

We can not be disheartened by this rhetoric. How can he say he loves this country when he would see it burn? When he would see it's people hurt, divided, weakened? He doesn't. I can't think that he does, when he speaks like this.

Huh! Well-Known Racist is, In Fact, Racist.

CNN had Richard Spencer on the air less than 4 months ago.

This audio leaked by Milo on his YT channel, includes Spencer saying "Little fucking k*kes, they get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons... My ancestors enslaved those pieces of fucking shit." pic.twitter.com/KeBTrseXZA

— Avi Bueno (@Avi_Bueno) November 4, 2019

I don't have any hard and fast rule regarding Nazi-punching (except if you do, you should do so both hard and fast) but I will say regarding this clip that if you scratch an alt-right personality....well, you're off to a hell of a start. The mainstream media has had a kind of soft-focus lens deal regarding these folks, but it is what it is.

In the Bubble with Fox and Some Friends

Just to resurrect the Fox Mushroom Farm notion for a bit, a recent survey suggests that the garbage news that the Fox Channel provides skews it's viewers more to the right, against climate change science, and pro-Trump. 

Not a shocker, there. Fox News has been in display as particularly problematic lately, regarding popular host Tucker Carlson, for instance, who is a real big hit with white supremacists for some reason, and Jeanine Pirro, who has been suspended from tv for another Saturday night after some extremely anti-Islamic comments. Also Laura "Sieg Heillo Kitty" Ingraham has been deeply suspect with regards to promoting the kind of replacement theory chanted at Charlottesville and which allegedly motivated the Christchurch shooter.  Fox also filters conspiracy theories from the fever swamps upwards to the mainstream, like promoting a Tweet from Qanon. 

Social media is often noted as a vector for radicalization, and this is both part of the strategies of such groups trucking in violence and disinfo, and part of the algorithms that control what people see online. Fox has actually been boycotting Twitter for some reason--and I have not missed them. 

I think people can be extremely online without becoming extremists. But I don't think they can be extremely fond of propagandists and do so. And it has never been more clear how much Fox is actually propaganda. 

The NRA is About "Gun Safety" You Guys

Someone sent me this image of the latest copy of NRA's magazine, featuring a story with the words "Target Practice" next to a photo of Nancy Pelosi with Gabby Giffords. Maybe don't do this @NRA. pic.twitter.com/u9fQhxwEyk

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) February 22, 2019

When I saw this Tweet I was reminded of Thomas Ten Bears' comment on my last post about Sarah Palin's crosshairs and the damage done. The potential provocation of that ad campaign was not ever really directly connected to the gun rampage made by Jared Loughner, but to my mind, the idea that the language and imagery could be taken literally and not figuratively has always loomed large not because her particular symbolism was especially egregious or different from far-right discourse, but because of how much it was part of the same militant and culture war (heavy on the war, maybe not so heavy on the culture) and gun-specific references that feature in right wing media altogether. When Sarah Palin sued The New York Times (recently called "an enemy of the people" by Donald Trump) the court dismissed her continued "blood libel" whinge. Apparently, a failure to be treated as a free speech martyr is the worst consequence she will face, and that's fair enough. But an examination of inflammatory discourse seems pretty timely in light of the current environment--the rise in far right wing terrorism and hate crime.

I don't think it's wrong to say that the NRA has evolved from gun safety and education and being a general proponent of second amendment rights, to being a political monster that supports the Republican party (or is just very necessarily supported by Republican candidates because you can't be a real Republican if you aren't NRA cleared, so...) and that NRA rhetoric has gotten very...extra in the digital age. But the connection between the group that explicitly supports the second amendment seems to thrive on its connection to the folks that think they have reasons to stockpile weapons, and that's really concerning. Call it the "Chekhov's gun" of politics--you show people being really concerned about using weapons and buying loads of them in the first act, and you should be expecting them to use them, eventually.

The reason this is exceptionally egregious right now, though, is that the same weapons-stockpiling formerly anti-government violence-oriented types are gravitating to pro-government so long as it's their sort of folks--and the violence they want to bring isn't really good for democracy or peace. I mentioned in my post on Christopher Hasson that Fox News has been talking about civil war, but it's strange to really consider how long they've been at it--years, and how they try to underplay the activities of violent groups even now. (Sooooo not new, though, their acceptance of violence, as they for a bit--I don't think all that recently, though--had G. Gordon Liddy as a Fox News panelist, even though he advocated for the smart use of firearms against G-men, of which he once was one, although to be explicitly honest, not a very good one.)

