other enemy foreign them
320 belated disambig redumbdent?
SEE BUNCH OF RELATED
see targets
see invasion/infection
see polarization, devil terms, me vs we
see PHOBIAS ESP XENO
see real american
see tribalism
see bogeyman
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mma
Leader of constitutional sheriffs group: “I don't blame Trump for not following the Constitution to the letter because he has no Congress that he can rely on or trust”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 04/03/26
As Media Matters previously reported last October about Richard Mack, leader of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association:
Mack is a former Arizona county sheriff and the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization which subscribes to the ideology that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.” The organization claims that sheriffs have the “Constitutional authority to check and balance all levels of government,” superseding “any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county.” Constitutional scholars and other experts dispute this assertion, with some noting that the Constitution doesn’t mention sheriffs at all.
Mack and CSPOA have pushed for sheriffs to get involved with mass deportation efforts, even holding the organization’s November national conference in Washington state in part because its attorney general is suing a sheriff for aiding the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. Mack also said he has been talking to Homan about “getting sheriffs involved in deportation.”
:{Video
Citation
From the March 30, 2026, edition of FreedomTalk, streamed on YouTube
RICHARD MACK (FOUNDER, CONSTITUTIONAL SHERIFFS AND PEACE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION): I think he’s always having to play defense, except maybe with the Iran war. Obviously, he took that offensive approach. And even on that, the Democrats and some Republicans have gone after him. And I don't blame Trump for not following the Constitution to the letter because he has no Congress that he can rely on or trust.
KELLY JOHN WALKER (HOST): Yeah.
MACK: He cannot. And so if he had gone to them before he invaded Iran, there's lots of Democrats in there that would have informed Iran.
WALKER: Yeah.
MACK: And it would have cost the lives of a lot of people and maybe even cost the entire operation. And when you have an enemy Congress like that, that obviously are traitors to America. And I'm not talking about, not, oh if they don't go along with Trump, then they're traitors. No. That's not what I'm talking about. This is far beyond just not going along, or going against the president. It's far beyond that. They will do anything, including compromise the safety and security of Americans.
...
This is obvious that they are enemy and they bring in enemy combatants so they're the same as. They're the ones who brought in terrorists. They're the ones that brought in the cartels and that's the most dangerous situation in American history right now what they have done.
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09/27/24
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:REALLY GOOD ANALYSIS
AN 10 25
A grim-faced President Donald J. Trump looks out at the reader, under the headline “LAW AND ORDER.” Graffiti pictured in the corner of the White House Facebook post reads “Death to ICE.” Beneath that, a photo of protesters, choking on tear gas. And underneath it all, a smaller headline: “President Trump Deploys 2,000 National Guard After ICE Agents Attacked, No Mercy for Lawless Riots and Looters.”
The official communication from the White House appeared on Facebook in June 2025, after Trump sent in troops to quell protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles. Visually, it is melodramatic, almost campy, resembling a TV promotion.
The post is not an outlier.
In the Trump administration, White House social media posts often blur the lines between politics and entertainment, and between reality and illusion.
The White House has released AI images of Trump as the Pope, as Superman and as a Star Wars Jedi, ready to do battle with “Radical Left Lunatics” who would bring “Murderers, Drug Lords … & well-known MS-13 Gang Members” into the country.
Most recently, on the weekend of the No Kings protests, both Trump and the White House released a video of the president wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet, from which he dispenses feces onto a crowd of protesters below.
Underpinning it all is a calculated political strategy: an appeal to Trump’s political base – largely white, working-class, rural or small-town, evangelical and culturally conservative.
As scholars who study communication in politics and the media, we believe the White House’s rhetoric and style is part of a broader global change often found in countries experiencing increased polarization and democratic backsliding.
White House style
In the past, national leaders generally favored a professional tone, whether on social or traditional media. Their language was neutral and polished, laced with political jargon.
While populist political communication has become more common along with the proliferation of social media, the communication norms are further altered in Trump White House social media posts.
They are partisan, theatrical and exaggerated. Their tone is almost circuslike. The process of governing is portrayed as a reality TV show, in which political roles are performed with little regard for real-world consequences. Vivid color schemes and stylized imagery convert political messaging into visual spectacle. The language is colloquial, down-to-earth.
