Authoritarian bak

818 disambiguation

NO MERRI

primary promote 719 on bolsonaro press and active suppress

proto-dictator

see press suppression

bak 1119

capt220

fascism lite

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/senate-republicans-are-implicated-in-trumps-authoritarian-organized-crime-outfit/

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Senate Republicans are implicated in Trump’s authoritarian organized crime outfit

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump disembark Air Force One Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, at El Paso International Airport greeted by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, and El Paso Mayor Dee Margo. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by Joe Conason / Creators Syndicate February 14, 2020

Authoritarian governments almost always operate in a style that resembles organized crime outfits. Despite their ostentatious populism, such regimes exist to enrich thuggish rulers and enable corruption in high places. The Trump administration is a perfect example.

But in order to maintain an aura of legitimacy, especially in a country with democratic norms and traditions, authoritarian bosses constantly proclaim their devotion to justice, their determination to right wrongs, and their adherence to law and order. So even as President Donald Trump and his attorney general, Bill Barr, pervert the legal system to cover up official crimes and protect presidential cronies, they are creating a narrative of justification for those acts.

From the very beginning of the Russia-collusion investigation, Trump has aimed to derail investigations of appointees and associates who might implicate him in criminal activity. He urged James Comey, then the FBI director, to bury the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s unlawful conduct. Then he fired Comey, and later he repeatedly tried to get rid of special counsel Robert Mueller. The Mueller report describes in appalling detail a dozen attempts by Trump to kill the investigation.

At the same time, Trump and his lawyers sent clear messages to all the gang members caught up in the Russia investigation: Don’t talk. We’ll take care of you. They “dangled” pardons to buy silence, with Trump openly considering clemency for the potential witnesses he praised as “brave” and “strong.” His former campaign manager Paul Manafort signed and then violated a cooperation agreement with Mueller. So did Flynn. Longtime adviser and dirty tricks specialist Roger Stone never talked, although he knows everything.

While Trump’s efforts to stop the investigation continued behind the scenes, the public face of his propaganda apparatus declared incessantly that the Russia probe was “a hoax.” Not only was there no reason to investigate Russia; according to Trump, the real culprit in 2016 was Ukraine, which Trump also blamed for framing Manafort. (Discovering, or perhaps inventing, evidence that will “exonerate” Manafort is among the chief preoccupations of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s trips to Ukraine.)

Never mind the meticulously documented findings of nearly every U.S. intelligence agency and official including his own FBI director, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and the Mueller investigation. And never mind the multiple convictions of Flynn, Manafort, Stone and others in Trump’s orbit.

The logic of Trump’s ongoing campaign is plain: If the investigation was a fraud, then the prosecutions of Trump associates that emerged from that investigation were, by definition, unjust. But the president can rectify those “injustices” — by granting pardons to the men who could have testified against him.

It’s as if a mob boss had the authority to pardon any underlings who might implicate him (instead of having them whacked).

Emboldened by the Senate’s impeachment acquittal, despite his obvious guilt, Trump now feels free to fulfill the obstruction conspiracy. He is certain that the Senate Republicans — not to mention his wholly owned attorney general — will do nothing to oppose the brazen scheme. They are all implicated in his criminality now.

By uttering a few little squeaks of protest, they help him create a scrim of normality around his gangsterism. So various senators tut-tutted Trump’s latest intervention in the sentencing of Stone as “inappropriate.” And so, Barr himself complained publicly that Trump’s tweeting about the Stone prosecution makes his job “impossible,” which simply means that Barr and the Republicans prefer assaults on democratic norms to occur in the back room, without too much noise.

When lawful government is restored someday, Trump may have to answer for having misused the pardon power for obstruction of justice. There was firm precedent in the Justice Department’s investigation of former President Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. Until then, the American system of justice and constitutional liberty will remain in the gravest jeopardy.

truscott

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/were-slipping-further-into-fascism-as-trump-indulges-all-his-worst-instincts-with-the-help-of-his-toadies/

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We’re slipping further into fascism as Trump indulges all his worst instincts — with the help of his toadies

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at the 2020 National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020, at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

Written by Lucian K. Truscott IV / Salon February 15, 2020

There will come a time when we look back on this week as the moment in our history when we finally understood that we have a man as president who is acting like a fascist dictator. Just look at the headlines from one day’s New York Times alone: “Alarm in Capital as Axes Swing in Growing Post-Acquittal Purge,” “Justice Dept. Acts to Ease Sentence for a Trump Ally.” If either one of those headlines had run on the front page of a major American newspaper before now, not to mention both of them at once, we would have believed as a people, as a citizenry, that we were facing a national crisis. But this week? Wednesday was just another day in Donald Trump’s America.

The day before that, in what became known as the “Tuesday night massacre,” all four prosecutors in the case against Trump’s longtime friend and political bad boy Roger Stone had resigned in protest of the intervention by Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, to reduce the sentence recommended by the Department of Justice in Stone’s conviction for lying to congressional committees and tampering with witnesses.

All of this followed closely the “Friday night massacre” of last week, when Trump fired two of the impeachment witnesses against him, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council and Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union.

But two “massacres” in a row was just the beginning. By mid-week, Trump was suggesting that Army officials with court-martial authority over Vindman should “take a look at” punishing him for testifying at the impeachment hearing. On Thursday, the New York Times front page trumpeted, “U,S. Lawyers Fear Removal of a Guardrail: Sone Case Stirs Worry of What’s to Come.” And by Friday morning, a panel of legal pundits on MSNBC were worrying about what would happen when Trump didn’t merely step in to help allies like Stone but actually began prosecuting his political foes.

Folks, let’s not mince words: This is the kind of stuff we read about happening in dictatorships like Russia and North Korea and Iran. And yes, it’s the kind of rule by strong-arm fiat that was practiced by Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

Before this week, I would have thought it an exaggeration to compare Trump’s frequent rallies to the infamous Nuremberg rallies Hitler held during the1930s. No longer. Trump’s rallies are unnervingly close to those held in Nuremberg. The MAGA hat has become a kind of Trumpian Nazi  helmet. The denunciations of hated minorities are the same. As is his insane bellowing before a crowd screaming its slavish obeisance.

Let’s just stop for a moment and consider the angry chants of “Lock her up,” first directed at Hillary Clinton, now at Nancy Pelosi.What do Trump’s cheering crowds want his Democratic opponents locked up for? Neither of those women has faced criminal charges, much less been convicted of any crime. Neither is even under investigation for corruption or alleged criminal behavior. But that doesn’t matter to Trump and his rally crowds. This stuff has been going on for so long, it’s clear that they actually do want them locked up. When Trump stands before his screaming fans, raising his arms and smiling, it’s obvious he does, too. To call for the imprisonment of political opponents without trial is not playing with rhetoric for effect. It’s not political gimmickry. It’s not cute. It’s not funny. It’s not clever. Let’s say out loud what it is: It’s pure fascism, plain and simple.

The man who stands before those rallies and encourages such idolatry isn’t merely running for president. He is calling, directly and without apology, for the kind of obedience and loyalty demanded by dictators. He is commanding worship and submission. It must be why he attracts so completely the support of evangelical Christians. He truly is the false idol their Bible warned them against. They have fallen for him in the same way the most conspicuously devout worshipers commit sins. The inevitability of Trump and his evangelical masses is jaw-dropping, and yes, biblical.

By the end of the week, we had the practically comic spectacle of Attorney General Barr scolding Trump publicly for his tweets in an interview with ABC News, saying they “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Within hours, Trump replied — by tweet, naturally enough — that he has the “legal right” to tell Barr what to do in a criminal case, “but I have so far chosen not to!”

Which given the events of the rest of the week is a little bit like reassuring the “Lock her up” minions at his rallies, “Just wait.”

It’s hard to put a finger on the worst thing Trump has done since taking office, but right up there is the complete destruction of the idea that the person in the Oval Office is the president of all the people. He isn’t. He doesn’t want to be. If you didn’t vote for him, if you’re not out there wearing a MAGA hat and screaming at his rallies, you’re a non-person. If your state didn’t go for him in the 2016 election, forget about it. Just ask California, or Puerto Rico, still waiting for federal assistance after natural disasters. Or ask New York, which Trump is now extorting like a domestic Ukraine, by denying New Yorkers access to the “Trusted Traveler” program unless the state “stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment” [sic]....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-thinks-authoritarian-executions-stop-drug-use-but-hes-totally-wrong/

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post impeach djt just ignore courts

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/critics-of-blackwater-mercenary-erik-prince-fear-ag-barr-will-quash-doj-case-against-him-report/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-says-he-has-the-absolute-tight-to-tell-the-justice-department-what-to-do/

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Trump says he has the ‘absolute tight’ to tell the Justice Department what to do

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 11, 2020

President Donald Trump says he has the “absolute right” to direct the Dept. of Justice in who and how it prosecutes, but claims that he didn’t, despite his furious tweet overnight attacking the DOJ and calling prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation of Roger Stone a “miscarriage of justice.”

Trump also called the 7 to 9 year recommendation of jail time for Stone, his ally, confidant, and former campaign advisor, an “insult to our country.” Trump often conflates himself and the nation, as if he is the country.

Saying he did not speak to anyone at DOJ Trump then said, “I’d be able to do it if I wanted I have the absolute right to do it.”

Calling the sentencing recommendation “ridiculous” Trump added, “I thought the whole prosecution was ridiculous.”

“That was a horrible abberition,” he concluded, apparently meaning “aberration.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-roger-stone-debacle-is-a-true-crisis-and-the-house-must-force-bill-barr-to-testify/

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The Roger Stone debacle is a true crisis — and the House must force Bill Barr to testify

Written by Daily Kos February 11, 2020

by Hunter

This cannot go on. Three top prosecutors (which may turn into four) in the Roger Stone case have now withdrawn after Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice ordered them to revise their guideline-based recommendations on Stone’s sentencing. This happened the morning after Donald Trump tweeted that he “cannot allow” the prosecutors’ recommended sentencing of Stone, an ally and key stonewaller in the Robert Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian government hacking in the 2016 elections....

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INFLECTION PT? POST IMPEACH TRIAL

when did he cave to trump cult?

omfg

omg 1st guaido sotu and now:

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/cpac-to-feature-authoritarian-brazilian-politician-eduardo-bolsonaro/

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Organizers of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference portray themselves as lovers of freedom, but among this year’s speakers will be Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s authoritarian President Jair Bolsonaro and the leader of a right-wing party in the Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. In January, the Brazilian government filed criminal charges against American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been a harsh critic of the Bolsonaro administration.

The American Conservative Union, the group that puts on CPAC, heralded the younger Bolsonaro. Tweeting last week about Eduardo Bolsonaro’s planned appearance, ACU chair Matt Schlapp wrote, “In 2019 ACU hosted several international CPAC events, one of which was #CPACbrazil, thanks to @BolsonaroSP. At #CPAC2020 he’ll share how our conservative movement inspires freedom-loving people across the globe & how the US & Brazil can work together to stop socialism.”

But Eduardo Bolsonaro seems keen to “stop socialism” with authoritarianism. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is also the regional representative of former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s global right-wing group The Movement, warned recently that the government could resort to repression to deal with protests and leftists “via a new AI-5.” The Guardian’s Tom Phillips explained:

That was a reference to one of the most traumatic events in recent Brazilian history – December 1968’s Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5) – when Brazil’s military rulers moved to extinguish growing political unrest by indefinitely outlawing freedom of expression and assembly and closing congress.

“The AI-5 was an instrument intended to intimidate people … It allowed the dictatorship to repress all opposition and dissent,” the historians Lilia Schwarz and Heloisa M Starling wrote in their recent “biography” of Brazil.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s comments reportedly shocked many Brazilians, but they aligned with previous statements made by his father, who also served in the legislature before being elected president in 2018 During his presidential campaign, the theme of which was “Brazil before everything, and God above all,” Jair Bolsonaro supported the torture carried out by the military dictatorship that ran the country from 1964 to 1985, and warned that under his regime, minorities would have to “bow to the majority … or disappear.”

Right Wing Watch noted last year, a week after Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration, that he “didn’t waste much time issuing executive orders and taking other actions going after the people he had targeted in his campaign rhetoric: the LGBTQ community; indigenous people; descendants of former slaves; civil servants deemed not on board with Bolsonaro’s ideological agenda; nonprofit organizations; and the media.”

Just this week, Eduardo Bolsonaro launched a social media attack on filmmaker Petra Costa, whose documentary “The Edge of Democracy” has been nominated for an Academy Award, The Guardian reported. Eduardo Bolsonaro tweeted that Costa was a “scumbag” and a liar. He and other government officials are angry about the movie and an interview in which Costa criticized? government policies encouraging the plunder of the Amazon region, a spike in police killings, ?the administration’s anti-gay actions and increased government censorship?.

In August 2018, months before the election that made his father president, Eduardo Bolsonaro met with Bannon and announced that Bannon would be offering suggestions on online strategy and data analysis for his father’s presidential campaign. He declared that he and Bannon would “join forces” against “cultural Marxism.”

Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign was backed by U.S. religious-right leaders, including former Rep. Michele Bachmann, who met with Eduardo Bolsonaro and recorded a video message to Brazilian Christians urging them to vote “only for a candidate for the president of Brazil who will support moving the Brazilian embassy ?[in Israel] to Jerusalem.” Trump-supporting “prophet” Cindy Jacobs and her husband Mike Jacobs declared that Jair Bolsonaro is establishing God’s kingdom in Brazil—turning it from a “goat nation” into a “sheep nation.” ?(There’s a biblical passage that refers to Jesus’s second coming when all the nations will be gathered before him and he, like a shepherd, will separate the sheep from the goats.)...

post impeach fail

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/revisiting-rules-for-survival-here-are-6-immutable-rules-of-autocratic-behavior-and-tips-for-countering-political-tyranny

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Revisiting ‘Rules for Survival’: Here are 6 immutable rules of autocratic behavior — and tips for countering political tyranny

Written by Daily Kos February 2, 2020

It’s stunning to look back and realize it now, but this was written just two days after the 2016 election.  Along with Adam Serwer’s piece in the Atlantic, bluntly titled “The Cruelty is the Point,” and Timothy Snyder’s tract, “On Tyranny,” Masha Gessen’s brief essay in the New York Review of Books,  “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,”  warning us of the threat Donald Trump posed to our nation’s continued existence as a functioning republic, has proved itself over and over as a frighteningly prescient and disturbingly accurate prediction of how this would all play out, down almost to its very last word.

Gessen, a Russian-American writer and National Book Award winner, has lived in autocracies most of her life. As an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, she was one of the first to point out that Trump would, based on all evidence at the time, essentially govern in Putin’s shadow, slowly and inexorably transforming the American Republic by imposing a corrupt, autocratic system on so-called American “institutions.”  As it turned out, Gessen’s assessment of the looming danger posed by Trump and his collaborators in the Republican Party, and her pithy but sound advice on what to expect from a regime that considered itself unbound by such institutions, resounds even more prophetically today as we watch another supposedly hallowed institution, the United States Senate, crumble into dust and irrelevancy, right before our eyes.

The purpose of this is not to revisit the entirety of Gessen’s essay. Most here have already read it (if not you should read it now). Briefly, she sets down a list of six immutable rules of autocratic behavior and explains how ordinary citizens must react, cope, and counter this type of tyranny; and she predicts how the Trump administration would fulfill each of those rules in its efforts to transform our government into something as near a dictatorship as possible. Those rules are: 1) Believe the autocrat—do not for a minute believe anything he says is intended simply to shock or exaggerate; 2) Do not be taken in by small signs of normality; 3) Institutions will not save you; 4) Be outraged; 5) Don’t make compromises; and 6) Remember the future.  Each one of these principles is followed by a prediction of how Trump would turn them into reality for our nation.  And each one, more or less, turned out to be accurate.

If you have any doubt as to the legitimacy of Gessen’s analysis or the soundness of her advice, then consider the following excerpts from it, written two days after the 2016 election and two months before Trump actually took office. The signs of just how perilously weak the American Republic would be in withstanding such an assault were evident in the concession speeches of Hillary Clinton, the words of the Democratic runner-up Bernie Sanders, and even former President Barack Obama, all of whom offered varied forms of the standard “olive branch” owed by the politically vanquished to the victor. Expecting Trump, whose real goal was absolute power, to respond to these platitudes was a depressing exercise in outright naivete, masking as political politesse. Gessen saw it for what it was: ridiculous and dangerous.

However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

Gessen first predicted that contrary to the common assumption that Trump could never command the allegiance of so-called “mainstream” conservatives, the  Republican Party would instead rush to embrace Trump. In this she was, again, absolutely correct.

He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate him—from the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.

After what is expected to be a full-blown acquittal of Trump in the Republican Senate next week (possibly accompanied by a few shiny votes of some Democratic quislings fearful of Trump’s wrath), there is no doubt whatsoever that the Republican Party, including nearly every elected Republican official in the country, is prostrate under Trump’s boot-heel. It was almost amusing to watch the media circus solemnly placing the fate of an autocratic monster in the hands of proven cowards such as Susan Collins, Mitt Romney and Lamar Alexander.  The Republican-controlled  Senate is now as laughable an entity as was the Roman Senate in Caligula’s age, and it seems only a matter of time before Trump sees fit to place a horse in the chamber.

Gessen also assured us with dead-on certainty that Trump would continue with his campaign-stated plans to dismantle not only the Affordable Care Act (which he has tried to do, with some success), but most if not all of the legislation and rulemaking passed in the Obama administration (which he has done), and would continue to use the functions of government whenever possible to punish his political opponents.

Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important.

With the nomination of Executive Power ideologues  Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr, Trump again has performed exactly how Gessen predicted. She suggested that a Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani could be chosen for AG, specifically for the purpose of investigating Hillary Clinton. As it turns out, Trump found someone possibly worse than that in Barr, while retaining Giuliani as his personal consigliere.

Gessen also predicted how the stock market would respond to Trump–it would leap to embrace his lies as if on cue: “Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended.”  This is exactly what (until the Coronavirus reared its head) the financial markets have done in response to Trump’s lies about the “trade war” with China. They and the financial press have reacted like trained monkeys, eager to accept the most absurd assurances about Trump’s tariffs and his trade “policy.”

But the harshest prediction has been the most devastating. Gessen, asserting that “institutions will not save us,” first noted that Vladimir Putin took a year to totally assimilate the Russian media landscape and an additional four years to dismantle its electoral system, so-called “institutions” which Americans also claim as their own. The same dismantling of the “cherished bulwarks” of these paper-thin “democracies”  occurred in Turkey and Poland over the span of a few years.

Gessen acknowledges that the United States has stronger institutions than these second-world nations, as we were continually reminded at the start of Trump’s term in office. But here’s the thing:

The problem, however, is that many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution.

The abdication of its responsibilities by fully one-half of the United States Congress and Senate in support of a wannabee dictator like Donald Trump—and the complete and wholesale embrace of corruption that this represented—is the most visible demolition of our institutions, but the pollution of our Federal judiciary with rabid  (and in many cases totally incompetent) ideologues is no less corrosive to the American constitutional order. For our Democracy to survive it is necessary that certain rules and norms be observed, rules and norms that everyone accepts.  When one party is willing to forego the truth in pursuance of contrived conspiracies and outright lies; when one party through procedural manipulation ensures that no legislation will proceed or even receive debate, then that essential good faith has clearly been abandoned. As a result, the “institution” dies an ignominious death. The dissolution of our federal government under Trump has also been accelerated by the perversion of our federal agencies, now tasked with working not for the interests of the American people, but for a narrow corporate donor base.

The dismantling of institutions is not limited to our Constitutional structure; Gessen also predicted exactly what would happen to the press after Trump. At the risk of being repetitious, remember this was two days after the election itself, and well before Trump even entered the White House:

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.

The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. The world will grow murkier. Even in the unlikely event that some mainstream media outlets decide to declare themselves in opposition to the current government, or even simply to report its abuses and failings, the president will get to frame many issues…[.]

Trump now has an army of voters numbering in the tens of millions who simply do not believe legitimate news sources, since they report negative news about Trump. Attacks on journalists and media outlets are a staple of his Nuremberg-like rallies. Seasoned reporters and news agencies, from CNN to NPR, are now routinely singled out and denied access to a White House that has all but abandoned press briefings.  Again, Gessen was spot on in her prediction: indeed, “institutions” will not save us. It only remains to be seen whether foreign influence in the form of Russian-generated propaganda will topple our last remaining institution—our elections themselves. Significantly, Gessen’s essay was written before the Mueller investigation was even conceived, let alone the degree of Russian influence on the 2016 electorate discovered.

So where does that leave us? There are only three rules left.

Of those, the first is  “Be outraged.”  Do not normalize anything this administration does. Never forget that this is not normal.  It can never be allowed to be normal. Most of us here have learned  through the bitter experience of the last three years to never stop fighting against this nightmare. We are not alone in our outrage, and we should never forget the fact that there are millions of us—in fact we are the majority.