But to bring this all back around to Trump and his associates, one of the not terribly funny things about the Roger Stone circus is that the guys he has in his circle? Are the alt-right fashy Proud Boys. Your basic Brownshirts reimagined in polos and chinos. I don't rightly know if that flatters PBs or insults them. Meh.

Anyway, the NRA probably laundered Russian money to who knows how many Republican candidates, but somehow are a proto-nationalist front and all they really seem to want is to arm bunches of folks to...fuck some shit up so badly that more guns are always needed. Which is a pretty amazing deviation from the bunch of hunting enthusiasts we used to think the NRA was about back in the day, right?

Also right-wing oriented media is a vector for brain worms and leads to just ridiculous Q-Anon and other assorted bullshit. Lara Logan and other people who say shit like "read Breitbart" should know that lefties do, but only enough to be sick, not enough to get literal brain damage.

A Matter of Speaking

There have been two episodes of absolute communications-failure that have happened lately that I think expressed dangerous anti-Semitic tropes (whether inadvertently or not) and are truly regrettable, but should, I hope, teach something. (And not to the same degree.)

One of these things was when Turning Point's Candace Owens blathered about nationalism and felt she had to use Hitler and National Socialism as her example, which ignorantly resulted in her sort of forgetting that scapegoating a minority population and exterminating them was a large part of the nationalist domestic policy of Hitler's Germany. She let on that she felt the problem wasn't so much what Hitler wanted to do in his own country but just the way he exported it. A thing just isn't national if it goes "international" am I right? Which gave off the grim idea that she didn't find the "Vernichtung durch arbeit" (where "arbeit macht frei" means through death) entirely condemnable except when it was franchised, to, say Poland, or....

For a communications person repping Turning Point, she had a pretty serious communication problem if she only understood the nationalism she wanted to represent via the literal worst and most murderous example. She could have expressed nationalism in the actual immediate founding sense of Garibaldi for Italy or the unification of Germany under Bismarck, or even the Young Ireland movement. But no, she went to Hitler. This is how I know American children just don't learn world history--and it well should settle whether Turning Point speakers actually have anything to show a broader audience. (They do not. They do not know, in fact, actual shit. But they may have made more money at not knowing shit than I did at their age actually knowing shit with an entire liberal arts degree and doing retail work, so basically, I hate them body and soul. Except you could not have paid me to ever say the things they do even when I was living off dollar store beans in my 20s.)

The other thing was when recently sworn Congressperson Ilhan Omar made a Twitter commentary to the effect that the RW in this country is beholden to the "Benjamins" of pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC. Everything about the way she said this was flippant and a bit insensitive. I don't know that in essence, what she said was factually entirely wrong--AIPAC is a broadly influential political group--but expressing their influence solely in terms of money was wrong, and I would say the kind of abbreviated wrong that Twitter definitely lends itself to. 

Invite Fleas, Expect a Flea Circus

The Metropolitan Republican Club seems to think they had a problem regarding antifascists protesting , leaving meaniegrams, and tagging their establishment for no great reason, but after seeing their special invited guests, the Proud Boys, who have a pretty shitty reputation for head bashing, doing some head bashing (as they do a lot) I'm of the mind that this particular Republican club might have baited the antifascists by having fashy folk right there. Surely, an Antifa/antifap to-do was going to ensue. 

This is what they do. They attract people who also might like bashing heads.  It is hard, then, to feel strictly bad for the hosts of a fashy group for having gotten Antifa attention. 

There was a way not to do that--not invite them in the first place. But hearing them point out that what the Proud Boys say is more or less what one might expect from a more traditional conservative, such as Ann Coulter, is, well, priceless. 

This is Getting to be a Disturbing Pattern

How is it possible that the ScaramucciPost does not yet understand this is not cool, not a game, and leading down a really anti-Semitic path...by now?


I mean:

Please vote & retweet. Do not let Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites control this poll.

Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. https://t.co/3ljJlK3G6M

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) October 20, 2017

It feels like it's being done for attention.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher Believes Weird Shit

I think it's really weird that one of California's few Republican Congresscritters, Dana Rohrabacher, possibly on the Russian payroll and definitely not properly housetrained,  thinks Charlottesville was a set-up of pore ole innocent Civil War re-enactors by dirty liberal scum.