Just as other influencers in a variety of domains might create an emotional bond by tailoring social media messages, content, products and services to the needs and likes of individual customers, the White House tailors its content to the beliefs, language and worldview of Trump’s political base.
In doing so, the White House echoes a broad, growing trend in political communication, portraying Trump as “a champion of the people” and using direct and informal communication that appeals to fear and resentment.
Trump White House social media makes no effort to promote social unity or constructive dialogue, or reduce polarization – and often heightens it. Undocumented immigrants, for example, are often portrayed as inherently evil. White House social media amplifies dramatic, emotionally charged content.
In one video, Trump recites a poem about a kind woman who takes in a snake, a stand-in for an immigrant who in reality is a dangerous serpent. “Instead of saying thanks, that snake gave her a vicious bite,” Trump recites.
Talking to the base
While some scholars have called the White House social media style “amateurish,” that hasn’t resulted in change.
The lack of response to negative feedback is partially explained by the strategic goal of these communications: to appeal to the frustrations of Trump’s deeply disaffected political base, which seems to revel in the White House social media style.
Scholars identify a large number of these voters as “the precariat,” a group whose once-stable, union-protected jobs have been outsourced or replaced with low-wage, insecure service work. These workers, many former Democrats, can no longer count on a regular paycheck, benefits or work they can identify with.
As a result, they are more likely to support political candidates whom they believe will respond to their economic instability.
In addition, many of these voters blame a breakdown in what they perceive as the racial pecking order for a loss of social status, especially when compared with more highly educated workers. Many of these workers distrust the media and other elite institutions they feel have failed them. Research shows that they are highly receptive to messages that confirm their grievances and that many regard Trump as their champion.
Trump and the White House social media play to this audience.
On social media, the president is free to violate norms that anger his critics but have little effect on his supporters, who view the current political system as flawed. One example: A White House Valentine’s Day communication that said “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.”
In addition, Trump and the White House social media use the president’s status as a celebrity, coupled with comedy and spectacle, to immunize the administration from fallout, even among some of its critics.
Trump’s exaggerated gestures, over-the-top language, his lampooning of opponents and his use of caricature to ridicule whole categories of people – including Democrats, the disabled, Muslims, Mexicans and women – is read by his political base as a playful and entertaining take down of political correctness. It may form a sturdy pillar of his support.
But prioritizing entertainment over facts has long-term significance.
Trump’s communication strategies are already setting a global precedent, encouraging other politicians to adopt similar theatrical and polarizing tactics that distort or deny facts.
These methods may energize some audiences but risk alienating others. Informed political engagement is reduced, and democratic backsliding is increasingly a reality.
Although the communication style of the White House is playful and irreverent, it has a serious goal: the diffusion of ideological messages whose intent is to create a sense of strength and righteousness among its supporters.
In simple terms, this is propaganda designed to persuade citizens that the government is strong, its enemies evil and that fellow citizens – “real Americans” – think the same way.
Scholars observe that the White House projection of the often comical images of authority echoes the visual style of authoritarian governments. Both seek to be seen as in control of the social and political order and thereby to discourage dissent.
The chief difference between the two is that in a deeply polarized democracy such as the U.S., citizens interpret these displays of authority in sharply different ways: They build opposition among Trump opponents but support among supporters.
The rising intolerance that results erodes social cohesion, undermines support for democratic norms and weakens trust in institutions. And that opens the door to democratic backsliding.
Andrew Rojecki, Professor of Communication, University of Illinois Chicago and Tanja Aitamurto, Associate Professor of Communication, *University of Illinois Chicago
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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MMA
From the October 7, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
MARK LEVIN (FOX HOST): You know, Donald Trump uses this phrase, the enemy within. You know who else used that phrase? Great men of the past, Abraham Lincoln talked about the enemy within. When you have an enemy within, and you say we have an enemy within, our press starts attacking you as some kind of a fascist.
There is an enemy within. The Democrat party has changed. It's not just policy disputes, they seek to overthrow the republic, they seek to destroy our economic system. They want to change the citizenry and population. They want to bankrupt the country. These are not policy disputes anymore with the Democrat party. These are fundamental battles over the survivability of the United States. Trump gets it, 100%, and he's trying to do the best he can in our country, in the Middle East, and with Europe.