The second, Don’t make compromises. This should go without saying, but somehow some Democrats need to be reminded. There can be no cooperation—ever–with this regime. As Gessen states, to do otherwise is not only corrupting, but soul-destroying. Willfully or even expediently ignoring the corruption of this fledgling autocracy will destroy any future this country may still possess.

Finally: Remember the future. Trump and Trumpism will come to an end one day. The man himself will no longer be around in a few years and his unique brand of insouciance and arrogance has already shown itself not to play well in the form of pale imitations. Trumpism and Trump’s personality are not as transferable or convertible as the Republican Party believes. 2018 showed that very, very clearly, and we all have the power to ensure that 2020 will demonstrate it to the Republicans again.

Most importantly, Gessen urges that the Democrats must offer up a powerful and compelling alternative vision to counterbalance Trump’s conjuring of an imaginary, lily-white past that appeals so much to his racist, xenophobic base. That is the challenge of not only of our nominee, but for all Democrats who want to wrest our country back from the brink of tyranny where it now rests. We failed to do that in 2016. We cannot and must not fail again.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/fascism-scholar-if-trump-wins-again-america-will-be-ready-for-full-on-authoritarian-rule/

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Fascism scholar: If Trump wins again, America will be ‘ready for full-on authoritarian rule’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon January 13, 2020

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Congress will soon send its articles of impeachment for Donald Trump to the Senate, where Republicans are determined to acquit him on all charges, including abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, and encouraging foreign powers to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.

No evidence or witnesses will persuade the Senate majority to reach a conclusion consistent with the obvious facts that Donald Trump should be impeached, convicted and removed from office. The Constitution’s mandate that a impeachment should involve an impartial trial and a fair hearing of evidence and witnesses has no meaning in TrumpWorld.

The Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump’s regime and an expression of his personal will and power. To that end,Trump has promised financial support to the Republican senators who will soon be voting at his trial. It has also been reported that Trump ordered the execution of Iranian Maj. Gen.  Qassem Soleimani in order to ensure that Republican senators would support his acquittal.

In essence, Donald Trump pays political blood money to his supporters. This is more evidence of Trump’s political thuggery and mobster-style behavior that is unbefitting an American president.

Like other dictators, authoritarians, autocrats and political thugs, Donald Trump believes he is above the law. With the support of Attorney General William Barr, this appears increasingly true.

The obscenities continue.

Donald Trump has suggested he is “the chosen one” and God’s messenger on earth. White Christian evangelicals believe this to be true and have pledged themselves to his cult.

Writing at USA Today, historian John Fea described the first event of Trump’s “Evangelicals for Trump” campaign, which occurred in Florida two weeks ago:

His evangelical supporters loved every minute of it. That night, Christians who claim to be citizens of the Kingdom of God went to church, cheered the depraved words of a president and warmly embraced his offer of political power. Such a display by evangelicals is unprecedented in American history.

I usually get angry when members of my tribe worship at the feet of Trump. This time, I just felt sad.

Trump and his allies label Democrats, liberals, progressives and anyone else opposing him as traitors and enemies of the United States. The most recent example: at a rally last Thursday in Toledo, Trump said that Democrats were “vicious horrible people.”

None of this should be surprising. Trump is following the authoritarian’s playbook almost to the letter in his assault on American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law. The question is not whether Donald Trump is an authoritarian and would-be dictator but rather whether anything or anyone is capable of stopping him.

I recently spoke with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat in an effort to better understand where America is on its road to fascism and authoritarianism in this fourth year of Trump’s regime.

Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and an expert in fascism and authoritarianism. She is the author of “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” and other books. Her opinion essays and other writing have been featured by CNN, the Washington Post, The New Yorker and the Atlantic.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to my full conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat through the player embedded below.

As you watch the Trump regime’s ongoing authoritarian assault on America, how do you feel?

I feel very resolute. It is very important not to feel helpless and desperate. In a funny way, I’m not frustrated with the Trump supporters because I understand how the process works. Of course, I’m very upset that there are in fact Trump supporters and I have zero sympathy towards them. But once individuals bond to an authoritarian leader it is a process, like a train that has already departed the station. It is very hard to stop and is well underway.

How is this constant state of temporary hope and then inevitable disappointment impacting the American people? For example, Trump has been impeached. Yet now he will be acquitted by his servants in the Republican Party. The American people are in a manic state because of Trump’s regime.

This is all happening a little bit at a time. Surveying the history of authoritarianism, only in a military coup do you really have an instant change. A person leaves the house in the morning and five hours later they are living in a dictatorship and there is mass violence. But otherwise, even Mussolini and Hitler took many years to get into power.

The shoe drops slowly, and it is hard for many people to discern what is really happening. This is especially true when there are multiple things happening at one time. For example, William Barr and his attacks on the rule of law and how he is part of this right-wing Christian counterrevolution in America. Yes, Trump is impeached, and that is a type of pushback against him and his forces. What judges are doing to slow down Trump’s agenda is very important too. It is very important to not give up because that is what authoritarians want the public to do.

Authoritarian leaders want you to believe that resistance is futile and that you should just give up. If we give up and resign ourselves to the conclusion that impeaching Trump is not going to have an effect, then he has won. Impeachment is extremely important because it will be on the record, marked in the history books as opposition to Trump and his agenda.

Three years into Trump’s regime, why are so many Americans still in a state of denial about this crisis?

They have no reference point for what is going on in America right now. Providing that reference point is one of the things that motivates my work. Many people are also scared. Many people in the news media are afraid to really engage the fact that Trump is an authoritarian because if they do so then reality becomes too threatening, and therefore they would have to take a different stance publicly.

Is this a lack of historical context and knowledge? Is it cowardice?

As I said earlier, only in a military coup do we really see sudden change in a society. Most people are not trained to recognize what is going on with Trump’s authoritarian agenda. If these leading media voices admit that they are living in the middle of a fascist, authoritarian takeover, then what are they going to do about it? Compare the United States to Hong Kong. Those incredible human beings are out there in the streets in Hong Kong day after day, month after month, because they know really well what the stakes are. The American people either do not understand those facts or they do not want to inconvenience themselves and disrupt their lives. That lack of mass protest and resistance is also an indictment of a particular American way of life where people are overly comfortable and take too many things for granted about their culture and democracy and their own lives.

Applying your historical framework and expertise about fascism and authoritarianism, what are Donald Trump and his regime an example of?

Donald Trump is an example of someone who comes up in history, and the way forward has been prepared for him, in this instance by the Tea Party and the Republican Party.

The road was already prepared for Trump by eight years of Barack Obama and how that created a type of mass anger and rage and panic among many white people. People like Donald Trump appear in history and their role is to undo social and political progress. Trump is a figure who is trying to undo everything that Barack Obama stood for and accomplished. But of course, historical figures such as Donald Trump add something new. Trump comes in and he has a “movement.” Trump does not have a political party. At first, Trump said that he was above politics. This is another common thread among authoritarians.

When we say that Trumpism is a “movement,” what specifically do we mean?

Donald Trump said, “This isn’t a party, it’s movement.” Trump did this to excite his potential followers and get their loyalty. At a traditional Republican convention or campaign rally, there are not loyalty oaths. There are not MAGA hats. All successful movements have rituals and symbols. Donald Trump is a marketer. He knows that symbols and rituals and having a movement is how you get people excited. Nobody is excited to show up for the Republican Party. But the Tea Party? Donald Trump? MAGA? That is something different. There are actually people who are addicted to Donald Trump’s rallies. They are following a movement. Of course that movement has now taken over the Republican Party — and Trump transcends the GOP.

Trump is establishing what is known as “personalist rule.” This can happen in failing democracies and in actual authoritarian states. Personalist rule is a process wherein the state comes to revolve around the personal agendas and needs of the ruler. This includes the need to defend the ruler’s corruption. To defend the ruler from the law and judicial processes and investigative journalists. Another indicator of personalist rule is when the leader’s personal obsessions, such as Trump’s wall, begin to monopolize and overtake other policies. This would not be possible and sustainable without the leader’s supporters coalescing in a movement.

There is an obsession in the mainstream news media with Trump’s “white working class” supporters. In that reporting, one of the repeated narratives is that those people feel some type of kinship with him. Somehow, in their delusional minds, Trump’s supporters believe that a supposed billionaire is actually like them. He is “oppressed” and “victimized,” as they are. The premise is absurd. But why is it so compelling for some people?

That is the personality cult. For Trump’s rule to work — as with Putin and other autocrats and authoritarians — the leader must be both an everyman and a superman. The leader is a populist in the sense that he speaks the “language of the people.” Almost all of these types of leaders have a sense of humor where they make crude jokes that get people to laugh. Politically incorrect jokes. Their humor is corrosive, of course. But the jokes work in showing that these types of leaders are very much of the people. Donald Trump uses a fourth-grade vocabulary. He is also very visual. He performs with his body. Yet Donald Trump is a billionaire, and supposedly a great success. The combination of all those traits is very attractive to his followers. “He’s a super success story. He’s done this, he’s done that.”

Consider the expression “TrumpWorld.” It is an accurate description. The goal of Trump and his allies is to colonize society and the media 24/7. To achieve that goal, they need attention and toget inside people’s heads. This is TrumpWorld. Authoritarian leaders also present themselves as victims of coups or other attacks by their enemies. This makes them look vulnerable. These types of leaders talk about emotion in their speeches. Trump does this. He’s always talking about “love” and “hate,” relative to his friends, enemies and rivals. This makes Trump’s followers bond to him because they feel very emotional and want to take care of their leader. This is a very successful strategy by authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump.

Part of the power of the Trump cult is how he promises to be their savior, protector, friend and father figure.

It is no accident that during the impeachment process Donald Trump has said that he is going to stay in office for 28 years. Of course, that is not physiologically possible. But what matters is the fantasy, because Trump is terrified right now. Leaders of that type create fortresses around themselves in a million ways. They do this with flatterers, lackeys and family. Authoritarian leaders like Trump do not want to hear any criticism. They also want and need total control over people because that settles the anxiety.

Trump does this in other ways as well. He does not have permanent appointees. This means they do not have to be confirmed by the Senate. Authoritarian leaders are actually terrified and brittle people inside. That is why they retreat inward. Donald Trump will not take any real questions from the news media. The authoritarian leader’s ego will not permit any questions, and the longer they stay in charge the worse it gets for a country because they lose all sense of reality. Leaders like Donald Trump make bad decisions, such as starting wars. One of the things that scares me the most is that Donald Trump is extremely destructive. Authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump delight in being destructive. Sometimes such people are also self-destructive.

How does authoritarianism impact people’s sense of time and history?

Part of the experience is the anxiety of the minute. Twitterfacilitates this because it is not just how many people check the news, but also journalists drip out news stories in the form of small tweets.This is not just one presentation of a story and the facts. It is not like reading the front page of a newspaper and getting the whole narrative at once. Twitter is a filter for information and experience that is constantly changing. People lose perspective on what is important and what is not.

Our capacity for discernment goes down and our anxiety goes up. Everything is made to feel urgent. Yet the more time people spend on Twitter the less time they are doing anything about Donald Trump and the crisis.Twitter is just an example of this problem. But it is the prime example because it is an unhelpful mechanism psychologically, emotionally and politically because it’s like a mass venting session without much real world impact.

How should we understand the ways that Trump and his movement conflate their love for him with loyalty to the country and what it means to be a “real American”?

The civil service has been purged and ruined under the Trump administration. The civil service makes government work. The State Department is a particularly sad example.Career civil servants have been purged because of ideological tests. This can take the form of leader loyalty — which is an ideology of loyalty. It could mean Trump removing experts who know that climate change is real. Civil rights as well. For example, The Department of Health and Human Services under Trump now has a “civil rights office” devoted to the “rights” of right-wing Christian evangelicals who believe their freedom is violated by doctors who agree to perform abortions. The state has been hollowed out. Expertise is gone and ideology rules. The state, the government bureaucracy and civil service are now just a vehicle for the authoritarian leader’s goals.

The end goal is for Trump, Barr, the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally is to have their own secret police. I keep returning to the question of civil disobedience, protest and corporeal politics as a response to this threat to democracy. Are the American people just cowardly? Have they already surrendered? Is the news media just afraid of the truth? Calm my nerves — or not — about the Trump’s regime’s plans to have political police and other enforcers.

This brings up the question of madness versus method. One of the objections that gets leveled at people who offer these types of analyses about Trump and authoritarianism is, “No, Trump’s just impulsive.” He’s not mentally ill. He may have some dementia, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. Trump’s spokespeople have been very clear that Trump wants his own intelligence and security services.

Such goals are part of the counterrevolution that has been slowly chipping away at democratic institutions, norms and laws under Trump and the Republican Party. Trump is going after the country’s trust in the FBI and intelligence services. All the relevant structures of government that could obstruct what Trump wants to do are being chipped away. What Trump has been doing up to this point is not at all an accident in that regard.

It takes a lot of time to prepare the public for such an outcome. It requires information and psychological warfare. Trump is very expert in those areas. Chip away at reality and objectivity, and then the public is ready for full-on authoritarian rule. The Nazis knew this very well.The public must be shaped and prepared. This is what Goebbels excelled at. The Russians excel at it. Once the public is shaped and prepared, the authoritarian regime can do what it wants.

What is the Trump regime preparing the American people for?

Not only Trump, but many other people around him, including Republican elected officials, have been speaking like authoritarian thugs. They say things such as, “Hillary Clinton needs to be executed.” That is how fascists speak. Making such threats is a type of trial balloon. If Trump wins in 2020, those trial balloons of fascist threats will be able to be made real. Even with all the horrible things that Trump has said and done, his popularity remains stable. Trump’s followers have not deserted him. The 2020 presidential election is almost a referendum and a mandate for Donald Trump to finally do what he’s been threatening to do all along.

What were some moments when the rise of Trumpism, and what feels like a type of inevitability and path dependency, could have been stopped?

This is called “gatekeeping.” Authoritarian leaders and their movements are very clear about being violent. Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do. It’s just that the American people are not ready to hear it. We do not want to hear the truth that Donald Trump is not kidding with his violent threats and promises. When Trump would not release his tax returns, that was a damning signal of how imperiled America is and was. When Trump said he could shoot someone on the street without losing any followers, that was another moment where I knew we were stuck on a very dangerous path. No American presidential candidate in modern history has threatened to murder someone as part of his campaign. Such behavior is what political thugs do.

The Republican Party’s leaders and other influential voices could have prevented the corruption of the system by this violent outsider. That was one path. The other path was and is to accept Donald Trump fully and claim he’s your savior sent from God. That is the path America is now on.

What comes next with Donald Trump in 2020 and the presidential election?

Exacerbation of the polarization. The goal is to leave people so confused about the truth that they are more and more dependent on Trump while also being increasingly disaffected. Trump may capitalize on some horrible event happening to the United States.Donald Trump has made some very scary declarations that the way to unite a country is through some catastrophe. Trump says that he hopes such a horrible thing does not happen but that is the way a leader can unite the county. Donald Trump has stripped anti-terrorism programs of their resources. He has defunded many national security programs that combat terrorism. If a calamity took place, Donald Trump would use it to declare martial law or some type of ongoing national emergency.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/a-historian-reflects-on-the-return-of-fascism/

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A historian reflects on the return of fascism

Image via Wikipedia.

Written by Lawrence S. Wittner / Daily Kos January 6, 2020

Back in 1941, the year of my birth, fascism stood on the brink of conquering the world.  During the preceding decades, movements of the Radical Right?mobilized by demagogues into a cult of virulent nationalism, racial and religious hatred, and militarism?had made great strides in nations around the globe. By the end of 1941, fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan, having launched massive military invasions of other lands, where they were assisted by local rightwing collaborators, had conquered much of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

It was a grim time.

Fortunately, though, an enormous movement arose to resist the fascist juggernaut. Led by liberals and assorted leftists around the world and eventually bolstered by the alliance of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, this resistance movement ultimately prevailed.

The antifascist struggle of World War II established the groundwork for a new and better international order. In January 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a major public address, outlined what became known as The Four Freedoms.  The people of all nations, he proclaimed, should enjoy freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. That August, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill unveiled the Atlantic Charter, declaring that people should have the right to choose their own form of government, that force should be abandoned in world affairs, and that international action should promote improved living and working conditions for all people.

These public declarations?coupled with the widespread discrediting of rightwing parties, movements, and ideas?led directly to the establishment, in 1945, of the United Nations. According to the UN Charter, the purpose of the new world organization was to “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights,” and “to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.”

And, in fact, in the decades following World War II, there were significant strides forward along these lines. Led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, setting forth fundamental rights to be protected.  Furthermore, much of Europe, the cockpit of two terrible world wars, cast aside nationalism to establish a federal union.  Moreover, a wave of decolonization freed much of the world from foreign rule, UN forces engaged in numerous peacekeeping operations, and the United Nations and many national governments established economic aid programs for the world’s poorest countries.

Admittedly, national policies sometimes fell short of the new internationalist, antimilitarist, and égalitarian ideals and programs.  Governments?and particularly governments of the major powers?all too often ignored the United Nations and, instead, squandered their resources on military buildups and terrible wars.  Many governments also had a spotty record when it came to respecting human rights, promoting social and economic progress, and curbing the rising power of multinational corporations.

Even so, for decades, humane domestic policies?from banning racial discrimination to scrapping unfair immigration laws, from improving public health to promoting antipoverty efforts and workers’ rights?remained the norm in many nations, as did at least a token genuflection to peace and international law.  Political parties with a democratic socialist or liberal orientation, elected to public office, implemented programs emphasizing social justice and international cooperation.  On occasion, though far less consistently, centrist and communist governments fostered such programs, as well.  Only parties of the Radical Right attacked these policies across the board; but, swimming against the tide, they remained marginal.

Nevertheless, in the last decade or so, enormous headway has been made by movements and parties following the old fascist playbook, with rightwing demagogues trumpeting its key elements of virulent nationalism, racial and religious intolerance, and militarism.  Seizing, particularly, on mass migration and funded by avaricious economic élites, the Radical Right has made startling progress?undermining the European Union, contesting for power in Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Greece, and taking control of such countries as Russia, India, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, the Philippines, Israel, Egypt, and, of course, the United States.

Long before the advent of Donald Trump, the Republican Party had been shifting rightward, pulled in that direction by its incorporation of Southern racists and Christian evangelicals.  This political reorientation sped up after the election of Barack Obama sent white supremacists into a frenzy of rage and self-pity.

Trump’s 2015-16 campaign for the presidency accelerated the GOP’s radicalization.  Drawing upon unusually hate-filled rhetoric, he viciously denounced his Republican and Democratic rivals.  Along the way, he engaged in his characteristic lying and mocked or incited violence against his critics, the disabled, immigrants, racial minorities, Muslims, women, and the press.  His racism, xenophobia, and militarism, combined with his thuggish style and manifest lack of qualifications for public office, should have doomed his campaign.  But, instead, he emerged victorious?a clear sign that a substantial number of Americans found his approach appealing.

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t**rump criticizes own security staff for not roughing up a woman protesting his Pennsylvania rally**

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-is-a-malignant-cult-leader-who-employs-universal-mind-control-techniques-former-cult-member

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Trump is a ‘malignant’ cult leader who employs ‘universal mind control’ techniques: Former cult member

Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story December 13, 2019

A former member of the Unification Church cult led by Sun Myung Moon sees a lot of similarities between the man he once blindly followed and President Donald Trump.

In an interview with Vox, author Steven Hassan, who has written a new book called The Cult of Trump, explains why he believes Trump fits the exact profile of a malignant cult leader.

“I began this book with the assumption that Trump is a malignant narcissist,” he tells Vox. “Actually, watching him and listening to him reminded me of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the cult I joined in college, in that both have a kind of God complex where they’re the only one with the answers, the only one who can fix things.”

He then points to statements by prominent evangelical leaders who believe that Trump was chosen by God to lead the United States, and also dives into how Trump was exposed at a young age to a prosperity gospel preacher named Norman Vincent Peale.

“Peale preached a cultish prosperity gospel, where everything’s about how God is going to bless you with material rewards,” he said. “It’s not about spirituality or Christ or anything like that. It’s all about turning self-confidence into a religion.”

Hassan concludes that the religious devotion Trump inspires is akin to mass brainwashing.

“The bottom line is that I see very sophisticated mind-control techniques being used through the media, through religious broadcasters and radio talk-show hosts,” he says. “It’s a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil, authoritarian view of reality that is mostly fear-based. And there’s a deliberate focus on denying facts in order to protect the image of the leader. These are universal mind-control techniques common to all destructive cults, and something I call “phobia introduction.” Irrational fears are drilled into people’s minds so that they can’t even imagine leaving the group or questioning the leader without terrible things happening to them.”

Read the whole interview here.