No, really:

Under Rohrabacher’s scenario, a former “Hillary and Bernie supporter” got Civil War re-enactors to gather under the guise of protecting a Robert E. Lee statue there.

“It was a setup for these dumb Civil War re-enactors,” Rohrabacher said. “It was left-wingers who were manipulating them in order to have this confrontation” and to “put our president on the spot.”

This wasn't even the first rally under the "Unite the Right" banner, which was totally about known alt-right and white supremacist personalities. The above poster was part of the on-line advertising of the rally in question. Ignoring the work that folks like Matt Heimbach, Richard Spencer, and Jason Kessler have done to actually carve out a space for white supremacy to pretend that they were mislead somehow is simply astonishing. Yes, Virginia, there are actual white supremacists. Apparently West Coast elitist Dana Rohrabacher has never met any! But they were proud and loud that day. Shouting things like "Jews will not replace us" which is not, as I recall, a Civil War war-cry. What world is he living in?

Which is pretty much what you'd expect of a Taliban-loving Russia-pwned Bill Maher-show appearing nutburger..

The Rime of the RW Radio-Listener

I'm going to forgo a discussion on the big crowd of anti-racist protestors who converged in Boston with the intent of countering a so-called "alt-lite" (AHEM!) "free speech" (AHEM! AHEM!) rally, because I don't know what there is to even say. No one on the anti-racist side was anti-freedom of speech, they just understood that the rally in question, on the heels of what happened in Charlottesville, had to be met with numbers.

It was, and well-done, and even Trump realized he couldn't turn this into an "OMG Leftist anti-cops and stuff!" thing. (Not that some digital a-holes aren't going to try it on. There's a lot of photo-shops out there trying to hang up antifa as worse than they are--I recommend taking any picture of so-called anti-racism or leftist violence with a grain--some of the photos are from Occupy anarchist crashers years back. In general, leftist skull crackers isn't the problem with these rallies.)

Nah. I want to go back in the Wayback machine to reminisce about a wedding I went to circa 1996 or 1997. I was on my first marriage, and the bride was a cousin of my ex's. I was in my maxi-length empire waist navy blue Wanamaker's favorite all-purpose looking awesome dress--I loved this article of clothing. I kid you not, it was the perfect cut and fabric (stretchy) for a curvy person who wanted to look modest and sophisticated and I wore that thing to weddings, and job interviews and work and damn! I really wish I still had a dress like that in my wardrobe.  Navy is the greatest of stealth neutrals! I was chilling around the pool at the hotel in Wildwood at the wedding after-party where drinks and a Viennese table with pinenut cookies and cake and finger foods and whatnot were available, and I found myself in political conversation with someone who marked me out as a liberal.

"Well, I know you are a Clinton-fan" I think, was his actual words. The wedding-guest who stopped me was a short, stout, 1990's era Van Dyke (people who call it a goatee are wrong, because that refers to a beard only--the circle-beard is actually a Van Dyke) early-adopter. "Say what?" I improvised, caught flat at the idea that I literally wore my bleeding-heart liberalism in my sleeve. Was it my wire-rim specs? Something about the insouciance of my long-banged Rachel cut?

"Have you heard about the Clinton death count?"

"Vince Foster and who else?" I snapped back, as if to show I was aware of all internet memes, in an era when internet memes were not yet really a thing.

Which Side are You on? (Trump?)

I could spend time breaking down President Trump's bizarre press nightmare, but I don't really fucking care what he said today. He was saying it all along, but some people just weren't paying attention. Hillary Clinton gave an entire speech about Trump and the so-called "alt-right" almost a year ago, and I thought the case she made was solid and apparent--my bad. It turns out, someone like Donald Trump can be a lifelong racist surrounding himself with other racists, and people will actually pretend they don't notice. That shocked me more than it should have, I will admit.

But then again, I am a funny old thing--I believe Americans should kill fascists. 

Look at the header of my blog--"This blog kills fascists. Eventually. It's a process I'm working on. Be patient with me." That header is a call-back to Woody Guthrie, who just forthrightly put "This machine kills fascists" on his guitar. My blogging isn't up to Woody Guthrie's songwriting, but I aspirationally hope I'm doing my bit. I'm not going to kick fascist ass all at once, but I will attempt it. Like I thought it was my job. 

