The Spirit of 2016 and the Illegal Meme

 

For some people, it's never stopped being 2020, and for the immuno-suppressed and their families, I get that. For me, it's never stopped being 2016, when begun, the meme wars were. The 2016 presidential election had an extraordinary amount to do with digital presence, and I don't think we've yet absorbed all of the lessons from how foreign influencers and Pepe-heads took over the conversation and suppressed part of the vote or rendered the importance of the franchise to "vibes". 

I have talked about the Brad Parscale/Internet Research Agency dual strategies at targeted voter suppression a few times in the course of TrumpWorld Grab-Bags because the similarities in tactics were tandem and synergetic. The Trump campaign in 2016 deliberately worked to target Black voters and peel them off of from the Democratic candidate. The same thing was done with the IRA. 

So if we take a look at recently convicted Douglass Mackey, who created voter suppression memes during 2016 as part of his online "Ricky Vaughn" persona, we see an individual not necessarily directly associated with a campaign or foreign influence, who nonetheless tried to influence an election through fraud. The text message, the option to vote via text, was inauthentic. The line was real, if not a valid way to vote. 

Unintended Consequences

Although the Trump Administration is coloring an upcoming executive order that will redefine Judaism as a nationality rather than a religion as a means of combating anti-Semitism, I'm deeply skeptical. A nationality implies that all persons considered "Jewish" are of a particular nation--presumably Israel, but this doesn't take into account that American Jews are American, and hail from many different geographical areas. It isn't just a way of blurring out the identity of Jews as Americans, but it feels a little like a form of erasure of the diversity of the diaspora. 

Also, it is a mistake to associate disagreement with the policies of a nation, Israel, in the form of its current government, with a hatred for Jewish people--these things are quite different. Americans are not a monolith, and American Jews are not a monolith; there is diversity of opinion, which includes proponents of BDS regarding the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli territory. This move appears to conflate freedom of speech against policies with hate speech against people--it limits freedom of political speech and action in a way that is shocking for an administration that found there were good people on "both sides" of a conflict where one side chanted "Jews will not replace us." (And whose greatest apologists on Fox News often cite Soros conspiracy theories.)

It also perpetuates a trope about dual allegiance by Jewish people to their home country and their larger identity as Jews. There is nothing about this that will not have unintended consequences, but the Trump Administration being what it is, I struggle to understand which parts are the fully unintended ones.  Singling out people by nationality simply has a bad historical precedent. This administration has tried a Muslim ban and centered it on certain countries, and has detained people of many countries who seek immigration or asylum under heinous conditions. I don't like the looks of this lurch towards Nuremberg.

Representative King Defends His Tired Racism

If there is anything so sad as a phone-picture of a printed out self-defense for one's racism resulting in the loss of committee seats, referring to that as an assault on "Freedom of Speech", and including a thumb, I guess it would have to be something especially self-congratulatory and insufficient as, maybe, a president hosting championship award-winning athletes at the White House during a government shut down with some room temperature fast food served on good silver and china, but without benefit of even chafing dishes and sterno. Which would be especially sad if that same president was connected to a local hotel with a kitchen that could possibly have catered even a basic business convention chicken dinner with more class. It would have to be something as pitiably late and un-self aware as an until just-now anti-LGBT, pro-Assad and pro-torture candidate thinking an apology will make her a viable Democratic presidential candidate. It would have to be...

But wait. What we have is long-time embarrassing racist Steve King, recently re-elected to his congressional seat in Iowa's 4th District, finally getting told he's a little too much. Huh! Because he said that he didn't understand when phrases like "white supremacist" became dirty words. I've talked about his racism on this blog a few times, because it affects a lot of what he says and does.  It could be a good sign that he is being censured after a fashion just now, but he was supported right through his re-election being the same exact racist guy! Prior to just now, he was supporting Faith Goldy, who is pretty openly white supremacist, and reiterated the Soros tropes that were part of the toilet-seat culture that influences the Squirrel Hill shooter. Prior to his election, he lost corporate support from several companies--but just now the GOP wants to distance themselves from King's rhetoric? What about that support Joni Ernst and Ted Cruz and Chuck Grassley gave him?

Well, what about the support that the GOP still gives to Donald Trump? Because if they don't especially love what Rep. King has been saying, the funny old thing is, Trump says quite a lot of the same. King's rant about somebody else's babies being unfit to carry forward western civilization is aligned to a recent tweet from Trump of a Pat Buchanan column that suggests that immigration will cause the United States to cease to exist. Buchanan is an old man, and I still am furious about the time I heard him speak about a "culture war" at the RNC and knew he was talking about a war on me. When Trump Tweeted that (well, someone tweeted, because I don't think Trump has this reference) that Buchanan should not go gentle into that good night, I almost thought for an instant the sumbitch might be dead. But my hopes all around account for little.  Buchanan and his ideas live. Trump and his administration can be considered pretty much pro VDARE, and still pro Steve King, and when Steve King describes the label he has as racist as "worn out" he is quite wrong, because the label of "racist" will not actually be worn out until folks like him have faded away. And even still it will remain necessary as a warning.

If I were still in any sense an optimist, I might want to believe that what happened was a reckoning for the GOP, and that Rep. Kevin McCarthy is a braver and more honest man than Paul Ryan had been (not a hard feat) and has drawn a line in the sand that needed to be made.

But if I don't believe that, it is because folks like Senator Ted Cruz can't quite disavow King, and maybe might support him again in the future, should the occasion that they need his support in Iowa (1st state in the presidential primaries) arise. And they certainly have shown no inclination to disavow President Trump at all, whatever hand-wringing over his Tweets and his cruder language might go on.