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): Well said.
//
10/17/24 9:17 AM EDT
10/16/24 1:01 PM EDT
10/07/25
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AN 9 25
Last week's murder of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk has prompted President Donald Trump to use him as a "symbol" to promote his own "political religion," according to a historian and journalist.
In a Tuesday essay for Religion News Service (RNS), former Harvard University professor Mark Silk lamented that Trump was using the shocking public killing of Kirk as an excuse to crack down on his ideological opponents, and accused the president of creating a "political religion" centered around hate and division. He contextualized Trump's response to Kirk's murder in former President Abraham Lincoln's reflection that in the wake of tragedies, presidents should speak "with malice toward none, with charity for all ... to bind up the nation’s wounds."
"Trump has, unsurprisingly, done nothing of the sort in this time of crisis, transgressing civil religious norms with utter self-awareness," Silk wrote.
READ MORE:'Something is wrong': MAGA pundits say Trump is 'lying to us' about Charlie Kirk shooting
In his RNS essay, Silk reminded readers that during an interview with Fox & Friends, Trump passed up an opportunity to be a uniter and instead said he "couldn't care less" about bringing the country together. Silk contrasted Trump's approach with that of Italian historian Emilio Gentile, who said that government should seek to create a "civil religion" that is built on "a plurality of ideas, free competition in the exercise of power and the ability of the governed to dismiss their governments through peaceful and constitutional methods."
"In place of a civil religion that sacralizes the political system to include those with whom we disagree, Trump has embraced a political religion that excludes them — one that, as Gentile put it, 'is intolerant, invasive, and fundamentalist, and ... wishes to permeate every aspect of an individual’s life and of a society’s collective life,'" Silk wrote.
Silk also drew a parallel between Trump's response to Kirk's death with the 1930 death of far-right German paramilitary leader Horst Wessel. After Wessel was shot, his death became a rallying cry for the far-right movement in Germany that led to World War II. Silk worried that Trump's actions were making Charlie Kirk into an American Horst Wessel, to be propagandized for today's far-right movement in the United States.
HIGH RANKING? SS ? OFFICERS SWORN IN ON FLAG WITH HIS BLOOD ON IT?
"Today, the canonization of Charlie Kirk proceeds apace. Tributes to him as a stalwart of free speech rights have come from expected and unexpected quarters, even as some are fired from their jobs for daring to criticize him. There are songs celebrating him as a martyr to a great cause," Silk wrote. "He is fast becoming the Horst Wessel of Trump’s political religion."
READ MORE:'Increasingly senile wackjob': Expert says Trump too broken to destroy democracy on his own
Click here to read Silk's essay in full.
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AN 8 25
There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens in the United States, accounting for 7% of the total population. Each and every one of them should be laser-focused on the Trump administration’s plans to denaturalize and deport as many of them as possible.
*This story originally appeared at Truthdig.
Denaturalization is the process by which the federal government revokes the citizenship of persons born outside of the country who became citizens by meeting the standards set by Congress in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which include swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States, and demonstrating “good moral character.”
Although denaturalization rates have declined over the past several decades, there is ample historical precedent for the revival President Donald Trump is planning. Between 1906 and 1967 — when the Supreme Court stepped in to tighten the legal requirements — more than 22,000 Americans were denaturalized. Many were left-wing activists who were singled out during the two Red Scares of the 20^th century. A common method to denaturalize them was to accuse them of fraud in taking their oaths of allegiance. In 1919, in perhaps the most famous case of all, the government deported Emma Goldman to Russia under the Anarchist Exclusion Act after revoking her naturalized citizenship. In the 1950s, the government tried but failed to denaturalize labor leader Harry Bridges.