And what do you know--Guthrie had his dealings and complaints about Old Man Trump (Donald's daddy).  Donald Trump started the hell off in this life Team Racist and fascist-associated. (No really, I'm not linking The Nation and I don't want to say Roy Cohn was such a fascist, but am I pretending Roy Cohn was not a fascist? Go--read Politico. McCarthyism is fascism. It doesn't matter that Cohn was a gay Jew. Demonizing and destroying and doubling-down and publically lying about everything? Shit's fascist. )

This blog is rooted in the mid-20th century ideas that Keynes rocked, that civil rights for all were a positive good, and that we all are supposed to stand against fascists. It's what the good people do. It's what Churchill and FDR did. (Stalin--I don't know him.)

It's what heroes are supposed to do. 

In the United States of America, where I thought I was living, Nazis are stupid and bad at best and are history's worst monsters because of course they are.  I mean, who demonizes and singles out ethnic minorities and gay and trans people and religious minorities  and disabled people and tries to codify into law ways to make the oppression of these people permanent? 

Oh, right. Trump. Because he is what he is. (And let's not actually "go there" and pretend his honesty is refreshing-it's shit. I don't expect people to eat shit and smile. You like this? You like eating shit, and there's something fundamentally wrong with you.) 

We are supposed to see Dictators as bad and even clowns in this society.

Hitler and those who are Hitler-adjacent are supposed to be targets of our scorn, not our admiration. People waving Swastika flags are not okay--ever.  You should expect better. The people who would easily accept standing right by them--are not okay either. And this Confederate thing--kind of fascist, also too, with the added problem of being treason against the US in the defense of bondage-slavery, because read the actual articles of secession of the states in question. Yes, it was always about slavery, not states' rights. Because it was about states' having the right to endorse slavery. Because the South was like, "Screw it" with respects to Northern States' feels about the Fugitive Slave Acts, which made catching free human (black) bodies and delivering them back into a pernicious bondage incumbent upon people who didn't want any part of it. Which was obviously fuckery. Northern states had to comply with making black people slaves, and the South at first simply didn't give a shit if the Federal law was about determining what states were free--but then when GOP President Lincoln happened, they had a total freak-out and got scared he'd take away their bondage humans. 

Wow. Fucking snowflakes. Makes you wonder why the Party of Lincoln is being all about Confederate statues now, doesn't it?

Terrorism Happened Here--Call it That

When a car apparently intentionally plows into a group of people participating in a counter-protest to the Nazi shindig in Charlottesville, it should be pretty obvious that you should call it terrorism, and disavow it, and condemn that sort of thing. Many politicians recognized at once the enormity of the situation, and called for the event to be treated as the terror that it was intended to be.  This was the obvious response, the necessary response. Bigotry and violence are a bad and unnecessary combination in a diverse nation where we value free speech. The counter-protestors had all the same rights as the so-called "alt-right" protestors (although I prefer to just think of them as Nazis, because, well, what they do, say and think). 

Our president, though, decided to make a comment condemning violence "on many sides".  How utterly inadequate of the man.  As if there was a movement that somehow used violence against white supremacy on the regular. None such exists. And yet, look at what the Trump Administration has stood for--they choose to ignore right wing extremism in favor of Islamic terror, even though RW extremism is more of a threat.  Recently, Sebastian Gorka, a guy whose functional White House position is not entirely clear and who might not even have a security clearance, held forth on the idea that maybe we shouldn't be so hard on white supremacists and that the idea of "lone wolf" terror ops was mostly bullshit. Every bit of that couldn't actually be more wrong. 

Trump's weird use of the term "on many sides" makes it seem like anti-racist or anti-fascist groups also were indulging in violence. He attributes the counter-protestors' existence as provocation enough for what happened to them? He blames the people standing up to hate as being also biased? His flabby response heartened the so-called "alt-right" (Nazis) by letting them believe he loves them too much to attribute blame to them. 

President Obama was regularly accused of appeasement. I have always maintained that this was a word deployed by people who did not understand the nuances of power, and would not know "appeasement" for "détente". But I have no problem seeing Trump as appeasing the white racists who helped elect him, in much the same way as I see appeasement in his stance on Russian sanctions, and his supposedly sarcastic "thanking" of Putin for the supposed reduction in his State Department staff in Russia. 