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829818775817

Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire

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Cara Daggett

First Published June 20, 2018 Research Article

https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817

As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny. Rather than consider these resentments separately, this article interrogates their relationship through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful to understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene can augment desires for authoritarianism. The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics. Moreover, through a psycho-political reading of authoritarianism, I show how fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble.

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Global warming poses a problem for fossil fuel systems and those who profit from them; leaving fossil fuels in the ground likely means leaving trillions of dollars of profit in the ground.¹ Vast networks of privilege that are sustained by fossil economies are likewise threatened. As Jairus Grove reflects, ‘environmental justice will require unequal roles: significantly constraining, even repressing, the powers of the Eurocene’.^2Similarly, the ‘Planet Politics Manifesto’ reminds us that ‘the planet is telling us that there are limits to human freedom; there are freedoms and political choices we can no longer have’.³ Perhaps not surprisingly, given the amount of money and privilege at stake, the tragic ethos demanded by global environmental justice is being resisted. Those regions that have emitted the most carbon dioxide are positioning themselves to profit from a warming earth by advancing a militarised and corporatised version of climate security.⁴ The result, as Christian Parenti foresees it, is the likelihood of a ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’, given that, already,

the North is responding with a new authoritarianism. The Pentagon and its European allies are actively planning a militarized adaptation, which emphasizes the long-term, open-ended containment of failed or failing states – counter-insurgency forever. This sort of ‘climate fascism’ – a politics based on exclusion, segregation and repression – is horrific and bound to fail.⁵

‘Climate fascism’, with its camps, barbed wire and police omnipresence, is a likely outcome of climate (in)security.⁶

A nascent fossil fascism is already evident in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and the conservative capture of the US Congress. In a short time, the Trump Administration and the Republican Party have shored up fossil fuel systems by denying climate change and dismantling a host of environmental policies including: withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, installing a climate denier (Scott Pruitt) to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, taking steps to kill the Clean Power Plan, weakening the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, lifting a moratorium on new coal leases on federal land, ending a study on the health effects of mountaintop coal removal, and moving to open nearly all US coastal waters to offshore drilling for oil.

Climate denial obviously serves fossil-fuelled capitalist interests. However, coal and oil do more than ensure profit and fuel consumption-heavy lifestyles. If people cling so tenaciously to fossil fuels, even to the point of embarking upon authoritarianism, it is because fossil fuels also secure cultural meaning and political subjectivities. Since the new imperialism of the 19th century, fossil fuels have become the metaphorical, material, and sociotechnical basis of Western petrocultures that extend across the planet.⁷ In other words, fossil fuels matter to new authoritarian movements in the West because of profits and consumer lifestyles, but also because privileged subjectivities are oil-soaked and coal-dusted. It is no coincidence that white, conservative American men – regardless of class – appear to be among the most vociferous climate deniers, as well as leading fossil fuel proponents in the West.^{8 [INTERSTING,} ^I ^THOUGHT ^us ^BS ^SPREAD ^TO ^ANGLOPHONE ^WORLD ^VIA ^CTT]

This article undertakes a feminist reading of climate denial and fossil fuel boosterism in new authoritarian movements in the West in order to interrogate the entanglement of masculinity and fossil fuels. Through the concept ofpetro-masculinity, I emphasise the relationship – both technically and affectively, ideationally and materially – between fossil fuels and white patriarchal orders.While misogyny and climate denial are often treated as separate dimensions of new authoritarian movements, a focus on petro-masculinity shows them to be mutually constituted, with gender anxiety slithering alongside climate anxiety, and misogynist violence sometimes exploding as fossil violence.⁹

^...^

GAME OVER?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/welcome-to-the-new-mainstream-gop-conservative-website-delivers-sobering-news-about-republicans-descent-into-the-alt-right/

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'Welcome to the new mainstream GOP': Conservative website delivers sobering news about Republicans' descent into the alt-right

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

Founded by Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol in December 2018, The Bulwark has become a refuge for conservatives who are disdainful of Donald Trump's presidency. And contributor Laura K. Field, in a November 27 article, delivers some sobering news to The Bulwark's right-wing anti-Trump readers: the alt-right fringe has become the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Most of The Bulwark's readers probably knew that already, but Field (who has held faculty positions at Georgetown University and American University) offers a lot of evidence to drive the point home. Under Trump, Field laments, alt-right figures likeSteve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller have become "the face of today's conservatism and today's Republican Party."

Field demonstrates the prominence that extremists have achieved in the GOP by discussing an event held during Donald Trump Jr.'s recent book tour in support of "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us." The writer notes that when the tour took Trump Jr. to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Trump Jr. and the group Turning Point USA were described as "mainstream conservatives" - and Trump Jr. was heckled by supporters of antisemite Nick Fuentes.

"This shift in language represents a victory for Don Jr., as well as for the extremists who attacked him," Field explains. "Now that Junior has been upstaged by the neo-fascist far right, he gets to be cast as mainstream. And if Turning Point USA counts as establishment, it means that the extremists aren't so far out there anymore. It's a win-win for them all."

Field goes on to say that many of the people who defined "movement conservatism" in the past have been marginalized in the modern GOP.

"You don't have to lionize the old GOP to see that many of the think tanks, magazines and intellectuals that made up movement conservatism since the Reagan years have slid into irrelevance under Trump, while talk radio and Fox News have grown in influence," Field observes. "Individuals and organizations dedicated to defending Trump and promoting Trumpism have prospered."

Field also laments that recently, "e-mails were leaked that definitively proved Stephen Miller's white supremacy, and not a single Republican member of Congress has joined the call for his resignation."

The leaked e-mails that Field is referring to were exchanges between Miller and journalist Katie McHugh, formerly of Breitbart News, in 2015 and 2016. Some of the e-mails show Miller recommending that McHugh use white nationalist websites like VDare and American Renaissance as sources of information.

Field wraps up her article on a troubling note, warning that extremists such as Fuentes won't be disappearing from the GOP anytime soon.

"The extreme environmentalists and Green New Dealers are fighting for the future of life on this planet; Nick Fuentes and his ilk want a white Christian ethnostate," Field writes. "That conservatives today aren't reeling at this difference tells us all we need to know about the successes of the alt-right…. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new mainstream GOP."

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/far-right-white-evangelicals-despite-impeachment-and-the-ukraine-scandal-still-see-trump-as-the-chosen-one/

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Far-right white evangelicals — despite impeachment and the Ukraine scandal — still see Trump as ‘the Chosen One’

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

In the 1980s, the late Sen. Barry Goldwater — who was considered an arch-conservative in his day — famously asserted that the Republican Party was making a huge mistake by embracing the Christian Right, which he described as a “terrible damn problem” for the conservative movement. But President Donald Trump, on the other hand, enthusiastically welcomes the support of far-right white evangelicals — some of whom are declaring that the impeachment inquiry he is facing is against God’s will and that demonic forces are trying to remove the president from office.

On November 21, evangelist Franklin Graham (son of the late Rev. Billy Graham and a strident Trump supporter) discussed impeachment when he appeared on fellow wingnut Eric Metaxas’ radio show. Graham told Metaxas that it’s “almost a demonic power that is trying” to remove Trump from office — to which Metaxas responded, “I would disagree. It’s not almost demonic. You know and I know, at the heart, it’s a spiritual battle.”

When far-right evangelicals speak of a “spiritual battle,” they typically mean one between God and Satan — and clearly, Graham and Metaxas believe that Trump is working for God, while his political opponents are working for Satan.

Republican Rick Perry, secretary of energy in the Trump Administration and former governor of Texas, has also claimed that Trump is on a mission from God. Perry, during a recent appearance on Fox News, described Trump as “the chosen one” and claimed he has been “sent by God to do great things.”

Many of Trump’s critics have had a hard time understanding why he is so popular with the Christian Right, which wanted to see President Bill Clinton impeached in the late 1990s for having an extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Trump, according to his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet. But the Christian Right is extremist tribalist in its thinking; so, even though Trump has never been especially religious (he’s a non-practicing Presbyterian) and former President Barack Obama has a long history of going to church, far-right white evangelicals view Trump as an ally and Obama as an enemy.

Similarly, white Christian fundamentalists detest South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a churchgoing Episcopalian and Democratic presidential candidate who often talks about his faith. Buttigieg is obviously more religious than Trump, but he is a non-fundamentalist Mainline Protestant — and the Christian Right doesn’t see him as part of their tribe. In fact, the Christian Right view Obama and Buttigieg as infidels, not unlike Islamic fundamentalists who view non-jihadist Muslims as infidels.

Journalist Chris Hedges, a non-fundamentalist Christian who has written a lot about the role that faith can play in left-wing politics, uses the term “Christian fascists” to describe the Christian Right. Hedges considers the Christian Right a dangerous authoritarian movement, often stressing that Trump appeals to the Christian Right’s authoritarian tendencies.

Such tendencies were evident in October after the death of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who chaired the House Oversight Committee. Cummings was quite religious: his association with the New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore spanned at least 40 years, and the Maryland Democrat would sing the Christian hymn “This Little Light of Mine” at civil rights marches. Yet some far-right evangelicals celebrated his death, insisting that God struck him down for opposing Trump.

Christian fundamentalist Stacey Shiflett, for example, said of Cummings, “Everything that he’s done has been nothing but trying to take this president out. I believe that God had had enough, and God moved.”

Hanna Selinger, in a November 26 article for The Independent, delves into the Christian Right’s unwavering adoration of Trump and explains why white Christian fundamentalists hold him in such high regard despite his not-so-Christian behavior.

“For evangelicals,” Selinger explains, “Donald Trump offers deliverables. The conservatives who follow the letter of the law when it comes to the Bible count among their most important issues ‘family values’: abortion, gay marriage, and so on. On these issues, Trump has offered a far-right tack. Despite who he actually is as a person, he checks the boxes — enabling evangelicals to look the other way and toward a perceived ‘greater good.’”

Christian Right voters, Selinger observes, “are willing to separate morals in a president from morals in a country. These voters will pull the lever for a man who prevaricates daily, who has had multiple wives and even more affairs. That’s because they believe that those characteristics outweigh the things they want done in Washington.”

Selinger adds, “Rick Perry is no different. He too is willing to overlook gross misconduct, of which he was part, simply because he likes the president’s policies.”

If a Democratic president had asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a political revival and made that investigation a condition of military aid, far-right theocrats like Graham, Perry, Metaxas and Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell, Jr. would be demanding his impeachment. But because Trump become an honorary member of the Christian Right, he gets a pass.

The Christian Right, Selinger asserts, is unlikely to turn against Trump.

“This is the problem with Trump and his allies, and it begins with religion: what it means to follow God has been lost in a political game that places legislative wins over moral losses,” Selinger writes. “Will evangelicals ever see the light? As Rick Perry demonstrates in his ruthless sycophancy, the odds are slim.”

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wm barr uses doj as protection racket vs russia probe fbi

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House committee sues AG Barr in wake of judge’s ruling that declared ‘presidents are not kings’

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement November 26, 2019

The House Oversight Committee wasted no time in filing a lawsuit against Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, suing both Trump appointees for failure to respond to subpoenas demanding documents.

Declaring “President Trump and his aides are not above the law,” Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney on Tuesday announced, “I am filing this enforcement action today because the Trump Administration’s brazen obstruction of Congress must not stand.”

Politico reports Maloney is seeking documents related to the 2020 Census, and the Trump administration’s attempts to add a citizenship question to the constitutionally-mandate survey.

That question was the brainchild of a Republican strategist, now deceased, who wrote it would depress participation in the Census by minorities, effectively granting Republicans greater representation in the House and other areas – including where $675 billion in federal funds are spent.

One federal judge declared if the citizenship question made it onto the census, “hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people will go uncounted.”

The Trump administration has ignored many subpoenas from House Democrats. On Monday a federal judge ruled former White House Counsel Don McGahn could not ignore a subpoena and must testify before Congress.

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings,” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her 118-page ruling Monday.

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aha confluence of forces, eg racism...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/stephen-miller-proves-the-trump-regime-is-a-white-supremacist-enterprise-will-americans-choose-to-save-our-multiracial-democracy/

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Stephen Miller proves the Trump regime is a white supremacist enterprise. Will Americans choose to save our multiracial democracy?

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon November 25, 2019

Like the president he serves, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. Miller believes that white people should be the most powerful group in the United States and around the world. He has worked diligently and enthusiastically to advance that goal through public policy.

Miller is not a “white nationalist.” To use such language is to legitimate the ways white supremacists have tried since the 1970s to repackage themselves so as to appear more “mainstream” and “reasonable” in order to win over more white Americans.

As though more evidence is necessary after three years of Stephen Miller’s influence on Donald Trump’s regime and its unrepentant and enthusiastic cruelty against nonwhites, 900 emails recently obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center offer further proof of Miller’s white supremacist ideology.

In his communications with a former editor of the right-wing website Breitbart, Miller — then an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions, who went on to become Trump’s first attorney general  — advanced talking points from white supremacist websites that advocate eugenics against nonwhites and a general belief in the inferiority of black people and others.

Miller praised the notorious white supremacist novel “The Camp of the Saints” (also a favorite of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon) which depicts nonwhite immigrants and migrants in Europe as subhuman, murderous invaders.

In these emails Miller also channeled white supremacist talking points about nonwhite immigrants being “invaders” in “white countries” and the premise that white people are somehow being “replaced.”

Writing at the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie observes that “there’s no way to spin these emails into something innocuous”:

The evidence is overwhelming: Miller was immersed in white power ideology. He was fluent in the language of white nationalism, attuned to its ideas. He was an obvious sympathizer who brought that sympathy to the federal government, where he has a direct hand in making immigration policy and choosing personnel.

For three years, Miller has used his perch to inflict fear and anxiety on refugees, asylum-seekers and unauthorized immigrants. Maybe, if you were charitable to Miller and sympathetic to restricting immigration, you could frame this as a misguided but good faith attempt to pull back from a more liberal status quo. No longer. These emails show that Miller’s views flow from his commitment to racist exclusion and the protection of a white demographic majority.

As a practical matter, Miller views nonwhite people as his enemies. In other words, a senior adviser to the president of the United States is crafting public policy that both directly and indirectly hurts tens of millions of nonwhite Americans. This is a treacherous betrayal of America’s multiracial democracy and a direct threat to its future, and provides more evidence that Donald Trump and his regime are illegitimate.

In response to Miller’s emails, more than 100 Democratic members of Congress have called for him to resign. No senior Republican elected officials, to my knowledge, have done the same.

These “revelations” about Stephen Miller’s white supremacist emails are not secondary to the current impeachment inquiry, or somehow coincidental to a rogue regime’s assault on the rule of law and the Constitution.

Indeed, Miller’s emails are better understood as huge flashing road signs that illustrate how racism and the ideology of white supremacy made Trump’s presidency possible and continue to fuel the Republican Party’s fascist and authoritarian crusade against American democracy.

There are many examples. Social scientists and others have shown that white racism in combination with nativism and hostile sexism (and assisted Russian interference) that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2016.

Vladimir Putin’s spies and other agents launched a sophisticated psy-ops campaign, via social media and other means, to exacerbate racial tensions. The goal was to mobilize Trump’s voters and demobilizing those more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Research shows that Trump’s racially intolerant white voters reject the very idea of democracy if it means that white people will no longer be the dominant and most powerful group in America. A large proportion of Trump’s voters are racial authoritarians....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fundamentalism-and-authoritarianism-how-the-party-of-law-and-order-become-the-party-of-crooks-and-crime

no lnx many

Fundamentalism and authoritarianism: How the party of ‘law and order’ became the party of crooks and crime

Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon November 24, 2019

Whatever happened to the Republicans as the “party of law and order”? True, Richard Nixon, who first branded the party that way, was lying when he famously said, “I am not a crook.” Both Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal rank among the most notorious examples of executive branch lawlessness in our nation’s history. But through it all, the narrative commitment to the brand never wavered. It was a source of moral and political strength, always to be contrasted with “soft on crime” Democrats, however contrary the front-page facts might be.

But not anymore. As noted here by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of rhetoric whose book, “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump” (table of contents here), will be published next year, it’s the Democrats who are the party of law and order in the impeachment drama, while the GOP is the party of conspiracy:

Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are betting that public opinion will move toward impeachment and removal once more information is made public. To try to shape public opinion they are relying on a law-and-order frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is legitimate and legally justified.

Democrats are positioning themselves as the only ones willing to uphold the rule of law and the Constitution.

Republicans, led by President Trump, are counting on their power to frame reality to prevent the public from moving toward impeachment.

The GOP is relying on a conspiracy frame that tells Americans that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate and part of a plot to destroy America.

Of course the rhetoric of conspiracy isn’t entirely synonymous with that of crooks and criminals — but when you start to insist that career law-enforcement officials are all in on it, and you’ve abandoned the “law and order” frame to the Democrats, the crooks and criminals stench is difficult to dispel. And it’s not happening in isolation, either — above and beyond the plethora of scandals Trump generates, and the lockstep support Republicans are giving him.

That lockstep support is perhaps the most striking difference between now and Watergate-a difference most readily understood via the role of asymmetric polarization and negative partisanship, which cautions us not to expect the kind of gradual but inexorable opinion shift seen 45 years ago in response to the buildup of evidence.

In turn, dramatically increased polarization is a predicted result of historical trends described by structural demographic theory (SDT), which I wrote about previously in October 2016, reviewing “Ages of Discord,” an analysis of American history by evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin. SDT identifies three underlying factors contributing to increased levels of political instability: mass immiseration (stagnant or falling wages, worsening health, declining well-being), elite overproduction (increased competition for wealth and power), and fiscal distress (a product of both public debt and trust in public institutions). Mass immiseration helps fuel elite overproduction, since stagnant or falling wages leaves more money for elites, and the increased competition that results reduces broad cooperation and intensifies elite fragmentation (which also contributes to fiscal distress). In America, political polarization is a prime indicator of that fragmentation.

The fact that polarization has been asymmetric deserves special attention, as it’s not yet implicated in SDT. But it can be credibly explained. In “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” Karen Stenner presented compelling evidence that expressed intolerance resulted primarily from two factors: an innate predisposition to intolerance, demanding obedience and conformity, (“authoritarianism”) interacting with increased societal threat, particularly dissension in public opinion and loss of confidence in political leaders. Thus, there is both a logical reason for the expression of authoritarianism to increase as political instability rises, and motivation for either authoritarian or opportunistic elites to strategically manipulate conditions to intensify this process.

One can read “The Long Southern Strategy” (Salon interview with co-author Angie Maxwell here) as a coherent history of how GOP-affiliated elites have pursued just such a strategy over the past 50-plus years.

“Authoritarian attitudes peak not only when social conditions change, but also if folks are made to feel like social conditions are changing (even if they aren’t),” Maxwell said. “The threats are recycled, renewed with a sense of urgency, stoking a fire that is always smoldering. It isn’t a natural rise in authoritarian attitudes, it is an orchestrated rise in authoritarian attitudes.”

SDT suggests that it may be both, but without the orchestration it would be much more manageable, and much less prone to produce lawless behavior.

One can also view conservative legal activism as a key component in that process, as well as a profound influence on elite politics as a whole. At the time of Watergate, authoritarians were more evenly divided between the parties, but they’ve become much more concentrated in the GOP since then. As their experience of threat has risen, they’ve become more inclined to lawlessness — although it’s not tolerated on the part of others, of course!

In short, the lawlessness at the top of the GOP isn’t new — just vastly more blatant than it was during Watergate.  But the infrastructure supporting, defending and excusing it is dramatically more powerful and robust, and the authoritarian mass base is much more consolidated within their voter base.

Aside from impeachment itself, three other developments this month underscores the GOP’s broader embrace of lawlessness, in contrast to its decades-long self-branding. First, there is Trump’s pardoning of three war criminals, burnishing his brand of support for official lawlessness and thuggish brutality. He may mistakenly believe this endears him to  the military — which wants nothing to do with them — but it’s also meant to hype authoritarian support among his most rabid supporters.

Second, hisRoy Cohn-style attorney general, William Barr, delivered a widely criticized authoritarian screed to the Federalist Society, portraying the impeachment inquiry as dangerous to the rule of law, rather than warranted by Trump’s self-professed crimes. Third, legal scholar Steven Calabresi, chair of the Federalist Society’sboard of directors, wrote a pair of opinion articles accusing Democrats of violating Trump’s rights, one of which, according to Steven Mazie, the Economist’s Supreme Court correspondent, “reads like the first draft of an op-ed by a MAGA middle-schooler who was inspired by Jacob Wohl’s erstwhile Twitter account.”

The combination of Trump’s blatant endorsement of lawlessness and the double-whammy high-profile embarrassments of Calabresi and Barr reflects something much broader and profoundly troubling. The latter two offer striking indicators of just how seriously this is impacting establishment conservatism, in a way that can’t be fobbed off on Trump alone, while Trump’s pardons of war criminals — following earlier pardons, including that of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio — not only enable brute lawlessness in uniform, but points towards outright valorization in the future, especially if performed in direct support of Trump himself.