And as for King, he nonetheless won his election, and for now, is still representative of some portion of the state of Iowa, intentionally, on purpose. Will the majority of his district, less than two years from now, realize what he is and decide they don't care for it? Will his primary opponent be a less bigoted, but still conservative, better option?

I can't say I know the answers to these things, but I think they matter very much. It has to matter that words like "Nazi" and "fascist" and "white supremacist" have meanings, and those meanings impact how human beings are treated--not the people called those things, when called them correctly, but the people who are harmed by those ideologies and whose rights necessitate we call bad things by their proper names.

I'm Not Mad: I'm Organized

One of the tropes engaged by the pro-Kavanaugh side, which won, and to them, all due congratulations and warm salutations! was the idea that the people who were present to provide direct protest to his nomination and confirmation were paid, possibly by George Soros, because no person in the history of ever would be morally opposed to a political operative credibly-accused of being a sex pest whose wholly partisan elevation was given the go-ahead with the clearance of an FBI (Fig leaf-Backed Inquiry) investigation. I'm of a differing mindset, of course. 

I hold that problems can bite you no matter how tightly you close your eyes to them. And I also posit that any singular thing that escaped investigation prior to Kavanaugh's Supreme Court installment will by no means go unheard in the post-installment era. On the contrary--there will be a sense of personal investment in whether future information is heard, as it might not have ever been had only a fully coherent and comprehensive vetting taken place (to pre-squash all relevant opposition instead of letting it become a festering and divisive thing).

Yes, this is the post of a dedicated cynic--what I'm really decrying here is that all of this Kavanaugh shit seems so lazy. He's an operative and a hack, a Bush appointment to the Federal bench for reasons and a child of privilege. I am certainly not claiming that the Trump administration would ever give us better! But in the handling of the whole deal I'm pissed at played by an amateur hand. The Trump admin could have made sure more docs from Kavanaugh's time as a federal employee were released so it looked less like info was being hidden, and since even McConnell knew full and well Kavanaugh was a part of the Pickering and Pryor judgeships' vetting, why not be more forthcoming? Are we really supposed to be dead shocked about any conservative POV's coming from a conservative jurist? So much of the handling here was bad stagecraft--as if wanting to get liberals pissed at the lack of transparency. Trust--this process could have gone smoother.

I also wonder who exactly was the aide who leaked Dr. Ford's info. I am not wholly certain it was only Diane Feinstein's people who were aware it existed, anymore than I credit this gap in knowledge with the presence of the girl's teams Kavanaugh coached at his hearing and the initial letter of 65 female students of schools about his era, and the asseverations of his good-guy status from assorted clerks that he boosted. They look, in retrospect, like an inoculation from being called a creep in the advent of future revelations. 

There was no good faith in his selection about whether he would be an impartial voice. There was no impartiality regarding whether Dr. Ford or any other person willing to give testimony against his character would be heard--these people were always going to be marked as being mistaken or partisan for trying it. The voices of the disbelieved and believed too late, the voices of real women and men who, like Dr. Ford, wanted to just be heard out, who protested for and about her, were secondary to the process of getting this one guy on his SCOTUS seat. The Republicans gave lipservice to "believing something happened to her" but disbelieved her actual statement as 100% to whom it pertained. They fell in with the Whelenist "mistaken identity" doctrine, as flawed as it was.  And yet, that theory revealed a bit too much--it could not have existed had someone not been tipped off about details of the event that everyone (Republican) wants to pretend did and did not happen. Just as they want to pretend the Yale Ramirez claims have no merit, even if Kavanaugh appeared to be doing work to get in front of them.

I'm just a poor old non-Soros-funded blogger who even took a long-ass break this year to not blog for my mental clarity. It sure does look to me like every GOP step, even Flake's request for investigation and Susan Collin's false ambivalence and later, utterly shameful, political obituary speech, was calculated to incense liberals. The advancement of Kavanaugh was always a foregone conclusion, and any stall was by the leave of GOP senators who could then pretend they were being very big, after all. Big as fuck. For not just saying, "This is our man" and moving altogether on, with all the not-filibuster-needing majority they got. 

It was GOP base rallying theater. It was furthering the line that it was the dangerous leftists who are elevator-cornering political theater dramatists, snowflakes and screamers, who bullied and doxed and otherwise were pests and made the "conservatives" too uncomfortable to hear them out, and actually forced them to approve of Kavanaugh. 

To all the protestors--you did great and are great. Your stories matter, and their justifications for why you were ignored and your concerns went unheard stay about them, not you. You are loved and admired by me, forever, and you stay blameless and whole because no motherfucker can take away what is best about you. You are you, and nothing takes away that simple, beautiful thing, you only have experiences that are shit, and shit comes to shit people who make that their way. You did not make Kavanaugh happen by existing, protesting or telling your stories. But the GOP mindset, at present, made your stories their reason to let a political hack be their best chance. And made you the enemy. Made me, too, for opposing him. 

They will say the shrieking leftists and their presence and protest made the Kavanaugh swearing in their goal, and feel good--I say it means politics will need other means, and the ballot box became the leftist grail as it never was before, because the most direct action is voting. It was why iron-jawed sisters marched and sat in jail cells. It was why voter registration is forever linked to lynching in this country.

Before they can take it away--vote: don't get mad, organize, don't boo, vote. Had only more people voted for Hillary Clinton in PA, WI, etc, we could have had a liberal SCOTUS. And no person in the US would be wondering if reproductive freedom or custody rights, would ever be left in the hands of a rapist. We would not wonder about the future of government subsidized health care, or our rights to vote or marry or be our open gender representation. Because she (the president we could have had) would have had our back. 

I am not mad, and no RW operative has "pwned". But days like today are the greatest call to organization we could ever need.  Vote Democratic everywhere, even if only to preserve the Dem Caucus. The alternative is not unthinkable, it has only become too real.