Trump is a stupid weakling who supports bias and hate, domestic terrorism, and entertains delusions of us making nice with a foreign power who means to undermine us. And any person who ever used the "appeasement" line regarding Obama, but supports Trump right now, is shit. (This would also include people saying the exact right things about domestic terror and against the Nazis gathered in Charlottesville. Say the exact right things all you want--but what are you doing about the birther your party made happen to our country? What standard do you even hold him to?)

The rise of Trump, the so-called "Trump Effect", is definitely a factor in reinforcing racist bias and emboldening hate groups to believe they can operate without fear. We need to call it that. We need to see an end to Trumpism. And that means ending Trump. 

 

Look! Nazis!

I think when you get right down to the Nazi salutes and the "You (jew) will not replace us" rhetoric, you just have to go ahead and call these people "Nazis". This isn't an "white working class economic insecurity" thing--this is just racism and brutality. The alt-right isn't new.  It's a resurgence of the same old racism with a grotesque twist. People who claim they are joking with the "Sieg Heil" and "lugenpresse" talk aren't actually joking, they just want to ignore that this is the direction they are silly-walking their way towards. 

But when "blood and soil" and all that rot come up in earnestness, pay attention to who still carries the torch and who they are carrying it for. It isn't humorous at all.

Now, Live From the Thunderdome, Julius Caesar by Billy Shakes

Just a little background--prior to the play written by William Shakespeare, an Elizabethan playwright and possibly political pundit (no, really, how else explain all the "Henry" plays?), in about 1599, which is over 400 years ago, there was an actual guy called Gaius Julius Caesar, who was a general in the Roman Republic who became a dictator and was assassinated. The play derives from the historical events. This was about 2,000 years ago. He really was assassinated. Being assassinated is not a modern thing. Kings and Emperors and all kinds of leaders have been going out that way for millennia. Go read Frazer's The Golden Bough. Literary and historical long story short: folks come at a king. But they best not miss. Or it does not go well with them.

There has been a recent foofaraw regarding the decision of the New York Public Theater to stage the 400+ year old play in modern garb--even though staging Shakespeare's plays this way to make them seem timely is a long-observed trick.  The same was done with Obama. The same was done with other US presidents. It is, for the most part, just a statement updated for the times. The message of the play remains the same--don't fuck with violently disturbing the civil order, or worse will follow in it's wake. Cassius and Brutus aren't heroes in Julius Caesar, they are displayed as petty and divisive insecure men who carry out this act because the fault was not in the stars but in themselves. 

So when a couple alt-right goobers try to disrupt the play in the name, ironically, of free speech? Or something? I cringe at their pitiable education. I'm not sure you can rep for Western Civilization when you actually display no depth of understanding of it. And I am not sure how you play at being for freedom of speech when you are scared of this ancient and accepted speech that has been happening without your asses for years. Welcome to the conversation: now shut up and learn.

Obviously, we've established that updating Shakespeare is just a thing. (I personally fell asleep during a viewing of Richard III set in the 1930's with the outstanding Ian McKellan, Annette Bening, and a host of my actual favorite actors.). Dire cinematic representations of current or more-recent leaders are nothing new, though. When Shakespeare was doing his thing, his historical British monarchs were commentary on the current ones. Today, we can argue whether Olympus Has Fallen was meant as a commentary on Obama. There was even a fake docudrama based on George W. Bush called Death of a President. It was not pro-assassination--in that narrative, things became more authoritarian as Cheney came into power.

A play is the thing to capture the conscience of a king. How the in-group treats free speech, art, derision, the free press, says a lot about how secure the "King" must feel. I do not think this would-be King is very secure, based on how his followers cavort. They are jesters all, that say him mortal. The play Julius Caesar wreathing Trump in an actual warrior's laurels does him an honor he never earned. To have him seen as executed for growing too powerful, and not because his Tweeting became a danger to himself and others, is a favor.

One truly great actor, Marlin Brando, played the Godfather and Marcus Anthony.  Trump is a reality tv guy--no Brando. But he seems at times to reflect Godfather values, and Caesar tragedy. He is Fredo and Brutus. Gifted with momentary power, and likely to fuck it up. He seems a cautionary fable in the making.