On June 11, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate wrote a memorandum that lists denaturalization as one of the Department of Justice’s top legal objectives to further Trump’s political goals. The memo was directed to the DOJ’s Civil Division, the department’s largest litigating component, which represents the United States and its executive agencies, members of Congress, cabinet officers and other federal employees in thousands of legal matters each year. It instructed the division’s attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” focusing on 10 broad categories of enforcement actions:
- Cases against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism, espionage, or the unlawful export from the United States of sensitive goods, technology, or information raising national security concerns;*
- Cases against individuals who engaged in torture, war crimes, or other human rights violations;
- Cases against individuals who further or furthered the unlawful enterprise of criminal gangs, transnational criminal organizations, and drug cartels;
- Cases against individuals who committed felonies that were not disclosed during the naturalization process;
- Cases against individuals who committed human trafficking, sex offenses, or violent crimes;
- Cases against individuals who engaged in various forms of financial fraud against the United States (including Paycheck Protection Program [“PPP”] loan fraud and Medicaid/Medicare fraud);
- Cases against individuals who engaged in fraud against private individuals, funds, or corporations;
- Cases against individuals who acquired naturalization through government corruption, fraud, or material misrepresentations, not otherwise addressed by another priority category;
- Cases referred by a United States Attorney’s Office or in connection with pending criminal charges, if those charges do not fit within one of the other priorities; and
- Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.
The first nine categories are generally consistent with the government’s existing powers, reflecting Trump’s penchant for exploiting the loopholes and weak links in current law whenever feasible. The 10th category, however, is a wildcard that could expand those powers exponentially and lead to a Red Scare encore.
And as dark and dangerous as that possibility sounds, it may be perfectly legal.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to establish a “uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Pursuant to this authority, Congress passed the first naturalization act in 1790, and ratified additional acts well into the late 19^th century. But it was not until the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1906 that Congress federalized naturalization procedures.
The act incorporated earlier race-based legislation that limited naturalization to white people and those with African origins. It also created the Bureau of Immigration Services, the precursor of the present-day U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which promulgated uniform application forms, and began the process of moving naturalization jurisdiction to the federal courts. (Prior to 1906, immigrants were able to apply for citizenship before any court of record, including state and municipal courts. In 1990, Congress shifted jurisdiction from the federal courts to the executive branch, where it remains to this day, although naturalization ceremonies are still conducted by federal district court judges.)
The Naturalization Act of 1906 was also the first federal law that provided for denaturalization, centered on individuals who had obtained citizenship by fraud, were racially ineligible and lacked “good moral character.” The act was amended on several occasions, most notably in 1952 by the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act, which added provisions for denaturalization based on activities deemed subversive or connected to communist or communist-front organizations.
Today’s denaturalization procedures are set forth in two sections of Title 8 of the U.S. Code. Section 1451 authorizes the Department of Justice to institute civil proceedings, alleging that citizenship was “illegally procured” or obtained “by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” The section also mandates denaturalization for individuals who refuse to testify before a congressional committee concerning their alleged subversive activities in cases where they have been convicted of contempt for such refusals.
Section 1425 of Title 8 authorizes criminal prosecutions, making it a felony punishable by 25 years in prison to knowingly procure, “contrary to law, the naturalization of any person.” A conviction results in automatic denaturalization.
Once denaturalized under either section, a person returns to their immigration status before becoming a citizen, rendering them vulnerable to deportation.
It’s easy to see why Trump and his advisers have opted to emphasize civil denaturalization proceedings over criminal prosecutions. In civil cases, there is no right to a jury trial or court appointed counsel, and there is no statute of limitations. The standard of proof is also lower. According to the Supreme Court’s precedent decisions, to prevail, the government must present “clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence” that the targeted individual obtained citizenship illegally or willfully misrepresented a material fact during the naturalization process. That is a rigorous test, but one far lower than the “beyond a reasonable” doubt standard for criminal prosecutions.
The first Trump administration attempted to make denaturalization a priority, launching an initiative dubbed “Second Look,” which built upon a similar Obama administration program called “Operation Janus” to identify alleged terrorists and fraudsters who had naturalized. In the end, however, Trump 1.0 filed a mere 102 denaturalization cases, amounting to an annual rate higher than the 16 cases per year filed under Obama, and eclipsing the total of 24 cases filed under Biden, but still miniscule. This time around, Trump 2.0 is pledging to bring the resources of the entire DOJ civil division behind the effort, reviving the specter of mass denaturalization.
The Shumate memo had largely flown under the media’s radar until Trump started talking in early July about deporting former best bro Elon Musk and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and stripping comedian and longtime celebrity nemesis Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship.