To better understand the role of the conservative legal movement, I turned to two law professors I’ve interviewed before: Eric J. Segall, author of “Originalism as Faith,” to help illuminate the role that faith has played in this process, and David Pozen, co-author (with Joseph Fishkin) of the paper, “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” which starts making sense of how the political asymmetry discussed above impacts norm-violating practices, with profound systemic results. In that paper, Fishkin and Pozen write:

The “restorationist” constitutional narratives and interpretive theories promoted by Republican politicians and lawyers, [this] Essay suggests, serve to legitimate the party’s use of constitutional hardball.

While this has surely been the elite focus of the actors involved, movement conservatives have also made remaking the Supreme Court and the entire judicial branch central to their politics in ways progressives have not, and this means engaging in authoritarian mobilization via threat manipulation, as described in “The Long Southern Strategy.”

Originalismplays a key role in this, but the meaning of that term shifted sharply in the process. At first, Segall told me, the originalist position argued that judges shouldn’t be engaged in moral reasoning:

It’s not for judges to select the best moral position for a country, it’s for people who are elected to do it. Unless judges can point to something in the text of the Constitution or something clear in the history, then judges should say look, the Constitution doesn’t speak to this, vote on it.

Originalism, at first, “was inextricably tied to deference. That’s the only way that works.”

But that all changed when conservatives gained control of the court in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Segall says: “After 12 years of Reagan-Bush judges, the people who embraced originalism dropped the deference part.” That meant a return of moral reasoning, “because history cannot answer modern problems,” and while conservatives won’t admit that, “it’s true and they act that way.” The Constitution is silent about the rights of transgender people or the definition of marriage, to cite obvious examples....

quite long]

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/political-scientist-explains-how-authoritarian-regimes-co-opt-institutions-to-work-for-the-leader-that-is-happening-even-more-rapidly-under-trump/

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Political scientist explains how authoritarian regimes co-opt institutions to work for the leader: ‘That is happening even more rapidly under Trump’

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon October 23, 2019

Donald Trump is a human maelstrom of chaos, disorder, lies and destruction — as has at least partly been exposed by Tuesday’s damaging Capitol Hill testimony from Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine.

Trump’s supporters are addicted to the chaos and lies. They too want to “burn it all down”. Trump and his supporters are the political beast with two backs, linked forever by insatiable lust.

The recent examples are too numerous to fully detail and list. Trump has encouraged and aided ethnic cleansing, and possible genocide, against the Kurds in Syria. He has engaged in multiple abuses of power, including obstruction of justice. He has tried to bribe and extort the Ukrainian president. He has violated the emoluments clause of the United States Constitution in any number of ways. He has ordered administration officials not to comply with subpoenas issued by Congress. He has spread racist or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He has threatened violence against leading Democrats, the news media and others who dare to criticize him.

Nonwhite migrants and refugees continue to be abused in Donald Trump’s concentration camps and by his enforcers in the Border Patrol and ICE.

New reporting by William Cohan at Vanity Fair suggests that Trump, may be manipulating the stock market for his (or his friends’) personal financial gain. Given Trump’s overall profligate nature, greed and utter disregard for the law, the possibility that the president of the United States is involved in such a brazen criminal scheme is not as preposterous as it should be.

Ultimately, it would be better for the United States and the world right now if we replaced Donald Trump with nobody and nothing. A power vacuum is infinitely preferable to this human chaos machine.

Given his statements and deeds, will there be violence if Donald Trump is removed from office? How is Trump’s regime weakening the United States abroad and encouraging global chaos including the possibility of major new wars? What types of reforms are necessary to prevent someone like Donald Trump from taking power in the United States ever again? And then, a terrifying question: If Donald Trump is re-elected in 2020 will American democracy survive?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Brian Klaas. He is an assistant professor of global politics at University College London and the author of several books, including “The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy” and “The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy.” His most recent book (written with Nic Cheeseman) is “How to Rig an Election.”

In September, The Washington Post featured Klaas’ widely-read op-ed “Everyone knows the 2020 election will be divisive. But will it also be violent?”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to my full conversation with Brian Klaas through the player embedded below.

Several weeks ago you wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where you shared your concerns about how Donald Trump may inspire political violence, especially if he loses the 2020 election. Given the recent developments with impeachment, how do you feel about your earlier assessment?

The only addendum I would add is that the dynamics I spoke about in the Washington Post essay regarding the election and violence could be moved forward as volatility around the impeachment proceedings. It’s also worrying to hear some prominent right-wing voices like Ben Shapiro and Roger Stone talk openly about the risk of violence if they don’t get their way on certain things. Even flirting with endorsing violence can cause people on the fringes to view that as a call to arms, and that’s very, very dangerous.

At this point in Trump’s presidency, are matters better or worse than you expected?

There are two levels of analysis. On one hand, in 2017 when I wrote “The Despot’s Apprentice,” I said that if the next election, meaning the 2018 midterms, went the right way, that there was a good fighting chance for American democracy to be salvageable and to not suffer serious damage from the Trump presidency.

Of course the 2018 midterms did not go perfectly, but they went the right way in the sense that the Democrats got a key foothold by taking back the House. Consider the last few weeks: If voters hadn’t shown up in 2018 and given Democrats formal power in the House of Representatives ,Republicans would have buried the Ukraine call. The Republicans would have buried all of Trump’s scandals. And Trump’s behavior would be even worse without any checks on him.

So, on the one hand, that is a very positive story. On the other hand, America is still not out of the woods yet, because Donald Trump could get away with all of his misconduct in the form of not being impeached or removed from office. Trump could also get re-elected. What I really worry about is how Donald Trump will respond if he gets voter endorsement by getting re-elected. Because, as authoritarian figures do, he tends to ratchet up his behavior as soon as he gets away with something. Trump tests the limits, gets away with it, matters get worse, Trump then repeats the cycle. It is going to be a very long year or so until the 2020 presidential election.

Did the Mueller report and its outcome actually encourage Donald Trump and his apparent lawbreaking and other assaults on American democracy?

If you read the Mueller report, it is extraordinarily damning. It outlines a horrific series of abuses of power, obstruction of justice, and Trump’s willingness to play with national security for his own personal gain. The framers worried about all of those things. But for Trump and for his acolytes, the Mueller report somehow exonerated him. And the way that Attorney General William Barr spun the report with his memo, I hate to say it, was brilliant. It worked extremely well as a political tactic. It set the narrative in a way that the Democrats didn’t have a good counter for.

And so by getting away with that, Donald Trump appeared to be vindicated. It’s not a surprise that the Ukraine call comes right after this period in which Trump believes that he’s gotten away with the Mueller investigation.

The question then becomes, “OK, let’s imagine Trump survives impeachment? What’s the next thing where he feels vindicated? What’s the next thing where he ratchets up his bad behavior?” There are already many other matters that we are not aware of, given the pattern of behavior from Trump’s White House. What the world has seen from Trump when the curtains have been pulled back just a little bit is horrifying.

I’m not confident that we’re out of the woods in terms of future abuses if Donald Trump feels, as he did with the Mueller report, that he’s been vindicated by the Ukraine scandal.

How do these claims about Donald Trump being a de facto king or emperor, through the “unitary executive theory,” fit into your research on how democracies fail and then become authoritarian regimes?

In authoritarian governments, particularly when they were democracies before, the regime consolidates power by slowly co-opting institutions to work for the leader rather than for the country or the citizens. That is happening even more rapidly under Trump than even I anticipated with this Ukraine scandal.

Two major institutions of United States policy have been co-opted for Trump’s personal and political gain. That is, rule of law through the Department of Justice as well as United States foreign policy. Barr is going around the world trying to get allies to basically discredit U.S. intelligence agencies and U.S. federal investigators from the FBI because he thinks it would help Trump undermine the Mueller report. At the same time Barr is doing that he is also using his full weight of his office as attorney general to try to protect Donald Trump by going after Trump’s political rivals.

Donald Trump is shamelessly using U.S. foreign policy and national security as a bargaining chip in order to force and leverage investigations of political opponents. This is absolute textbook behavior in an authoritarian regime. The way that you go after your rivals, if you’re a despot in an authoritarian regime, is by basically bending the institutions to work for you against them. In countries where corruption is rampant, only the president’s rivals get investigated and prosecuted for corruption. In the developing world, anti-corruption crackdowns are really purges of the authoritarian leader’s enemies.

Are you surprised by how Trump’s norm-breaking has become so normalized so quickly?

The American people appears to be numb to Trump’s behavior. Trump has recently suggested that Joe Biden should be put in the electric chair. He’s called Adam Schiff treasonous, implying, therefore, that he should be executed. Trump has threatened Nancy Pelosi the same way. It’s not even a news story. Trump’s threats of murder and violence are objectively the most insane behavior of any U.S. president in history, at least in modern history, and it’s just a blip on the radar.

The news stories that traditionally define presidencies are now the news stories that define one hour on Monday morning until the next what-was-once-unthinkable thing happens. That is the death of accountability, because if you can behave in such a way as Trump is behaving and the American people don’t even pay attention for longer than an hour until the next crazy tweet, then you can get away with anything because you know it’s just a ratcheting effect where you shock people.

And if you keep shocking the public and the news media and other institutions of society, then they all become used to it. The unthinkable becomes routine. And then the unthinkable that became routine is no longer unthinkable. The leader and the regime then have to do something even more egregious and extreme to get press attention. And that’s what Trump is doing. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

How does “state capture theory” help to explain Trump’s political corruption, such as brazen violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution — and that of his inner circle and other allies?

The organs of the state are being co-opted for Trump’s personal gain. Personal financial interests are now the national interest. There are two angles to this. The one is that obviously Trump is corrupt. He’s getting paid off and it is negatively impacting U.S. national security. It’s hurting U.S. diplomacy.

I believe that there is a realistic possibility that if the transcripts of the Trump call with the Saudis are made public — and if it’s at all around the time that Jamal Khashoggi was murdered — that Trump telegraphed that he wasn’t going to go after the Saudis for committing that heinous act. And then of course you have the murky business interests of $270,000 being funneled through Trump’s hotel to him shortly after the inauguration. There are also the bailouts of Trump’s yachts in the 1990s, when a Saudi prince bought them.

Now, with Donald Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and effectively abandon the Kurds, the American people and the world do not know where the next national security crisis is going to be. We are left hoping that such a crisis and the country’s reaction to it, policy-wise, does not conflict with Trump’s personal financial interests.

In 1941, the world would have been very different if Franklin D. Roosevelt had “Roosevelt Tower Berlin” and “Roosevelt Tower Tokyo.”

The fact that Donald Trump does not have a coherent ideology of foreign policy, but does have financial interests dotted around the globe, means that every time there’s a decision to be made, one must credibly ask, “Is Donald Trump making a decision for the United States’ national interests, or is he instead making a decision for his own selfish personal or political interests?”

What does Trump’s ability to continually assault democracy, with few if any repercussions from the American people, reveal about the country’s character?

I think the two great disappointments of the Trump era are the lack of backbone from Congress and the lack of pushback in the streets in terms of peaceful protest. The Trump presidency — if it sustains itself for eight years in total — is an existential threat to American democracy as we know it.

We have to have some introspection about the character of our democracy. There are children being abused at the U.S.-Mexico border. Life and death decisions are being made with corrupt intent by the president. There is one Trump scandal after another. Yet there are not spontaneous mass protests. There are not mass marches.

The last one that was really spontaneous and big was the “Muslim ban” protests, early on in his presidency, where people showed up at airports. I do not know why that has not happened since. Maybe the American people feel that they’ve just been beaten into submission by the helplessness they feel under this Trump presidency. It is a very disappointing thing that here in the United States we have to question ourselves on why the barrier to action, even in taking to the streets to protest, seems so high for so many millions of people.

How can we create a politics in America that empowers people to believe that it’s worth protesting? Because right now it is not happening.

The one silver lining of the Trump presidency — whether it ends soon through impeachment or in 2020 at the ballot box — is that I hope there are a range of reforms that will be passed in the next Congress to change democracy for the better. Donald Trump has certainly exposed many of the weaknesses of America’s democracy as it presently exists.

What are some of those specific reforms?

One of them is ethics: Presidential divestment should be the law. It is obviously clear that a president should never be able to make a national security decision at a time when he has financial stakes in play. Mandatory release of tax returns should also be enacted. The American people need to know what the financial entanglements are for somebody who’s going to be making the country’s foreign and domestic policy.

Restrictions on a president’s pardon power need to be considered. The idea that the president can simply sign a paper and absolve anybody of criminal wrongdoing should be re-evaluated.

The crucial Department of Justice memo from the 1970s that says a sitting president cannot be indicted needs to be changed. There is the cliché that nobody is above the law in the United States. If that memo is the law of the land, then that is not in fact true. It is understandable that one would want to protect the president from frivolous lawsuits while he or she is in office. But if things rise to the level of credible allegations of serious felony wrongdoing, then the president should be indictable.

Donald Trump has done things in public that would have ended almost any other American presidency. He publicly enlists hostile foreign powers and others to interfere in elections on his behalf. He makes clear allusions to the violence and death that will be suffered by his political enemies. And of course, the obstruction of justice, the corruption, the conspiracy theories, the overt racism and white supremacy, the sexual assault allegations, etc. But Trump then accuses the Democrats and other people who dare to stand up against him of those same things. It is classic psychological projection. It is also shrewd political strategy.

It’s a very smart strategy. It’s the core of how disinformation works. Disinformation is separate from misinformation. Misinformation is false information. Disinformation is deliberately false information that’s spread with an agenda behind it.

Trump’s disinformation campaign relies on human psychology, where even hearing something that is not true and being told it’s not true raises a nugget of possibility in a person’s mind that it could in fact be true.

This means that there is a risk in debunking Trump’s lies that by doing so the lies are actually reinforced. Fact-checking, for people who start with a belief that something is true and then are told it’s not, sometimes actually may end up driving a stronger belief in the incorrect information and lie. There is a large amount of political science research on that phenomenon.

If people don’t know what’s true and what’s false, then they don’t believe that what the press says is necessarily true. That provides a level of protection for a president who is constantly being exposed in the press for genuine wrongdoing.

You do many interviews with the international press. What is the view of America from abroad right now?

There is a lot of variation in the U.S. press in terms of how they have dealt with the Trump presidency. There is everything from “Fox & Friends,” which is just a dangerous joke of journalism, all the way to genuine interviewers who will press Trump and his allies hard on their lies.

In the U.S. media, there is a temptation to try to be seen as balanced rather than as objective. For example, when the Department of Justice calls Trump “Individual One” in committing a criminal conspiracy — a felony regarding Stormy Daniels’s hush money payments — the starting point in international news is not, “Is this good or bad?” The starting point is the fact that the president of the United States committed a crime.

If you were to explain to the average American why events abroad in places such as Turkey, Syria, the Ukraine and elsewhere should matter to them, what would you say?

I would tell them that the world is a very dangerous place. When you think about geopolitical risks, some really bad things can happen. We have not had World War III. World War III did not happen because the better angels of our nature have taken over and caused countries to be benevolent and cooperative, but rather because we built a system that prevents such a horrible thing from happening. America has had sound leadership, such that when we lurched towards those moments of international crisis we pulled back, acting in a sane way, and did the right thing.

The real problem with Trump’s foreign policy is that it is completely rudderless. It is driven by self-interest. Donald Trump is ill-equipped to understand how much risk he’s playing with. We have nuclear weapons at play in North Korea. We have the possibility of a Russian invasion of Eastern Europe to a greater degree than has already happened in Ukraine. We have the risk of the Middle East going into a regional war that drags in world powers and starts World War III. These are not far-fetched scenarios.

Matters can get much worse in America and around the world. I would tell the average American that you might be pissed off about how politics functions today. You might be pissed off about the state of the world. You might be upset about the fact that the way the world economy is working has screwed over quite a lot of people. Those are all legitimate grievances, but it can get much worse. That’s not an inspiring rallying call, but it is a reason to pay attention because we live in an extremely dangerous world.

Donald Trump has been extraordinarily lucky. Foreign relations and global affairs are a type of ticking time bomb, in the sense that there are always massive international crises that we, the United States, do not necessarily create but that happen on a president’s watch. Trump has not had one yet. But how long is that luck going to last? What’s going to happen when Trump’s luck runs out and we have this man as president who is delusional, unhinged, dangerous and willing to sacrifice just about anything to save himself? What happens when those massive crises come to America and Donald Trump is president?

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

some fissures on kurds/isis and ukraine but

Any resistance there may have been to Donald Trump's worst impulses inside the White House has gone by the wayside. This week, The Washington Post reported that administration officials, fearing retaliation or diminishing influence, have all but given up trying to temper the president's authoritarian instincts.

Effectively, a nation governed by Trump's worst impulses is one governed by Fox News. Media Matters' Matt Gertz highlighted the various ways Fox News has influenced domestic and foreign policy, as well as the Justice Department investigations.

Additionally, Trump and White House officials are now parroting the network's language regarding impeachment, calling the inquiry led by House Democrats a "coup." Impeachment, by definition, is not a "coup." It is the legal process laid out in the Constitution for holding a president accountable for alleged crimes.

However, the urgency of this language is extremely dangerous. In just the past several years, we have seen several violent attacks or attempted attacks carried out in some part due to right-wing media's increasingly urgent anti-immigrant rhetoric about an "invasion" or a "great replacement." However, as Gertz pointed out, this "has not given Trump pause as he continues to amp up his rhetoric, nor has it led Fox to reflect on the influence its programming has on the most powerful person in the world."

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/democrats-make-a-huge-mistake-by-abandoning-their-farm-labor-roots-and-risk-empowering-fascism/

no lnx

Democrats make a huge mistake by abandoning their farm-labor roots — and risk empowering fascism

Written by Martin Longman / Washington Monthly September 20, 2019

In most circumstances, it’s a sign of health and success if the members of an organization are flourishing financially. It means they’re producing a product or service that people want and they have a solid and profitable process. People are buying their cars. The mutual fund is getting great returns. The movie studio is making hit films. The toy company is making popular games. The doctor’s office is adding many new clients. The law firm is winning big cases.

Yet, we’re all familiar with the story of the wealthy and successful person who gives it all up to live a simpler life. The popular 1980’s sitcom Newhart was an extended dream a Chicago psychologist had about moving to Vermont to be an innkeeper. There have been many movies and books with the same theme. There are now countless detective shows premised on the city cop moving to a small town in the hope of having a safer and lower pressure job. Another popular theme is the Wall Street trader who has a midlife crisis and takes a job serving the people, often as a teacher. People recognize the obvious moral of these stories, which is that life is about more than the rat race and it’s nobler to look after the needy than it is to spend your life working on ways to separate them from their money.

Real life isn’t bifurcated in this way between soulless strivers and capitalists and virtuous social workers and nuns. But there is a tension between these two very real human impulses. In a general sense, right-wing parties emphasize the first and left-wing parties the second. When it comes to the proper role of government, some think it should provide basic safety and the conditions that best allow commerce to thrive. Others believe it should assure that as few people as possible are left behind and that those on the bottom have a decent opportunity to rise to the top.  Traditionally, Republicans have been the party for folks at the apex of the capitalist food chain and the Democrats have represented the small farmers and factory workers.

But that is now changing, as we can see in a pair of current articles. Writing for CNBC, John Harwood looks at the results of a new Brookings Institute study:

TheHouse Democratic majority, which represented 39% of the U.S. land area in 2008, now represents just 20%.The House Republican minority 80% of U.S. territory.

That widening red-blue economic divide in turn drives the parties’ starkly different policy agendas. It helps explain why Democrats lavish more attention on education, technology and protecting immigrants, for example, while President Donald Trump and other Republicans place mining, manufacturing and border control on center stage.

That coincides with a sharp increase in incomes and economic output for the constituencies Democrats represent in Congress. Today, the $61,000 median income of blue districts substantially exceeds the $53,000 median income of red ones, reversing the order from 2008.

The average gross domestic product for Democratic districts, near parity with Republican ones in 2008, has grown 50% higher. Output per worker has followed the same pattern…

…The share of professional and digital services jobs in Democratic districts more than doubles the share in Republican districts; a significantly higher proportion in blue areas now holds college degrees. By contrast, Republican districts now boast the lion’s share of work in basic manufacturing, agriculture and mining. They also have a slightly higher proportion of residents age 65 or older – 16.6%, compared to 14.7% in Democratic districts.

The Wall Street Journal tells the same story in infographic form. The Republican Party is morphing into a farmer-worker party, and that’s changing to nature of the Democratic Party too.

One problem here is clear from the fact that I didn’t say that the GOP is becoming a farmer-labor party. They are still hostile to unions and don’t support class-based solidarity at all. Instead, they support race-based solidarity and a cultural unity based on white-dominant traditional small-town values. They seek to hold modest income people together by appealing to their worst instincts rather than their common aspirations. And they have an easier time doing this precisely because they’ve been so successful in undermine organized labor in this country and offshoring manufacturing jobs.

But it’s also easier for them because the Democrats are getting easy pickings from professional and college-educated voters who live mostly in cities and near suburbs. The Democratic Party is changing not only because they are representing more affluent constituents but because they no longer feel the need to represent small farmers or a dwindling manufacturing base.

In 2016, Trump pulled off a miracle election victory by winning this swap. He lost millions of traditional Republican votes in the suburbs but won even more traditional Democratic votes in small towns and rural areas. The trade didn’t benefit him on the whole. He lost the popular vote by a good margin. But it helped him win in enough Rust Belt states to take the Electoral College.

But I am less concerned about election results than the culture of the country. When I talk about fascism, I don’t typically have in mind death camps like Auschwitz. That’s the extreme. Fascism arises when the right wins the support of working people based on a resentment-based solidarity. Typically, scapegoats are found to explain why a war was lost or the economy is in the shitter. Normally this involves racial or religious minorities, as well as intellectuals and cultural elites.

Militarism is often a feature, but opposition to immigration and hostility to education are mainstays of fascism. The encouragement of vigilantism and street violence are recurring themes. The sense that the culture is under threat and that people should use any means to fight back is stoked, and in extreme cases results in the formation of politicized paramilitaries or militias.

These factors are glaringly present in our current environment, and I do not believe they will improve if there is no left-wing alternative seeking to unite famers and workers around economic principles that transcend racial or religious differences.

A successful left-wing party in present-day rural America may look quite different from the Democratic Party, but it doesn’t have to pander to people’s prejudices. It should actually exist primarily as an alternative to the familiar fascist impulses we see when workers are under stress. What it would absolutely have to do, though, is put their constituents’ concerns first on their list of priorities....

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nb an alarming # of authorit stories laTELY AN

eg

gop authoritarian, so dump trump  not enuf

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/nobel-prize-winning-economist-republicans-show-a-total-contempt-for-democracy-and-constitutional-government/

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That same month, after Trump pledged to move the capital of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Netanyahu compared Trump to King Cyrus the Great, from 2,500 years ago, who “proclaimed that the Jewish exiles in Babylon could come back and rebuild our Temple in Jerusalem.”

As in the case of Nigeria and South Korea, Trump’s popularity in Israelseems to be a reversal of his predecessor. Frosty personal relations plagued Obama and Netanyahu, beginning with Obama’s first major foreign policy address to the Arab world in Cairo in 2009. This culminated in Netanyahu’s visit to Congress in 2015, when he urged Congress to oppose the Iran nuclear agreement.

In 2016, prior to the rise of Trump, Israelis ranked Obama as the worst U.S. president for Israel in the last 30 years....

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-a-wannabe-dictator-in-training/

no lnx

Trump: A wannabe dictator-in-training

Written by John C. Waugh / History News Network September 16, 2019

In a view shared by many, it is easy to believe that what Donald Trump really wants is not to be president of the country, but dictator of it.

Indeed, he has suggested how good it might be for him to enjoy a third term, perhaps more, even though the Constitution forcefully forbids it.

In a Fathers Day tweet he fantasized over the possibility, suggesting the public might “demand” that he serve a third term. The [good news], he wrote, “is that at the end of six years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House  (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT)….”

After Chinese president Xi Jingping abolished term limits in his own country, Trump said he liked the sound of that. “President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have give that a shot some day.” Just joking? It is not all that laughable. [The quotes in these two paragraphs are from an article by Gabrielle Bruney in Esquire, July 16, 2019. They have also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post.]

So what does a wannabe dictator who wants to give that a shot some day have to do day-by-day to reach his miserable goal? And how is Trump measuring up?

It is not an easy jump from democracy to dictatorship in our country. There is that dratted Constitution in the way. There are laws to be violated. There are critics, opponents, Democrats, immigrants, and the unfaithful to be purged.There is the critical mainstream media to be done away with. There are many lies to be told. It is hard, nasty work and Trump is fast running out of time.

A dictator must as soon as possible, by any means, shut down the media or control it. No dictatorship can exist in the presence of a free press. So far Trump has only been able to call the media names—”the fake news media,” “the enemy of the people,” “the opposition party.” From the time of announcing his candidacy to the end of his second year in office he had tweeted 5,400 times. Some 1,339 of those tweets were attacks of some kind on the media or individual reporters. This doesn’t count the times he has harangued the media in his speeches. He has turned many of his supporters into media haters like himself.

He is particularly incensed by the Washington Post and the New York Times, both of them highly critical of him. He has said that in the event that the public did demand  that he stay, “both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!”

A dictator must be an avid hater of some minority group and wanting to purge it. Trump hates Muslims. He is not too crazy about blacks and Hispanics either. But there are now many of them, a very tall purging job. On the other side of this coin, Trump seems in no mind to purge white supremacists, who love him as one of their own.

A dictator must tell lies, lots of lies. Trump is far and away the champion liar in presidential history. It is said by news outlets who keep track of such things, that Trump averages about six lies per day.

A dictator must be willing to exterminate people, lots of people. Since this is forbidden in a democracy, Trump can only slander them with a tweet or in a speech or fire them. In a successful dictatorship you just shoot anybody you want any time you want. Trump can only fire them, or tweet insults at them. But it is not a far jump to think of Trump’s firings and insults as symbolic exterminations. Nor is it a far leap to think of the would-be immigrants pinned up and families separated on our southern border as concentration camps.

A dictator often has an affinity with other established dictators. Trump admires and is on friendly footing with two elite of the world’s dictators—Vladimir Putin of the Soviet Union and Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He has met and spoken kindly of both. And there is that admiration of  China’s Xi Jinping for making himself president for life.

A dictator is narcissistic, in love with himself and glory seeking, demanding and getting total obedience and acclamation from his followers. In his first cabinet meeting Trump invited each member to praise and celebrate his greatness. He loves his many rallies out in the country, where he basks in the acclamation of his many avid followers, which are said to be a strong third of the country’s population.

A dictator is lawless, often pushing the limits of his power. Breaking a law seems meaningless to Trump.Whether intentionally or ignorantly, he has violated a host of laws, many later challenged or overturned by the courts, thwarted by the judiciary. That is why it is so important for Trump and the Republican Party to appoint sympathetic judges to as many courts as possible. As for the Constitution, it can perhaps be questioned whether he has ever read it, much less  whether he worries about violating it.

A dictator questions the legitimacy of his opponents, demonizing them and curtailing or abolishing their rights. In the 2016 campaign for president, Trump suggested he might not accept the legitimacy of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, if she won the election, and suggested several times that she ought to be thrown in prison. He has tweeted hatred of many of his detractors and has encouraged brutality against anti-Trump demonstrators at his rallies.

As a wannabe dictator in training he has been doing reasonably well.

John C. Waugh is the author of One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War.

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aha-let inequality leads to polarization and instability

919

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/autocrats-do-not-need-a-majority-to-destroy-democracy-a-divided-opposition-helps-them/

no lnx

Autocrats do not need a majority to destroy democracy. A divided opposition helps them

Written by Claudia Koonz / History News Network September 16, 2019

As we witnessed in the third Democratic primary debate last week, Democratic presidential candidates are struggling to distinguish themselves from their party rivals and competing for endorsements. Their horizontal vision in these disagreements diverts their gaze from the peril we face as Donald Trump dismantles the norms that have guided our political life since 1776.

Whatever their differences, Democratic candidates must agree to broad principles related to key issues, for example, immigration, health care, and the growing wealth gap. A general consensus would leave plenty of room for healthy debates about implementation, but failure to emphasize shared ideals in relationship to two or three major questions will blunt Democrats’ offensive against a candidate whose campaign is based on slander and fear.

Although we Americans like to think our nation is exceptional, the choices made by defenders of democracy in 1922 Italy and 1933 Germany are worth revisiting. The parallels are not perfect. Our two-party tradition sets us apart from Germany and Italy, each of which had five major parties. But legislative gridlock and voter cynicism today are reminiscent of conditions that marked the last months of democracy in Italy and Germany. The threat to our democracy does not command militias, but hate groups incite violence. Our economy is stable but many Americans feel left behind.  Most worrying, Republicans march in lockstep behind Donald Trump, while Democrats fragment – like opponents of authoritarianism in interwar Europe. Of course, we can’t know whether different strategies in Italy and Germany would have preserved democracy, but since hindsight is 20-20, let’s use it.

In economically devastated post-World War One Italy, labor unions and peasant leagues clashed violently with Mussolini’s Black Shirt militias.Voters in 1921 gave Socialist and Christian Democratic candidates almost half of the vote – compared to seven percent for the Fascist Party. Fearing a revolution from the left, the King used his constitutional power to appoint Mussolini as prime minister in 1922. Mussolini manipulated the election of 1924 to create a Fascist majority. An exposé of Fascist electoral interference by journalist Giacomo Matteotti touched off massive demonstrations. After Fascist thugs murdered Matteotti, 150 deputies protested by walking out of the Chamber of Deputies. After Mussolini expelled them and won the King’s approval, erstwhile critics in the Chamber calculated that opposition to “il Duce” would be futile.  Superficially, the trappings of democracy remained.

Fast forward to the German elections of 1932, when Marxist parties won 38 percent of the vote, compared to the Nazis’ 33 percent. Instead of forming an anti-Nazi phalanx, Communists and Social Democrats fought about tactics and theory. In January 1933, the President appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor. On February 27, after arsonists set the Reichstag on fire, Hitler called it the beginning of a communist revolution. Despite massive repression of leftist rivals, on March 4, Nazi Party candidates won only 43 percent. Two weeks later, the Catholic Center Party legislators joined conservatives and moderates in granting Hitler four years of dictatorial power. As in Italy, the handover was technically legal.

Mussolini and Hitler promised to restore national glory and depicted themselves as the last defense against radical socialism. Neither appealed to racism at first. Not even Hitler, who muted his virulent anti-Semitism in public to attract middle-class voters during the late 1920s. New followers told themselves he had mellowed, but his base and his Jewish targets never doubted his true intentions.

President Trump has violated many of the norms and laws on which our democracy depends. He circumvents Congress by declaring the “crisis” at the border a national emergency. He orders his staff to ignore subpoenas. He uses his presidential status to enhance his family’s wealth. He demands absolute loyalty from his appointees. He treats truth like a despot and jokes with Vladimir Putin about his “fake news” problem. He boasts about his misogyny and spews racist insults.

Trump is not a despot. But neither were Mussolini and Hitler early on. No black or brown shirts march in our streets. President Trump’s enablers wear white shirts and black robes. They are unified. Democrats are not.

Claudia Koonz is the author of The Nazi Conscience and Peabody Family Professor of History Emerita at Duke University.

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sharpiegate

// CA cafe threat? authoritarian

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/internet-demands-trump-fire-wilbur-ross-over-news-commerce-secretary-threatened-to-fire-noaa-officials/

omg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/the-entire-us-federal-government-is-becoming-trumps-glorified-fixer/

no lnx

The entire US federal government is becoming Trump’s glorified ‘fixer’

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 10, 2019

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department had opened an anti-trust investigation into four automakers. The issue wasn’t that the companies were colluding to fix prices or eliminate competition, it was that they had all agreed to abide by the fuel efficiency standards imposed by the state of California.

The Trump administration has been attempting to write a new rule to roll back the fuel efficiency standards adopted by Obama’s EPA. However, Coral Davenport and Hiroko Tabuchi reported that those efforts were running into problems.

In the Trump administration, three senior political officials working on the rollback, a complex legal and scientific process, have all left the administration recently. A senior career official with years of experience on vehicle pollution policy was transferred to another office.

That means the process is now being run by Francis Brooke, a 29-year-old White House aide with limited experience in climate change policy before moving over from Vice President Mike Pence’s office last year. Given the lack of experienced senior staff members, people working on the plan say it is unlikely to be completed before October.

They went on to write that, during White House meetings on the topic, Trump was prepared to drop the roll back of Obama’s fuel efficiency standards and had shifted his focus to coming up with ways to retaliate against both the automakers and the state of California.

According to a more recent report from Davenport, the rollback now appears to have been put on hold, but retaliation efforts are going full steam ahead. The anti-trust investigation appears to be the way the administration is taking on the automakers, which is why the editorial board of the New York Times issued this stinging rebuke.

President Trump’s Justice Department — for it is increasingly clear that the department has been reduced to an arm of the White House — has opened an antitrust investigation of four auto companies that had the temerity to defy the president by voluntarily agreeing to reduce auto emissions below the level required by current federal law.

The investigation is an act of bullying, plain and simple: a nakedly political abuse of authority…

The investigation is particularly striking because the department has shown little interest in preventing corporations from engaging in actual anticompetitive behavior. This summer, for example, the department blessed T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint, a deal likely to harm mobile phone consumers and workers, and to impede innovation.

If the Justice Department wants to get serious about antitrust enforcement, there are plenty of places to get started. This investigation is an embarrassment. It might as well wheel out the statue of Lady Justice and replace it with a bronze marionette.

According to the WSJ, the state of California also received a letter that threatened legal action.

On Friday, top lawyers at the Transportation Department and Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to California’s top air regulator, Mary Nichols. It urged her to dissociate the state from the four auto makers, saying the commitment may result in undefined legal consequences.

“The purpose of this letter is to put California on noticethat this framework agreement appears to be inconsistent with Federal law,” the letter states. “Congress has squarely vested the authority to set fuel economy standards for new motor vehicles, and nationwide standards for (greenhouse-gas) vehicle emissions, with the Federal government, not with California or any other State.”

That last sentence is the kicker, because it’s not true. Robinson Meyer provides some historical background.

When Congress amended the Clean Air Act in 1970, it empowered the EPA to set new national standards on air pollution from cars and factories. It was the federal government’s most aggressive attempt ever to address the dangers of smog and toxic air pollution.

But this was old hat for California, which had already been dealing with smog for two decades…When Congress began drafting the 1970 Clean Air Act, the state fought to maintain its ongoing regulatory scheme. It argued that its program should be left alone, since it was successful, and that its air problems were naturally worse than other states’…

California succeeded—and dramatically so. California is written into the Clean Air Act by name: At any time, it can ask the EPA administrator for a waiver to restrict tailpipe pollution more stringently than the federal government. If its proposed rules are “at least as protective of public health and welfare” as the EPA’s, then the administrator must grant the waiver…

Under the same provision, any other state can choose to adopt California’s more stringent standards. Fifteen states currently opt for the tougher rules, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and the entire New York metro area. This means that California’s rules actually cover 135 million people, more than 40 percent of the U.S. population.

So what the lawyers at the Transportation Department and the EPA should have said in that letter to Mary Nichols  is that they are preparing a plan to revoke California’s authority to set its own vehicle greenhouse gas standards. But I suppose that wouldn’t have sounded as threatening.

What we are seeing in all of this is that the Justice Department, as well as the Transportation Department and the EPA, are being used to retaliate against institutions on behalf of the president. This is the same kind of corruption of the federal government we’ve seen recently on everything from the NOAA’s defense of “sharpie gate,” to the Air Force being used to prop up a failing Trump business, and the State Department withholding funds from Ukraine in order to pressure that country into investigating a potential Trump opponent.

As Jonathan Chait notes:

This is the story of 2019, as Trump has replaced institutionalists attempting to curtail his grossest instincts with loyalists happy to indulge them. It is playing out across multiple dimensions. This is the through-line between several seemingly disconnected episodes from the last several days…Trump’s stench is slowly seeping into every corner of government.

In other words, the entire federal government has been corralled into being nothing more than a glorified “fixer” for Donald Trump.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trumps-disturbing-plan-to-address-mass-shooting-has-nothing-to-do-with-gun-safety-its-a-sign-of-his-authoritarianism/

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Trump’s disturbing plan to address mass shooting has nothing to do with gun safety — it’s a sign of his authoritarianism

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 3, 2019

Less than an hour after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold started shooting people at Columbine High School, they killed themselves. The same is true for Adam Lanza, who killed himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School after his shooting rampage.

That is not an uncommon end for mass shooters, according to research done by the Associated Press.

More than half the perpetrators of mass shootings since 2006 have ended up dead at the scene of their crimes, either killed by others or dying by suicide, according to a database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University…Of the 82 public mass shootings since 2006, 30 gunmen killed themselves and 16 were killed.

While the specifics can be controversial, of the 16 who were killed at the scene, it is possible that many of them would fit the description of“suicide by cop,” which is “a method of suicide that occurs when a subject engages in threatening behavior in an attempt to be killed by law enforcement.

We can assume that a gunman who engages in a mass shooting expects (or wants) to die. At a minimum, he is not concerned with the consequences of his behavior. But that kind of basic logic has escaped this administration.

The Justice Department has drafted legislation to expedite the death penalty for those convicted of mass murder and the provision will be included in a larger White House package designed to address recent incidents of gun violence, a top aide to Vice President Mike Pence said Monday.

Pence has been directly involved in conversations with Attorney General William Barr about the death penalty initiative, Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, told reporters traveling with Pence between Poland and Ireland on Monday.

Since imposing the death penalty happens only after a gunman has taken lives and spread terror, the only possible justification for it is deterrence. But as Matt Stein explains, the administration is once again ignoring the evidence.

One study from 2009 found that 88 percent of criminologists did not consider the threat of execution as a deterrent, a level of consensus that matched the scientific consensus on human involvement in global warming.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is ignoring research about policies that could actually save lives.

Children living in states with strict firearm laws are less likely to die from gun violence than those in states with more lax restrictions, according to a study in Pediatrics published Monday. The more rigorous the rules, the lower the risk, the researchers showed.

Given the involvement of Donald Trump and William Barr in this decision to push for the death penalty in response to mass shootings, it should come as no surprise that they have ignored the facts. After all, it was the president who called for the reinstatement of the death penalty against the Central Park Five before they even stepped footin a courtroom. He has also referred to our criminal justice system as a “laughingstock” because it isn’t strong enough. Similarly, the attorney general doesn’t seem to know the difference between justice and revenge, suggesting that because our system is a process, it doesn’t achieve justice very often.

Confirming what we would expect, studies have shown that “authoritarianism is a leading predictor of death penalty support.” Perhaps that is why, prior to this move by the Trump administration, the United States already “ranked in the top five countries in terms of state killings, along with Saudi Arabia, China, Iraq, and Iran.”Additionally, “the vast majority of executions in America (81 percent) have been carried out by Southern states,” with Texas—where two mass shootings recently took place—leading the way. It is clear that Trump and Barr want to inflict the death penalty more often because they are authoritarians, not because it works.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/not-all-republicans-are-neo-nazis-but-are-they-still-evil-for-not-fighting-the-neo-nazis

no lnx

Not all Republicans are neo-Nazis — but are they still evil for not fighting the neo-Nazis?

Written by Frank Vyan Walton / Daily Kos August 25, 2019

In previous articles, I’ve discussed how the GOP has openly become the party of racism, white supremacy, and nationalism; why you can’t be nice to neo-Nazis or their enablers in the GOP; and how the recent racism leading to violent acts of terrorism and mass murder wasn’t started by Donald Trump himself—he just brought the kerosine and the s’mores to the fire. What I’ve always wondered is: At what point would the majority of the GOP finally come to their senses and recognize all of this, and begin to denounce Trump’s many bigoted statements and policy positions? When will they reach the breaking point?

But It seems as though waiting for Trump to go too far, or to say too much,is a fool’s errand. The rank-and-file Republicans have repeatedly said they don’t care what Trump says, or for that matter what he does, as long as they themselves are economically alright. Not that there hasn’t been a slow trickle of converts, including former Republicans and never-Trumpers like Joe Walsh, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Justin Amash, Jeff Flake, Bill Kristol, Michael Cohen, George Conway, and lately Anthony Scaramucci. But the basic bread-and-butter Republicans still don’t give a shit, even when there are neo-Nazi Proud Boys marching in the streets wearing #MAGA hats, or when thousands of children and families are being held by Trump’s immigration forces indefinitely at concentration camps in crowded unsafe conditions, without proper sanitation, and without flu shots, in violation of federal court orders and international law.

If they can’t stand up against any of this, does this mean they are providing a tacit endorsement for it? Are they not willfully permitting this abject evil?

There is danger in saying that “all Republicans” are bigots, because it’s clearly not true. It couldn’t possibly be true. It’s understandable that making such a broad and unfounded claim would clearly generate outrage and a backlash for the person making such an outlandish claim. As I’ve said before, however, there are worse things than just being a racist.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more difficult to observe Trump and not see that he traffics in bigotry and that each time he has an outburst of bias, members of the GOP scramble to ignore it, excuse it, justify it, and rationalize it.

Worse, it’s become more common that they echo the themes of supremacy by supporting ideas such as the “great replacement.”

In July 2017, white nationalist Youtube star Lauren Southern posted a video called “The Great Replacement” that has since garnered more than 670,000 views.

In the monologue, Southern blends fear-mongering about the supposed Islamification of Europe with specifically American concerns about automation and disappearing jobs to create a narrative of whites being replaced.

“The future of Europe looks pretty halal,” she says, before discussing how technology makes jobs — and people — redundant. “It’s all replaceable and there’s nothing particularly significant about the thing being replaced.”

According to Keegan Hankes, the interim research director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, the theory is a “dressed-up version” of older ideas that white nationalists have peddled about supposed conspiracies to destroy the white race.

“It’s not that the ideas are new, it’s new packaging,” he said.

But the idea has caught fire on the U.S. far-right since Trump’s election.

Rather than remaining on the fringe, these ideas have been echoed within the mainstream GOP.

Fox News has begun to propagate aspects of the racist narrative over the past year, without necessarily adhering to the theory itself. The Fox News version is more narrowly focused on domestic electoral politics, accusing Democrats of pushing for replacement for partisan political advantage.

Laura Ingraham has subscribed to the notion that Democrats are trying to use “chain migrants” to replace Americans. She said in one appearance last year that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”

Tucker Carlson has also echoed elements of the theory — “demographic replacement” is his term — using it as a partisan bludgeon to accuse Democrats of trying to seed the country with liberal constituencies.

After the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, for example, Carlson claimed that leftists were advocating for a “genocide” of white men. He has also characterized the difference between U.S. policy towards immigrants and towards its native-born citizens as “it’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.”

Trump himself has promoted this idea with his rallies and ads about the scary migrant “caravan” during the midterm elections.

The “Great Replacement” was a specific idea that was espoused by the Pittsburgh synagogue and the Christchurch shooters last year.

Only 19 minutes before 911 was first alerted that a terrorist shooting had occurred in El Paso, Texas on Saturday, the suspect posted a 2300-word manifesto online that outlined his motives. The suspect spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” asserting, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.” At the heart of the manifesto, titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” was a belief that is central to modern white nationalist and white supremacist ideology: the Replacement Theory, which argues that whites are being replaced by “non-whites” around the world. And the Replacement Theory has been a primary motivation in a series of deadly terrorist acts, from Pittsburgh to New Zealand to Virginia.

In “The Inconvenient Truth,” acts of terrorism are characterized not as extremism or murdering innocent people, but as acts of self-defense against a non-white “invasion.” And the manifesto openly praises the worst act of terrorism in New Zealand’s history: an attack on two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, 2019 that left 51 people dead. In the manifesto written before that attack, the Replacement Theory was specifically mentioned as a motive — and “The Inconvenient Truth,” in solidarity, asserts, “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

The Christchurch terrorist specifically thanked Donald Trump, but somehow the National Review thought it was totally unfair to link Trump to his actions.

I do not recall hearing President Donald J. Trump urge anyone to enter a mosque and gun down Muslims. Still, Trump’s critics — whose volcanic rage makes Vesuvius resemble Old Faithful — hold him responsible for March 15’s mayhem in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Police say that an Australian white supremacist opened fire inside two local mosques, killing 50 worshipers and wounding some 50 more. Yet, somehow it’s all Trump’s fault — his detractors argue.

Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said: “The president uses language often that’s very similar to the language used by these bigots and racists, and if he’s not going to call it out, then other leaders have to do more to call it out.”

“Time and time again, this president has embraced and emboldened white supremacists,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.). “Instead of condemning racist terrorists, he covers for them.”

[…]

These scathing attacks raise this philosophical question: If the president of the United States speaks, and the Trump-loathing media and his critics ignore his words, has he made a sound?

In fact, President Trump has praised Muslims at home and abroad. He has denounced white supremacists. And he has embraced the two groups whom Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and their ilk detest the most: blacks and Jews. This news may shock most Americans, since anti-Trump journalists conceal these facts like classified data.

Oh sure, Trump said that he “condemns” all types of violence, and he’s criticized white supremacists once or twice. But frankly, nobody, including the white supremacists, believe any of that because he’s also criticized the “alt-Left” and Antifa. They said so during the recent Portland Proud Boys rally.

The organizer of a far-right rally in Portland, Oregon claimed the event was a “success” after President Donald Trump attacked Portlandiers protesting the group.

“A confluence of protesters on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum merged on Portland’s waterfront Saturday in a tense but relatively uneventful face-off that brought national attention, including a tweet in the hours before the protest by President Trump decrying the city’s signature anti-fascist movement,” the Oregonian reported Saturday.

[…]

“Joe Biggs, a former InfoWars staffer and the organizer of Saturday’s right-wing demonstration, was asked by The Oregonian/OregonLive what message the effort got across,” the newspaper reported.

“Go look at President Trump’s Twitter,” Biggs said. “He talked about Portland, said he’s watching antifa. That’s all we wanted. We wanted national attention, and we got it. Mission success.”

In recent weeks, white supremacists have murdered dozens of people in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. Several others have been thwarted before they attacked, including one who praised Trump as he threatened to kill Hispanics and blacks.

Eric Lin, 35, was charged with interstate transmission of threatening communications. According to the criminal complaint against him, Lin targeted an unnamed victim who lives in Florida but is from Spain with threatening Facebook messages, repeatedly indicating he identified with Hitler’s views. He also referenced the President.

“Our Great President Donald John Trump is too Nice of Man. But I will say it,” Lin allegedly wrote on July 15 to his victim, before unleashing a series of racial slurs and saying that Hispanic, black and Muslim Americans “will be Killed!”

“I Thank God everyday President Donald John Trump is President and that he will launch a Racial War and Crusade to keep [various slurs] and any dangerous non-White or Ethnically or Cultural Foreign group ‘In Line,’” he allegedly wrote a few days later.

Another white nationalist was arrested for planning an attack in Ohio.

The FBI raided the home of James Reardon, 20, on Friday and found a stockpile of weapons that included dozens of rounds of ammunition, several semi-automatic weapons and protective gear like a gas mask and bulletproof vest, according to multiple reports. Police also found white nationalist and anti-Semitic imagery in his home.

Reardon was initially flagged by authorities last month when he posted a video on Instagram that showed a man shooting a semi-automatic rifle. Sirens and screams were heard in the background of the video, according to ABC News and Reardon tagged Jewish Community Center of Youngston in the Instagram post.

And yet another anti-trans, racist Trump fan from Connecticut was arrested for making violent threats.

A Connecticut man who had amassed an arsenal of tactical weapons and body armor, and who police say may have been preparing for a mass shooting, left a trail of virulently racist and anti-trans postings online.

TPM found that social media accounts registered to Norwalk, Connecticut resident Brandon Wagshol both reflected elements of the police accusations against him and contained rants against minorities.

[…]

In January 2018, for example, after Trump complained that immigrants were coming into the U.S. from “shithole countries,” Wagshol posted memes riffing on the term.

In one post, a meme appears to show the popular 23andme genetic testing kit offering consumers the opportunity to discover “which shithole country are you from?”

And these three were just the tip of the floating turdberg.

It’s impressive that all of these whack jobs were caught before things went completely off the rails, but none of that was thanks to Trump or the White House ,who have been repeatedly ignoring the threat of growing white nationalism.

“Homeland Security officials battled the White House for more than a year to get them to focus more on domestic terrorism,” one senior source close to the Trump administration tells CNN. “The White House wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat which, while serious, ignored the reality that racial supremacist violence was rising fast here at home. They had major ideological blinders on.”

The National Counterterrorism Strategy, issued last fall, states that “Radical Islamist terrorists remain the primary transnational terrorist threat to the United States and its vital national interests,” which few experts dispute. What seems glaring to these officials is the minimizing of the threat of domestic terrorism, which they say was on their radar as a growing problem.

“Ultimately the White House just added one paragraph about domestic terrorism as a throw-away line,” a senior source involved in the discussion told CNN. That paragraph mentions “other forms of violent extremism, such as racially motivated extremism, animal rights extremism, environmental extremism, sovereign citizen extremism, and militia extremism.” It made no mention of white supremacists. (A separate paragraph in the report mentions investigating domestic terrorists with connections to overseas terrorists, but that does not seem to be a reference to white supremacists.)

Also, Homeland Security has been struggling to deal with domestic terrorists because of the White House’s obsession with immigrants.

An unnamed current DHS official told the Daily Beast on Tuesday that the department is “scrambling” to deal with domestic terrorism following the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.

“These two shootings have caused a mad scramble where they are pulling every publication and book off the shelf in an attempt to figure out what they can do to address this problem,” a former DHS official told the Daily Beast.

Former DHS deputy Counterterrorism Coordinator John Cohen said the struggle is a “direct result” of “no serious planning efforts by the department” to fight domestic terrorism.

“That’s due in large part because of the insistence by the White House that the department first and foremost focus on immigration and border security,” he said.

Under President Donald Trump, who’s fixated on immigration and Islamic terrorism, the department’s seen major cuts in resources for addressing domestic terrorism.

Trump has ignored asylum law, which allows people to legally enter the nation from any port of entry. He’s detained asylum seekers, even though as many of 99 percent of them make it to all of their court dates. Now he’s both implementing indefinite detention for families and children while denying them flu shots, when several kids have already died as a result of the flu. Remember that Anne Frank didn’t die in a gas chamber: She died of typhus while at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Trump’s goal is simple: to make the risk of trying to enter the U.S. so painful, dangerous, and perilous that it’s not worth it, even when the alternative is death as a result of crime, gangs, and drug lords.

And all this came after acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan revealed that domestic terrorism is now a greater threat to the U.S. than al-Qaida or ISIS.

Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan stated that domestic terrorism is “absolutely” a bigger threat than international terrorism on Sunday.

“Is it fair to say that you want to change the priority–that your priority needs to be domestic terrorism?” NBC host Todd asked during an interview with McAleen. “Is that a greater threat, right now, than international terrorism?”

“Absolutely,” the acting DHS secretary replied, adding that the DHS “has to balance threats.”

McAleenan said that his department’s emphasis is providing support for “prevention, awareness, and response capability” regarding domestic terrorism on a local and state level.

Just to re-emphasize: As the threat of foreign terrorism slows, the Trump administration would rather continue to focus on that and immigration issues (such as their sudden huge raid at a chicken plant in Mississippi) instead of address terrorists that are right here, right now, and who are killing Americans by the dozens.

And then you have the House GOP caucus, which concocted talking points about white supremacy intended to minimize the issue and instead attack so-called “left-wing” violence.

In an email to constituents reported by the Tampa Bay Times, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) included a series of talking points that his spokesperson told the paper were “provided by the House Republican Conference.”

If asked, “Do you believe white nationalism is driving more mass shootings recently?” the talking points falsely respond that the El Paso shooter and the man who shot Congresswoman Gaby Giffords were politically “from the left.”

“White nationalism and racism are pure evil and cannot be tolerated in any form,” the talking points included in the email said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “We also can’t excuse violence from the left such as the El Paso shooter, the recent Colorado shooters, the Congressional baseball shooter, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooter and Antifa.”

Rather than address these terrorists, the right would rather attack Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib for their support of human rights in Palestine, by arguing that doing so “supports terrorism.” This tactic is shown in the video below, where The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart engages in an amazing shouting match with the National Review’s Rich Lowry. He repeatedly denies that they or he support Palestinian terrorism, but repeats that the basic humanity of the Palestinians itself is inherent.  Beinart argues powerfully that Palestine is an apartheid state, and that you can’t understand how bad conditions are for the those on the West Bank until you visit there and see that it is as bad and tragic as the Jim Crow South. Lowry blows all that off.

During the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King jr. and groups like SNCC, led by John Lewis, were called “communist.” The same went for Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which fought against South Africa’s apartheid system—and not always with nonviolent methods.

This basic and clear inhumanity was what Tlaib and Omar were attempting to highlight and unveil by visiting Israel, but Trump asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to block them. Netanyahu did just that, with frankly bogus claims of “anti-Semitism” and support for terrorism on their part.

The irony of that is just delicious.

Rather than admit the truth that Beinart speaks or call out domestic terrorists, conservative columnists have instead claimed that Trump has been the “victim’ of racism, and that bringing up these white supremacist terrorists is mere “identity politics.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, conservative columnist Heather Mac Donald says that Trump himself is a victim of racist attacks.

In a story headlined “Trump Isn’t the One Dividing Us by Race,” Mac Donald claims that “He hardly mentions it, while his adversaries are obsessed with ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege.’”

“It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations of large parts of the American polity,” Mac Donald claims. […]

“Identity politics dominate higher education: Administrators, students and faculty obsessively categorize themselves and each other by race. “White privilege,” often coupled with “toxic masculinity,” is the focus of freshmen orientations and an ever-growing array of courses.” […]

“To note the inevitability of white identity politics in no way condones the grotesque violence of men like the El Paso killer,” she says. “But the dominant culture is creating a group of social pariahs, a very small percentage of whom—already unmoored from traditional sources of meaning and stability, such as family—are taking their revenge through stomach-churning mayhem,” Mac Donald argues.

And many conservatives, including Newt Gingrich and Erick Erickson, apparently lost their minds over The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which is a series of essays about the impact of slavery in America published on the 400th anniversary of the first Africans landing on North American soil.

Some commentators, like Elie Mystal, have noted the absurdity that all these complaints seem to center on the idea that no one would like America if a full and complete history of slavery and its brutality was debated publicly.

But there is another, deeper common thread that runs through all these complaints. Conservatives seem to be bristling at the idea that slavery is not just something in our past, but something that shapes what our nation is to this day.

They don’t want to grapple with the structures we have cyclically built and rebuilt to reduce black Americans to a state “almost” like slavery, from mass incarceration to attacks on voting rights. They don’t want to talk about how stereotypes we formed about black people during slavery affect everything from how willing employers are to hire them to how willing doctors are to prescribe them pain medicine. And they also don’t want to hear how white people were not, in fact, selfless saviors who swooped in and ended slavery in 1863, because that forces them to confront how unwilling they are to address its lasting effects now, from civil rights to reparations.

Admitting and acknowledging the experience of African Americans is a threat. It validates the evil, discriminatory, and bigoted acts of (some) white people during the past four centuries, and if those acts are admitted then it requires action—largely by white people—to change and correct those actions. That’s exactly what the GOP doesn’t want. It’s certainly what Trump doesn’t want.

Instead of correcting the consequences of discrimination, Trump’s Labor Department has been establishing rules to legalize LGBTQ discrimination for “religion-exercising organizations.”

Labor officials have made public a new rule—no Congress, needed, thank you—to allow companies contracting with the federal government who are “religion-exercising organizations” to ignore federal laws protecting the rights of gays, transsexuals, and who knows who else in hiring or workplace practices. Religious employers and companies with “closely held” religious ties now will be shielded from claims of bias in court or other law enforcement actions, says the rule..

Trump supporters like goofy game show host Chuck Woolery claim “racism has nothing to do with race.” Yeah—okay, Chuck.

Rather than point advocate against any of this, other Trump supporters are instead holding rallies against “hate” directed at Trump.

Trump supporter Tammy Curry, who sells log cabin accessories and CBP products at a pair of local shops, organized a “Make America Great Again” rally Friday evening at a picnic grounds, where supporters gathered to celebrate the president.

“We have to do something about all the hatred,” Curry said. […]

The 61-year-old Curry was instead concerned about criticism against one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history.

“I just think right now the president is being attacked unjustly,” Curry said. “People don’t respect the office of the president. Never have I seen this much hate. It scares me.”

Most of Trump’s supporters are just as oblivious, if not more so. His base’s support hasn’t wavered, remaining in the 80 percent range both before and after his “very fine people” reaction to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. They fail to see these events, his disgusting treatment of immigrants, and his dismissive attitude toward the dangers of white supremacist terrorism as being relevant to them.

His support among the GOP actually increased after his attacks on Reps. Omar, Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ayanna Pressley, which were launched to tamp down their criticism of his inhumane immigration policies.

Support for U.S. President Donald Trump increased slightly among Republicans after he lashed out on Twitter over the weekend in a racially charged attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen, a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll shows.

The national survey, conducted on Monday and Tuesday after Trump told the lawmakers they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” showed his net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points to 72%, compared with a similar poll that ran last week.

They don’t really mind any of this, because they like his immigration policies. But that doesn’t make them all racist. It just makes them racist-adjacent.

One of the key things learned from the 1619 Project is the fact that there was never any point in time when most Americans were racist. I believe they were not. The issue of slavery something that only impacted the slave owners themselves, and few people (even among Southerners) belonged to that class. If you read the letters of Civil War soldiers, rarely are the issues of slavery or abolition discussed. More often, their issues are personal and more prosaic. Union soldiers were, at least originally, not fighting to free the slaves, despite what Newt Gingrich says. In fact, they were somewhat concerned with the ramifications of the Emancipation Proclamation.

One of those new measures that is taken to fight the war is the Emancipation Proclamation. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had been issued on September 22nd of 1862 and the Emancipation Proclamation really changed the whole aim of a war that had been begun to save the Union. Now it becomes a war also to end slavery. Now those two goals had never been completely separable but the official line had always been “This is a war to save the Union” and not to have really much of anything to do with slavery. Those changes really rocked much of the Civil War North, particularly the Northern home front.

You have quite a lot of dissent among white Northerners over the Emancipation Proclamation. Black Northerners, there is no dissent. They think this is exactly what has been needed since well before the war began. There are a number of issues at stake in the 1862 elections. There are economic issues, there are issues having to do with civil liberties, what actions can and cannot the United States government take during wartime and there’s the war and of course there’s the Emancipation Proclamation.

All of those from the North weren’t abolitionist heroes, and all those from the South weren’t slaver bigots. Then, as now, most people were largely trying to get on with their lives and not so much concerned with the matters of others.

This is why it is only the threat of a looming recession that has Trump starting to worry he just might lose the support of his base. Trump can use the exact same anti-Semitic trope of suggesting that Jews aren’t “loyal” that Rep. Ilhan Omar was slammed for when she criticized AIPAC, and his base won’t care one wit. What they care about is their own pocketbook, and hardly anything else.

Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who has always supported Trump’s policy positions (even though they are all still based on bigoted ideas) is someone who reached the breaking point with Trump’s racist attacks on “the Squad” when he said they should “go back where they came from.” He believes there are other Republicans who are merely in the closet on their moral objections to Trump’s behavior.

He claims he can take five points off of Trump’s support using his new SuperPAC and gathering Republicans who supposedly have the strength of moral conviction to try and primary Trump in 2020. The goal is to continue Trump’s policies without all the embarrassing, silly, and racist parts.

Oh, really?

We’ll have to see how he does with that effort, but I’m not optimistic.The problem is the core of the “Great Replacement” idea is that it’s not just racial, it’s also economic. It’s about jobs and opportunities being supposedly taken or blocked from white people who because of immigration now have to compete on the level that the market actually demands. To keep their jobs and avoid being “replaced,” they’d have to accept a cut to their pay or their benefits, which migrants are willing to tolerate. According to the paranoid theory, white people would likely have to move to another state, or possibly even out of the country because that’s where their jobs just might be going.

Trump has been selling his base the idea that he’s going to bring those overseas jobs back, and he’s going to get rid of all those pesky immigrants (even a lot of the legal ones!) and that’s what is going to “Make America Great Again.” The economic and the racial have always been linked in his vision; it’s not really possible to separate them.

In order to bring about his economic vision, Trump has to totally amp up the cruelty toward immigrants. He has to attack even our allied nations and portray China and the E.U. as taking “unfair advantage” of us on trade, because you see “those other people” are always the problem. “They” are the issue. We just need to put all those other people in their proper shithole place, and America will be better off—the “real” America, that is: not Baltimore and all its rats and rodents, of course.

This is why the white supremacists love him. This is why they feel emboldened by him. This is why they are acting out, and have become radicalized at increasing rates: because of him.

Meanwhile, the rest of the GOP stands idly by, in denial—and often, in delusion.

During the height of the civil rights struggle, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously stated that his largest challenge wasn’t with the KKK, but with white moderates who remained idle in response to injustice.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice […]

It’s often said that all that’s required for evil to flourish, is for good men to do nothing.

Then, as now, the greatest challenge we have aren’t the white supremacists and racists who have rallied to Trump’s side: It’s the other loyal supporters of the GOP who have placed their own personal gain and comfort above the damage that Trump’s tragic trade, immigration, and domestic terrorism policies are doing to the lives of tens and hundreds of thousands. They just don’t care, because they don’t think they’re in the path of the wrecking ball.

I think they’re wrong about that.

They aren’t moved by pictures of children in cages. They aren’t moved by pictures of Americans dead and dying on the ground as a result of white supremacist terror. They aren’t moved by seeing throngs of Proud Boys marching in the streets of Portland, or by the “very fine people” in Charlottesville. They aren’t moved by Trump saying black and brown congresswomen should “go back where they came from,” and they aren’t moved by Trump saying that Jews that support Democrats are “disloyal.”

They’re more concerned about being called “racist” for supporting Trump. They’re more concerned with being blamed for something, or being responsible for anything. They’re more concerned with their own 401(k). They’re more concerned with their own pension.

Technically, there’s nothing wrong with that. Obviously, people can make their own choices about what they’re going to care about. But I do wonder: When there is clear and obvious evil taking place on their behalf, on their watch, and under their nose; when terrorists are being radicalized by the rhetoric of the current White House resident, when does their standing on the sidelines become an act of enabling that evil?

Are you truly innocent if you only act when your own financial interests are threatened by a recession?

And naturally, in anticipation of this Trump is already scapegoating the news media for creating a recession if there is one, so he won’t have to take the blame.

“The Fake News Media is doing everything they can to crash the economy because they think that will be bad for me and my re-election,” Trump tweeted Thursday, apparently seeking to spread the outrageous theory that shadowy forces would wreck the economy for the sole purpose of damaging him politically.

“Mr. Trump has repeated the claims in private discussions with aides and allies, insisting that his critics are trying to take away what he sees as his calling card for re-election,” Haberman writes

Because of course, their money is all they truly care about. As for the rest of it, they’re just not interested or worse yet, they really do believe that wackadoodle conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton (on her day off from running the Comet Pizza teenage human trafficking ring and selling Benghazi secrets to Q-anon while laughing over Seth Rich’s grave) hired Christopher Steele to pay off a bunch of Russians to lie about Trump, and then used that information to manipulate the Deep State of Comey, Strzok, Page, Clapper, and Brennan to illegally spy on Carter Page and Trump in his tower. Then they called up Bigfoot and the Sasquatch for an Illuminati clam bake at Chappaquiddick and any minute now—literally any second—Attorney General Barr is gonna have them all, including Mueller, Hillary, and Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend Bill Clinton, in handcuffs and leg irons. Just you wait.

They think Trump saying that he’s the “King of the Jews” and the “chosen one” is cute and the best thing they’ve heard since the last chosen ones, Neo of the Matrix and Anakin Skywalker.

Scaramucci is betting that GOP rank-and-file will get up off the sidelines and support his alternative candidate to Trump in 2020 on essentially moral grounds. He’s not the first to try and make this argument. Former Sen. Jeff Flake tried to stand up to Trump too, and it didn’t work out so well for him. Rep. Justin Amash is trying to do it, but the verdict is still out on how that’s going. The Mooch might have a better shot if he was willing to go third-party rather than try and work inside the GOP, because I think that the rank-and-file Republicans are frankly long, long gone from being who and what he seems to think they are. The cancer of the Trump cult —which Trump claims is a “movement based on love”—has already metastasized.

At its core, Donald Trump’s love is filtered through fascism and authoritarianism. His form of tainted love rests upon moral inversion, a state of being in which truth is replaced by lies, empirical reality itself is usurped, and the evil and immoral are transformed into the good and the noble. As Hannah Arendt warned in her landmark book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

In this malignant reality, people who are in thrall to Donald Trump (or the other ignominious fascist and authoritarian leaders whom he adores and imitates) do not know what right and wrong are anymore. When these distinctions are pointed out, Trump’s supporters double down on their investment in the Great Leader and “the Movement,” focusing their rage and violence against the political truth-teller.

Donald Trump’s love is exclusive rather than inclusive, narrow rather than broad. It is focused inward on the in-group as a way of legitimating violence and meanness towards the out-group. Trump’s love is not a celebration of the best of humanity but is itself inhumane.

They have become an authoritarian cult.  Maybe they already were after the days of George W. Bush and decades of Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, Pirro, the rest of Faux Snooze, Sinclair, Newsmax, Breitbart and RT. They don’t flinch at his crazed, inhumane, and racist actions because they support his inhumane and racist actions. They like it. They think every little time the media has a bovine birth over his latest nutball action like trying to buy Greenland like it’s on sale at Walmart is great. He’s just trolling the media, and also “pwning the libs,”, ha ha! He called the prime minister of Denmark “nasty”? Just like Meghan Markle and Elizabeth Warren? Fine. He also said London’s Mayor Saddiq Khan was a “Nasty guy” and a “total loser” but since he’s a dude, that makes it fine.

I don’t think they’re ever coming back from being enablers for Trump’s bigotry. They like that he says out loud what they’re afraid to admit they think. He says pretty boldly what Limbaugh and Ann Coulter only hinted at previously. His supporters have completely lost their moral compass down the garbage disposal if they can’t see this man is totally bankrupt not only six times financially, but also morally and ethically. And I when Trump is finally gone—whenever that maybe—they’ll still be here, raging about immigrants and foreigners, and enabling and rationalizing monsters.

And if I’m wrong, nobody is stopping them from proving this isn’t the case.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/russian-history-gives-america-an-ominous-warning/

no lnx

Russian history gives America an ominous warning

Kremlin

Written by History News Network August 17, 2019

Russia is often in the news these days – corrupt and repressive at home, aggressive and malevolent in relation to neighbors and rivals. Yet this Russia is heir to a country that shaped the twentieth century and had a formative impact on the cultural and political history of the modern world. It cannot be dismissed as a plaything of Vladimir Putin’s arrogant ambitions. Over the past hundred years, Russia has been a bellwether, not an exception. We should take heed.

Russia has more than once demonstrated the ease with which complex societies can fall apart. It has shown how difficult it is to uphold the legitimacy of nations and to install and sustain democratic regimes. The country we know as the Russian Federation changed names, borders, and political systems twice in the course of the twentieth century. We remember the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A megapower suddenly vanished–the ideology that sustained it deflated like a punctured balloon. The periphery defected – fourteen former Soviet republics emerged as independent nations. Nevertheless, Moscow remains the center of a multiethnic territory that continues to span the Eurasian continent. Democratic in form, authoritarian in practice, Russia is still a major player on the international stage.

In 1991 the center not only held, but other structures also persisted. Positions of power within the Soviet hierarchy translated into opportunities to amass personal fortunes. Alumni, like Putin, of the Soviet political police, the former KGB, used their insider status and institutional leverage to shape a new form of authoritarian rule.A pseudo-capitalist oligarchy arose on the ashes of Soviet Communism, while the welfare of the majority of the population eroded. What we now deplore as the increasing disparity between rich and poor in the developed industrial nations in Russia was an instant product of Communism’s collapse. Much has improved in the post-Soviet sphere; open borders, an uncensored press, freedom of speech and assembly (though increasingly imperiled), prosperity for the better off, not just the elite. But the rule of law is a mere fig leaf and the hope that free markets would result in a free society has not been fulfilled.

This recent transition – by now thirty years old – was not the first time the center held, against all odds, and the promise of liberation was disappointed. Seven decades earlier, between 1917 and 1921, an entire civilization collapsed and a new one was founded. In 1913 Tsar Nicholas II celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty; in August 1914 he took Russia into World War I on the side of the Allied powers. In March 1917 mutinies in the imperial armed forces, bread riots by working-class women, industrial strikes in the key cities, and peasant revolts in the countryside led to the defection of the military and civilian elites. For years, a burgeoning civil society and a disaffected radical fringe had been dreaming of change – the one of the rule of law, the other of socialist revolution. When Nicholas renounced the throne, a seven-month experiment in democratic politics ensued – at the grass roots in the form of elected soviets (councils), on the scale of empire in the form of elections to a Constituent Assembly. Millions voted at every level; democracy was in the air. Yet, the Provisional Government, which honored Russia’s commitment to the Allied cause, could not cope with the same war that had proved the monarchy’s undoing. In October 1917, the Bolshevik Party, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, arrested the liberal ministers, took control of the soviets, and heralded the installation of the world’s first socialist government.

...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/history-shows-that-protest-is-not-enough-to-topple-a-dictator-the-army-must-also-turn

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/29/headlines/brazilian_president_bolsonaro_threatens_glenn_greenwald_with_imprisonment

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro threatened journalist Glenn Greenwald with possible imprisonment Saturday, following recent reporting by Greenwald’s news website The Intercept implicating Justice Minister Sérgio Moro in a possible plot to smear and convict former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Speaking to a reporter, Bolsonaro said Greenwald could not be deported because he was married to a Brazilian, but that he might be imprisoned instead. Journalists and press freedom activists blasted Bolsonaro’s threats, and Greenwald responded via Twitter: “Contrary to what the president says, he is not (yet) a dictator. He doesn’t have the power to order people to stop. To detain someone, you need to present evidence to a court showing that a crime was committed. That evidence does not exist.” Click here to see our interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glenn Greenwald on The Intercept’s exposé of Sérgio Moro and the Operation Car Wash scandal.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/29/headlines/miners_raid_tribe_in_brazil_killing_leader_as_amazon_suffers_mass_deforestation_by_illegal_loggers

In northern Brazil, residents of a remote indigenous village say at least 10 heavily armed gold miners in military uniforms raided their community last week, stabbing a leader to death. The assault on the Wajãpi village came as new government data show that deforestation in the Amazon has dramatically increased since President Bolsonaro took office in January, losing more than 1,300 square miles of forest cover—a 39% increase over the same period last year. The drastic change is due to Bolsonaro’s rolling back of regulations and punitive measures on illegal logging. In May, a group of former Brazilian environment ministers warned, “We’re facing the risk of runaway deforestation in the Amazon.” One former minister said that Brazil was becoming an “exterminator of the future.”

cf lakoff strict FATHER, the fasciststrong man alone can save us

.but chaos will increase b/c of global weirding, and perhaps other (converging?! in unexpected ways, cascade effects b/c our commons/resilience is being degraded?!) but b/c bannon's alt rt disruption model is catching on, and can piggyback/hijack the chaos?!

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/democratic-2020-strategy-must-be-gloves-off-and-abandon-all-subtletytrump-will-kill-your-dog/

Democratic 2020 strategy must be gloves off and abandon all subtlety: ‘Trump will kill your dog!’

sounds like a joke, but it's sort of jiu jitsu, using trump strength (here literally) against him: the Dems will take care of you (health care, school student debt etc)

Written by Lucian K. Truscott IV / Salon July 27, 2019

When he’s finished putting down your dog, Trump is going to take away your health care, raise your taxes, eliminate your job, take away your right to an abortion, limit your right to vote, turn your air and water brown, cut your Social Security and Medicare, and tell you if you don’t like it, you can leave.

It doesn’t matter who’s the nominee. This is the message Democrats have to carry to the country in 2020. Is it an exaggeration? A scare tactic? Are you kidding? We already know all this stuff is true, and we don’t need “facts” to surmise that if given half a chance Trump and his minions will find some way to make euthanizing shelter animals easier and more profitable. For Donald Trump and the Republican Party he leads, money and cruelty is who they are. It’s what they do.

Democrats had better wake up to the fact that the 2020 campaign, on every level from the presidential race on down, is going to take place in the gutter. It’s long past time to take the gloves off. Republicans never put them on. They’ve been out there stealing, lying and cheating their way into office for decades. They don’t have a concept of playing fair. They play dirty. They play to win. They’ll do anything it takes to do it.

They’ve already gerrymandered electoral districts so that Democrats get a majority of the vote and a minority of House seats like they do in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina. They’ve passed laws restricting the right to vote in 25 states since 2010, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting laws. Fifteen states have more restrictive voter ID requirements, and ten have passed laws making it harder for citizens to register to vote. Every state with new voting restrictions is controlled by Republicans, and a Republican-backed lawsuit succeeded in defenestrating the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. And I hardly need to go into what they’ve done to campaign finance laws. Mitt Romney’s cri de coeur in 2012, “Corporations are people too!” is all you need to know.

Now they’re floating shit like this: all Democrats are Socialists. That whiny little Trump-pilot-fish Lindsey Graham recently asserted that AOC and the rest of the “Squad” are communists. Every other time Trump opens his mouth he’s chirping that Democrats are for “open borders.” They’re out there daily pushing the lie that Democrats want to come right into your homes and take away your guns. And don’t you know that they’ll get around to some bullshit about how Democrats want ISIS to win in Syria and Iraq and then they’ll turn Afghanistan over to the Taliban.

Do you think Republicans care if it’s all complete bullshit? Hell no. They’re going to run on this crap, and anything else they can think up over the next 15 months, and they’re going to laugh all the way to the ballot box. You want to know what else Trump and his lily-livered bunch of chicken hawks are going to do? They’re going to sell the idea that Donald Trump, who had five draft deferments, skipped out of Vietnam with his bone spurs, capitulated to Vladimir Putin at Helsinki, writes “love letters” to Kim Jung Un, ripped babies out their mothers arms along the southern border, and has been charged by multiple women with rape as well as sexual assault  is a tough guy.

I’ll wait for you to reach down and pick your jaw up from the floor on that one. You okay now? Is your jaw reattached?

Here’s why Republicans are pushing the lie that Trump is a tough guy. Because it works. Historian Rick Perlstein, author of a series of books on the rise of Republican conservatism, was interviewed in The New Yorker last week and said something I think the Democratic Party has forgotten over the last decade or so. “Toughness is a core primary value,” Perlstein said, referring to red states that Democrats have failed to carry in recent elections. “All of us remember 2004, when George W. Bush won reelection explicitly on this rationale of saying we know people disagree with his issue positions, but we are going to position him as the guy who sticks with his gut no matter what.”

Sound familiar? Bush, who famously avoided Vietnam by joining the Air Force National Guard and then failed to show up for duty during the war years, was sold as “tough.” Ronald Reagan was awarded the Bronze Star for Toughness when he yelled out that he “paid for this microphone” at some long-forgotten debate in New Hampshire in 1980. And now we’ve got Donald Trump, whose boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy” on the infamous Access Hollywood tape is what passes for Republican toughness today.

The appearance by a real-life tough guy on Capitol Hill got me thinking about what the Democrats’ problem has been when it comes to this “toughness” thing. Robert Mueller, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who earned a Bronze Star medal and a Purple Heart, has been roundly criticized for his halting and seemingly imprecise testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees this week. The contrast between the serious, taciturn Mueller and such bellowing “bomb throwers” as Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio couldn’t have been starker.

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Mueller’s problem on Wednesday is the same as the problem Democrats have when they run for office. Mueller was careful, nuanced, and he stuck to the facts. His testimony, when it came right down to it, was imperfect in the way that any sane person must be if he or she is bound by a sense of duty, propriety, and an urge to abide by accepted norms. He came across as a somewhat reluctant, hesitant witness, while if you read his testimony, he was anything but. He was measured, he was accurate, and he was truthful.

Republicans on the two committees were almost uniformly the opposite. Their speechifying and questioning was impertinent, premised on lies, and intended to distract from the truth. In short, they conducted themselves at the Mueller hearings in the manner that they run for office.

There is a lesson Democrats running for office can learn from the Mueller hearings. It does you little good to stick to the rules of good order and behavior when the other side has abandoned both. I’m not saying that Democrats should adopt Republican ways by joining them in lying, cheating and stealing. But I am saying that Democrats can learn something from Republican imprecision.

Take health care as just one example.Ever since the debates over Obamacare, Democrats have been lost in a blizzard of confusing and often contradictory details about how to handle the nation’s healthcare crisis. Obamacare was an imperfect compromise, and now they’re torn between defending a muddled status quo or going for one variation or another on Medicare for all, and nobody really understands one plan from another. Meanwhile, Republicans have spent the last several decades firing potshots at Democrats and proposing no plan of their own.

How about this: what if Democrats took a page out of the Republican playbook and simply said, “Don’t worry, you can trust us. We’re going to take care of your health care.” That’s the plan, the whole thing. It would have the advantage of being both simple and true. They could apply this approach across the board. Here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to lower your taxes, raise your pay, protect your jobs, reduce your student loan payments, protect Social Security and Medicare, maintain your right to an abortion, reform the immigration laws, and protect the southern border. And we’re going to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What plan do we have for all of this? You know us, we’re on your side, and we’re going to do what we say....

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/how-the-white-evangelical-worldview-is-pulling-us-toward-authoritarianism/

no lnx

How the white evangelical worldview is pulling us toward authoritarianism

written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly June 18, 2019

A recognition of the fact that the American right has soured on the whole notion of democracy in favor of authoritarianism comes with the implicit recognition that conservative white evangelicals have willingly joined that movement. As poll after poll has demonstrated, the one group that has remained loyal to the GOP during its descent into Trumpism is white evangelicals.

To understand how that happened, we should note that court evangelical Franklin Graham is fond of equating progressives with godlessness. That is first and foremost his attempt to exclude anyone who doesn’t agree with him politically from calling themselves “Christian”—which is why he constantly challenged the faith of Barack Obama.

But Graham’s pronouncement is about a lot more than that. It also encapsulates his worldview, which is shared by many white evangelicals.

Almighty God is a sovereignGod, ruler over nations, states, empires and governments. He is to be worshipped and obeyed through the precepts and principles revealed in His infallible Word. He not only exists, but He is sovereign over all of history according to His wisdom and purposes, and He is intimately involved in every aspect of life.

The Biblical worldview also asserts the existence and reality of sin and evil. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). War, disease, violence, injustice and the myriad of problems that beset the world are the result of man’s rebellion against God. No amount of higher education, no enlightened political agenda or social program can cancel or remove the devastating consequences of sin.

The root of everything wrong in the world is sin, which relegates any attempt to improve things outside of the parameters set by the “Biblical worldview” to the dustbin of abject failure. According to Graham, human beings who don’t submit to the authority of the Bible are incapable of behaving morally.

The secular worldview dismisses God as irrelevant in the affairs of men and government, and views critical moral issues as independent of God’s moral character and principles. Clear definitions of right and wrong are impossible to determine, having been replaced by cultural whims and situational ethics…

Any attempt to create a utopian society, to permanently solve global problems, is doomed to fail.

That is where the authoritarianism comes in. Graham began the article I’ve been quoting by referencing the fact that Congress failed to pass legislation banning abortion after 20 weeks, the movement towards equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, and the so-called “foothold” that Islam has gained in Europe. Those are all meant to indicate that white evangelical Christians are losing the culture war.

Graham posits that the ultimate solution will only come at the rapture when Jesus returns to eliminate sin and mete out judgment to those who have rebelled against him. But in the meantime, the intent is clear. Since any effort to mitigate the consequences of sin—war, disease, violence, injustice, etc.—outside of adherence to the authority of the Bible is doomed to failure by the godless secularists, Graham’s view of Biblical authority must be imposed by the state in order to contain chaos.

When Sohrab Ahmari counsels conservatives to eschew civility and decency in political discourse in order to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good,” he is joined in that advice by Franklin Graham. During a speech in North Carolina, Graham warned that those “godless progressives” will call you names and get in your face, so Christians need to have thick skin and say, “there’s more of us than there are of you, so shut up and sit down.”

As with any group, there are those in the white evangelical community who disagree with some elements of Graham’s worldview, just as, contrary to his claims, there are a whole host of Christian progressives. But overall, what Graham has articulated is embraced by Trump’s enablers among the court evangelicals and their followers. It abandons the idea of a democracy where neutral ground is found among a pluralistic society in favor of an authoritarian system that imposes its Biblical worldview on everyone.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/lazy-stupid-and-dangerous-this-ex-republican-explains-how-he-enabled-right-wing-populism-and-it-went-completely-off-the-the-rails/

...“I used to think right-wing anti-elitism against the intellectuals — in contrast to the left-wing anti-elitism against the rich — was innocuous and even well-warranted,” he wrote. “While warning of the dangers of populism, I sometimes indulged in this kind of posturing myself. Like a lot of conservative eggheads, I imagined that, even though I lived among the coastal elite, I was expressing the wisdom of the heartland.”

He added: “I now realize that these stereotypes are lazy, stupid and dangerous.”

It’s dangerous, of course, because anti-intellectual rhetoric is a common tool of authoritarians seeking to undermine anyone who could challenge them. Boot noted that Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong all demonized and went after intellectuals they feared. These actions mirror Trump’s attacks on experts and the media, whom Trump calls “the enemy of the people,” echoing Stalin himself.

Of course, intellectuals and commentators aren’t without their faults. Boot himself, as a backer of the Iraq War, would be a prime example of their failings. But anti-intellectualism — denunciations of the “chattering class” — was itself a disturbing trait of the second Bush administration as it devised to bring the country to war, with horrifying consequences. Public intellectuals aren’t above criticism, but a political ideology that denounces them as illegitimate should be feared.

When someone like Trump wields anti-intellectualism and hostility to public figures who can challenge him, it’s a clear sign we’re on a perilous path.

“In the United States, to be sure, it will not lead to Stalinist show trials, a Cultural Revolution or the ‘killing fields,’ but it could conceivably lead to the kind of soft authoritarianism that Viktor Orban has imposed in Hungary,” wrote Boot. “President Trump shows his eagerness to imitate the dictators by calling the news media ‘the enemy of the people’ and denouncing his critics as traitors. The president’s hateful rhetoric encouraged one supporter to mail pipe bombs to prominent liberals and journalists, and could yet spark greater violence.”

He also speculated that Trump’s anger toward the media and others comes not just from cynical political motives but arises from his fragile ego.

“More than a political threat, the chattering classes are a psychological threat: They feed Trump’s insecurities because he knows they view him as a buffoonish ignoramus, not as the  that he so desperately wants to be,” said Boot.

...

==

==

Welcome to the beginning of the fascist takeover’: Utah judge suspended for 6 months without pay after series of anti-Trump remarks

In Utah, Judge Michael Kwan has made it clear that…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/democracy-is-in-a-global-crisis-revealing-the-structural-flaw-at-the-heart-of-classical-liberalism/

All over the world, alarm bells are ringing for democracy. Everywhere we find strongmen in charge, enraged citizens and a desperate search for explanations and remedies. Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. Maybe something’s even going wrong in the United States.

==

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176563/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_the_rising_tide_of_the_populist_right/#more

The man who is the most unpredictable American president of all time lives in what is, if you stop to think about it, a remarkably predictable world. Each of his seemingly strange and unexpected acts, tweets, bizarre nominations, lies and misleading claims, rallies, gestures (or those of his circle of fawning officials, advisers, and family members) is promptly seized upon by a media desperate for eyeballs.  All those cable news talking heads, all those reporters assigned to a presidency in numbers never before seen run with whatever he does as if there were neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow, as if there were nothing in the world but him and his cronies (and those who oppose him). The Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr's testimony before the Senate, his unwillingness to testify before the House, the latest phone conversation with Vladimir Putin or a Trump lawsuit, or... well, you name it. Though he calls the media the “enemy of the people,” there’s never been anything in our history like its collusion with him. In pure attention terms, can there be any doubt that the media he loves to denounce is his for the asking or that it's creating a bizarre cult of personality around him? In that sense, it’s everything he ever wanted and it’s now ineradicably fused to him and only him. Each of his acts plays out in a surging torrent of publicity, reportage, and a blizzard of tweets and social media attention.  It's no longer the news as we once knew it, but a kind of continuous news seizure, a spasm of nothing but him.

It matters not at all that you could essentially have guessed what William Barr was going to say in that Senate hearing or that the president’s strange acts are, in some fashion, curiously predictable and repetitive or that so much about the world he looms over remains similarly predictable. Even his popularity in the polls varies remarkably little, month by month, year by year, with his base eternally loyal and so many others outraged.

In such a world, always in your face, always in close-up -- and what a close-up that face of his is (reminding me, at least, of every belligerent father of the 1950s I ever knew!) -- it’s hard to get perspective on much of anything.  That's why John Feffer, author most recently of the dystopian novel Frostlands, is such a useful figure, whether in his weekly columns at Foreign Policy in Focus or, as today, at *TomDispatch*. He reminds us regularly that, whatever the evidence of our daily media lives, there’s still a world out there, a planet distinctly in distress that needs thought and attention. Tom

The Threat of Political Climate Change

Countering the Bannon Archipelago

By John Feffer

In the Americas, the Trump tsunami has swept across both continents and the “pink tide” of progressivism has all but disappeared from the southern half of the hemisphere. In Europe, with the recent exception of Spain, the left has been banished to the political margins. In Africa and Asia, socialism has devolved into nationalism, authoritarianism, or just plain corruption. And forget about the Middle East.

In this planet-wide rising tide of right-wing populism, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands -- Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Uruguay. In so many other places, increasingly illiberal leaders are in charge. Add up the numbers and significantly more than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule, courtesy of Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China, among others.

Optimistscling to the pendulum theory of politics: conservatives are now basking in the limelight, but the day will come when the right inevitably falls on its face and the left swings back into action; witness the results of the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States.

In addition, pragmatists point out that many of these latter-day autocrats, for all their anti-democratic tendencies, came to power through elections. Yes, they have since sought to change constitutions, pack courts, muzzle the media, and crack down on civil society, but they remain constrained by the guardrails of the more-or-less liberal political systems they still run. In the end, so goes such thinking, democracy will prevail. Look at how, over time, some right-wing populists have been dislodged at the polls (Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia), brought down by corruption scandals (Alberto Fujimori in Peru), or forced to resign in disgrace (Silvio Berlusconi in Italy).

Optimists and pragmatists alike ultimately have faith that democracies are self-regulating organisms, not unlike the Earth’s ecosystem. The planet has managed to survive countless asteroid strikes, solar flares, and extreme weather conditions. Democracy, too, will outlast Hurricane Donald and all the other examples of extreme political weather, thanks, sooner or later, to woke voters and resilient mechanisms of checks and balances.

Unfortunately, given the malign impact humans are having on the planet, this analogy is far less reassuring than it once might have been. Only the willfully ignorant expect that some natural oscillation in global temperature or the Earth’s own adjustments to its climate feedback loops will arrive in time to save us. Humankind has clearly thrown a spanner into the works and now faces a distinctly difficult, if not disastrous, future. Similarly, across the globe, the electoral pendulum appears to be stuck on the side of reaction and the new generation of right-wing populists could well be on the verge of changing the political playing field, just as humans are in the process of irrevocably transforming the planet.

Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Putin, Trump, and their ilk should indeed be understood as the political equivalent of global warming. Instead of deadly carbon, they spew hateful invective and show a remarkable determination to destroy a far-from-perfect status quo.  Moreover, they are the product not of farting livestock or extraterrestrial events but of the self-interested acts of blinkered humans. In an increasingly restrictive political space, liberals and progressives are looking ever more like so many polar bears on ever fewer ice floes, with diminishing room for maneuver.

Don’t bet on politics as usual to lower the temperature and put a stop to this moment’s tidal surge of ugly intolerance. Because the nature of the game has changed, those who oppose the global New Right must engage in a strategic rethink -- or we’ll all drown in the rising waters.

The Game Changers

Today’s autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers.

In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte has attacked the Catholic Church for defending the sanctity of human life and challenging his campaign of extrajudicial murder. In Nicaragua, one-time revolutionary Daniel Ortega has courted the Catholic Church as a pillar of his undemocratic rule. Vladimir Putin presents himself and his country as saviors of Christianity, while Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to promote his own brand of political Islam, Narendra Modi has ridden to power thanks to Hindu nationalism, and Xi Jinping eschews religion altogether. Some right-wing nationalists like Bolsonaro have ambitious plans to privatize state assets, while others, like those in Italy’s current leadership, want to nationalize major properties. Hungary’s Viktor Orban is concerned about climate change, but most right-wing populists like Donald Trump insist that the threat doesn’t exist and want to extract ever more fossil fuels.

Don’t be fooled, though. While these leaders may not rhyme, they all dance to the same rhythm.

These illiberal politicians have uniformly come to power by attacking globalization. They have criticized the neo-liberal transformations of the recent past that enriched the few at the expense of the many, while challenging the major political parties of the center left and center right that implemented the economic reforms that unleashed such forces. They have taken aim at the corruption that has metastasized in political systems already ill equipped to handle a massive uptick in cross-border financial transactions. When politically useful, they have demonized immigrants and refugees who are one side effect of, as well as victims of, that very burgeoning globalization movement. They have championed national sovereignty against the interventions of multilateral organizations, while blasting multicultural values and the human-rights groups that promote them. And they have taken advantage of social media like Facebook and Twitter that promote a version of participatory totalitarianism in which individuals can freely relinquish their privacy and abandon conventional news media for daily dispatches from their favorite celebrity autocrat.

Election results in the world’s most populous democracies suggest that liberalism -- in its free-market economic form and its more tolerant, inclusive, and statist political version – has become discredited at a popular level. A quick glance at the titles of some recent books (*Why Liberalism Failed*, *The Retreat of Western Liberalism*, *How Democracies Die*,*What Was Liberalism*) reveals that the chattering classes, too, have noticed this global trend.

The Trumps of this world have cannily identified a fundamental shift in the political playing field, rushing into the gap created by the declining popularity of liberal values. Viktor Orban set an early example of such opportunism when, in the 1990s, he jettisoned his liberal past and opted instead for the right side of the Hungarian political spectrum. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the left and right had alternated in power as voters became disgusted with whatever party controlled the levers of state. By successfully linking all the ills facing the country to liberals and their follies, however, Orban became the one to preside over a genuine transformation of the political landscape. The premier liberal party, the Alliance of Free Democrats, effectively disappeared when he became prime minister in 2010 -- and formally dissolved three years later. Almost a decade after he first took office, the only serious opposition to Orban is to his right.

The last time globalization transformed the world so thoroughly, in the early twentieth century, the ensuing backlash led to liberalism’s first catastrophic fail. In those years, liberals consistently failed to understand that the ground had shifted under them. In Russia, Bolsheviks took power from the weak crew of potential democratic reformers that had overthrown the tsar, inspiring a handful of movements in Europe that attempted something similar. In Germany, illiberal politicians took aim at the cosmopolitan values of the Weimar Republic. In Italy and Spain, leaders adopted virulent nationalism, challenging incipient global institutions like the League of Nations. In the wake of the Great Depression, Japanese ultra-militarists easily dispatched the weak Taisho democracy. Meanwhile, in the United States, right-wing demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin built large followings by railing on the radio against communists, Wall Street, and “the international money-changers in the temple,” though they failed to take power in the era of a charismatic liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Where liberalism survived, it did so largely by absorbing some of the strategies of the illiberal communists and fascists, namely relying on the state to keep the economy afloat, as Roosevelt did with his New Deal policies. This lesson carried over into the post-World War II-era in which American liberals continued to embrace New Deal principles that would culminate in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and European liberals embraced the compromises that would eventually produce the European Union. At the global level, nations of various ideological dispositions came together to create a set of institutions -- the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund -- meant to ensure some degree of permanent stability. Economic globalization resumed, but this time in a regulatory environment that, initially, seemed to spread the benefits more equally.

That all changed in the 1970s when, in one country after another, a new generation of liberals and conservatives began to dismantle those very regulations in hopes that an unfettered market would jump-start growth globally. However, only after China embraced capitalism and the Soviet Union collapsed did economic globalization take a quantum leap to true globalization. With it the world returned to Gilded Age levels of concentrated wealth and inequality. No surprise, then, that the instability and intolerance of that long-gone era has returned as well.

Leaders like Putin, Erdogan, and Trump aren’t just politically savvy, nor have they simply been lucky or unusually ruthless. Instead, they sensed the changing mood of a moment and were able to capitalize on a profound discontent with the status quo that liberals had built, a discontent that won’t disappear simply because right-wing populists are exposed as frauds, incompetents, or cheats. Worse, crafty operators with even more ambitious agendas stand ready to destroy the liberal status quo once and for all.

The Bannon Archipelago

A Nationalist International should be a contradiction in terms, but that hasn’t stopped Steve Bannon from trying to create one. The erstwhile publisher and moviemaker, darling of the alt-right, and one-time Trump whisperer is on an extended world tour aimed at building a loose network of right-wing populists that he calls the Movement. It’s centered in -- of all places -- Brussels, the home of the European Union.

Bannon hopes to take advantage of post-Brexit Euroskepticism to roll his Trojan horse of a movement into the very heart of the enemy’s camp. With the encouragement of various right-wing oligarchs like financier John Thornton, he’s already met with neo-fascists associated with groups like the Belgian Vlaams Belong, France’s National Rally (the rebranded National Front), and Sweden’s Democratic Party, as well as more conventional right-wing populists in Italy and Hungary. He’s out to take the EU from the social democrats and pallid conservatives, the Vatican from the too-permissive Pope Francis, and the West from the clutches of immigrants and multiculturalists.

Elections for the European Parliament at the end of May should prove a testing ground for Bannon’s Movement. Right now, if the polling is accurate and the Euroskeptic, populist, and far-right parties combine their efforts, they could, staggeringly enough, become the largest coalition in that body. True, some prominent right-wing parties, like Poland’s Law and Justice, remain unseduced by Bannon. But it’s a mistake to underestimate him, just as it was a mistake to dismiss Trump in 2016. Success can be very persuasive, as The Donald proved in his takeover of a Republican Party whose leaders initially and almost universally despised him.

But Europe is only part of Bannon’s plan. For someone who has vented so much spleen at “globalists” like financier and philanthropist George Soros, Bannon is quite the internationalist. In Latin America, he’s already appointed Jair Bolsonaro’s youngest son as his regional representative to help build on the right’s electoral successes in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay. Bannon has also partnered with a Chinese billionaire to create a Rule of Law Fund that’s meant to be the point of a spear aimed at the regime in Beijing.

In search of a stable of princes, that would-be Machiavelli has also visited Japan at the invitation of the fanatical Happiness Realization Party, a political cult that embraces Japanese militarism. Israel, too, is to be part of Bannon’s alt-right archipelago because the self-professed “Christian Zionist” sees Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a key link in a future anti-Islamic front. Also figuring prominently in his thinking is Russia, a vast, mostly white country led by a critic of Western liberalism and “radical Islam,”though Bannon acknowledges that the Mueller report has temporarily set back his efforts.

Bannon didn’t create the new right-wing populist wave, but he’s been clever enough to grab a surfboard, dive into the waters, and try to guide the swell further to the right. Toward that end, he’s creating what he calls a “war room.” He says:

“It’s what we did for Trump in the U.S.: writing op-eds, booking people on media, surrogate media -- all that. The last part of it is to do with grassroots social media and getting organized physically and getting out the vote.”

This isn’t, however, just a global version of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” an opportunistic attempt to solidify a political realignment. Bannon and his ilk have a much more ambitious project in mind. Having dismissed the current resident of the Vatican as far too liberal, Bannon has put himself forward as the pope of a new movement to fight the barbarians (as he defines them).

A lifelong Catholic and former military man, he harkens back to a much earlier papal tradition, that of Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade to retake Jerusalem at the end of the eleventh century. Bannon wants to recreate a pre-EU, whiter, more martial and nationalistic Europe. Like the popes and princes of the eleventh century, the right-wing populists in Europe have already been conjuring up external enemies to unify the like-minded. Islam remains a suitable adversary, whether in the form of ordinary immigrants or extraordinary terrorists. But there’s China, too, which poses the greatest challenge to the West since the Middle Kingdom last ruled the world of commerce, innovation, and culture so many centuries ago. Finally, there’s the enemy within: the globalists who have no patience for nationalism, the secularists who want to hold religion at arm’s length, and the multiculturalists who campaign against white privilege.

This crusade of Bannon’s and the far right is a last-ditch effort to maintain the United States and a large swath of Eurasia as bastions of white Christendom. For decades, those who held such views populated the extremes where they belonged. However, the economic failures of globalization, a huge uptick in refugee flows, and a general decline in faith in democratic institutions have proved fertile ground for such a new crusade to take shape.

Movement vs. Movement

In the United States, organizations like Indivisible, a progressive group created by former congressional staffers in the wake of the 2016 elections that now has 5,000 local chapters, are not waiting for the political pendulum to swing by itself. They’re already working hard to push politics back to the left -- and their organizing produced results in the 2018 midterm elections when the Democratic Party retook the House of Representatives.

The 2020 presidential election, however, is a different matter. Trump now has the incumbent’s advantage and, for the time being, the tailwind of a strong economy. In fact, some economic forecasters predict a landslide for him as long as the economy doesn’t tank. The president’s team has also made sure that areas of the country where his base is strong are experiencing greater job growth than in Democratic Party strongholds.

In addition, Trump and his minions are hard at work eroding the foundations of a democratic society -- demonizing the media, working to suppress voter turnout, chipping away at the barriers between church and state, and packing the courts with ideologues who support their agenda. The vast majority of the groups mobilizing to defeat Trump in 2020 are working with traditional tools to effect political change. Having learned from past masters of populism like Orban and Erdogan, Team Trump is instead busy changing the playing field.

That’s what makes the current political moment different. The pendulum theory of political change only applies if the major electoral actors play by the same rules. The right-wing populists have, however, been busy transforming the rules of the game so that they can stay in power as long as possible, while using the levers of the state to enrich themselves and their cronies. Putin has ruled Russia for two decades. Erdogan has held onto power for 16 years. Orban is closing in on a decade in office. Even in an undemocratic country like China, Xi Jinping has altered the collective rules of succession to ensure that he will remain leader for life.

One possible response to right-wing populism would, of course, be to ramp up left-wing populism.This was a winning strategy in 2015 for the Greek political party Syriza, which has been in charge of that country for four years now. It also worked for Evo Morales, who has captained Bolivia for more than a dozen years. And, of course, Bernie Sanders came close to being the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in the 2016 election while promoting his version of left-wing populism, which capitalizes on an essential political reality: passion often moves people more effectively than policy.

But it’s hard to see left-wing populism as a long-term answer to the New Right. It either fails electorally, as Jean-Luc Melenchon, the standard bearer for the movement France Unbowed, discovered in that country’s last presidential election; or it faces the kind of “economic realities” that forced Syriza to accommodate the austerity demands of European bureaucrats and banks; or, as Morales has demonstrated in Bolivia, it ends up presiding over the same erosion of democratic practices as its right-wing counterparts.

Yes, the nuts-and-bolts organizing of groups like Indivisible is indispensable. Yes, the passion of left-wing populists is essential. But such politicking and the mirror-image populism that sometimes goes with it are mere life preservers. They may keep us afloat, but they won’t rescue us. The New Right requires a far more original kind of response.

After all, the forces that gave rise to this tidal wave of right-wing populism remain in place: widening economic inequality, surging migrant flows, ballooning corruption scandals. Parties of the center remain discredited, and liberals have not come up with convincing alternatives to the policies and institutions of globalization they created. Trying to nudge the political pendulum out of the emergency zone is a necessary but ultimately insufficient approach. It’s the equivalent of expecting that a conventional fix like a gasoline tax will stop climate change. Environmentalists understand that unprecedented change requires an unprecedented response. To deal with the threat of political climate change, a similarly international, broad-based, and fundamentally new approach is called for.

So don’t wait for the pendulum to swing. Don’t put your faith in the guardrails. It’s not time for a manifesto or a 10-point plan. It’s time for a movement to counteract Bannon’s Movement, a global coalition that joins people and politicians in a united, international effort to respond to the true global problems -- climate change, endless war, and economic inequality -- that threaten to overwhelm us all. Absent such a movement, the rising tide of populism will sink all boats, life preservers and all.

John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and book two of his Splinterlands series.

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U.S. technology giant Microsoft has teamed up with a Chinese military university to develop artificial intelligence systems that could potentially enhance government surveillance and censorship capabilities. Two U.S. senators publicly condemned the partnership, but what the National Defense Technology University of China wants from Microsoft isn’t the only concern.

As my research shows, the advent of digital repression is profoundly affecting the relationship between citizen and state. New technologies are arming governments with unprecedented capabilities to monitor, track and surveil individual people. Even governments in democracies with strong traditions of rule of law find themselves tempted to abuse these new abilities.

aha MIC and PIC merge; note systemic solution // new green deal

“People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes [its] primary mission.”

“The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale said. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back and forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. … They needed a force that was more adherent to the interest of capital. … Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be that strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. … It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morphs into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.”

The almost exclusive alliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into miniature failed states, ones where destitute young men and women join a gang for security and income and engage in battles with other gangs and the police. The “broken windows” policy shifts the burden for poverty onto the poor. It criminalizes minor infractions, arguing that disorder produces crime and upending decades of research about the causes of crime.

“As poverty deepens and housing prices rise, government support for affordable housing has evaporated, leaving in its wake a combination of homeless shelters and aggressive broken-windows-oriented policing,” Vitale writes. “As mental health facilities close, police become the first responders to calls for assistance with mental health crises. As youth are left without adequate schools, jobs, or recreational facilities, they form gangs for mutual protection or participate in the black markets of stolen goods, drugs, and sex to survive and are ruthlessly criminalized. Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions.”

The accelerated assault on the poor and the growing omnipotence of the police signal our transformation into an authoritarian state in which the rich and the powerful are not subject to the rule of law.The Trump administration will promote none of the conditions that could ameliorate this crisis—affordable housing; well-paying jobs; safe and nurturing schools that do not charge tuition; better mental health facilities; efficient public transportation; the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure; demilitarized police forces in which most officers do not carry weapons; universal, government-funded health care; an end to the predatory loans and unethical practices of big banks; and reparations to African-Americans and an end to racial segregation. Trump and most of those he has appointed to positions of power disdain the poor as a dead weight on society. They blame stricken populations for their own misery. They seek to subjugate the poor, especially those of color, through police violence, ever harsher forms of punishment and an expansion of the prison system....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/welcome-to-the-fourth-reich-donald-trumps-assault-on-the-rule-of-law-will-not-end-well/

Donald Trump is not an ideologue or a person who possesses a coherent or sophisticated understanding of political theory, history or philosophy. He is all impulse and id, a man gifted in manipulating the fears of ignorant and insecure white people in the service of expanding his power and his fortune. Trump’s enforcers, including Attorney General William Barr, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and the right-wing media machine, are then tasked with transforming the president’s most base impulses into public policy.

As we have seen throughout Trump’s presidency — and as we see now in Robert Mueller’s report, with its extensive litany of borderline corruption and its numerous instances of blatant obstruction of justice — the president and his allies disregard the law whenever it is inconvenient, and enforce it with callous cruelty when it serves their goals.