O’Donnell, who is seeking dual citizenship in Ireland, appears safe from Trump’s clutches as she was born in Commack, New York, and enjoys birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. Even Trump’s January executive order attacking birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants would leave her unscathed.
Musk and Mamdani are another story, as both are naturalized citizens. Musk, born in South Africa, naturalized in 2002. Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents, naturalized in 1998. Musk allegedly worked illegally in the U.S. in violation of his student visa after leaving Stanford University in 1995. Mamdani has been accused of posting comments on X quoting rap lyrics suggesting support for Hamas.
Even if Trump’s threats against O’Donnell, Musk and Mamdani are basically performative, thousands of less affluent naturalized citizens will likely be caught up in the coming denaturalization dragnet. Millions more who are not targeted will be intimidated from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and full political engagement. The net result will be a society less diverse and less free for the vast majority, exactly what Donald Trump and his cohorts want.
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NO LNX
The first victims of Trump's hit list
Thom Hartmann January 17, 2025
It may seem counter-intuitive, given that most people think of dictators as bad guys themselves, but the simple reality is that without proclaiming enemies — larger than life enemies — dictators have a hard time hanging onto power and accomplishing the things they want to do.
Hitler had Jews. Mussolini had the Italian Socialist Party. For Duterte it was drug dealers. Stalin vilified the “Kulaks” (wealthy peasants) as a threat to the Soviet Union. Mao blamed the bourgeoisie. Pol Pot said intellectuals were the enemy and so ordered everybody who could read killed. Idi Amin blamed Indians and Asians for the problems of Uganda. Robert Mugabe said white farmers were destroying Zimbabwe. Slobodan Milošević pointed to the Kosovo Albanians. Pinochet blamed the trade unions for Chile’s struggles.
Trump has flirted with condemning several different groups over the years, primarily using brown-skinned immigrants as his bogeymen, although the GOP has also vilified queer people, Black people, academics, journalists, teachers, and liberals to motivate the hatred of their base.
I learned about the importance of a good enemy when taking a creative writing class from the late Robert B. Parker in the 1970s. At the time, he was working on his third Spenser novel and hadn’t yet really hit it big, so a few of us who signed up for his weekend seminar were able to sit at his feet and learn from the man who became one of America’s great masters of fiction.
While the hero of the story is important, Parker told us, it’s the antihero — the bad guy or antagonist — who makes real for the reader the goodness of the hero.
He said that Superman, for example, would have just been a boring guy who stopped bank robberies if it weren’t for Lex Luthor. Batman would only be a rich guy with a fancy car and a weird outfit if it weren’t for the Joker. Without Moby Dick, Captain Ahab was merely another whaler. Sherlock Holmes would have been a weird but boring private eye were it not for Professor Moriarty, “the Napoleon of Crime.”
You get the idea. The hero can only be as good as the bad guy is bad. Every superhero requires a super-antihero. A larger-than-life bad guy. Genuine evil.
Even beginning novelists and screenwriters know this. And so does every dictator, including wannabe dictator Trump. It was a lesson George W. Bush learned and used after 9/11 to lie us into two unnecessary wars, make billions for Cheney’s near-bankrupt Halliburton, and destroy our reputation around the world.
Today, it’s why the GOP is making such a big deal about Laken Riley, the white woman killed by an Hispanic “illegal” immigrant, going so far as to name legislation after her. See how terrible these “invaders” are? They try to rape white women and when they don’t get their way, they kill them!
It’s why Trump, when he first announced his candidacy in 2015, characterized Latino immigrants as rapists and murderers. Its why Nancy Mace is constantly talking about “predators with penises” being in women’s restrooms. It’s why rightwingers claim books in our schools are “indoctrinating” our children. It’s why Trump still claims the Central Park Five should have been executed.
When a dictator wants to rally the people — particularly so they’ll support him in doing something dreadful — he must first convince them that the common enemy he’s identified is super evil.
To successfully claim to fight evil, he must first identify that evil in terms everybody understands. And it can’t be ordinary evil; his opponents must be super-evil incarnate: Monstrous. Depraved. Malefic. Diabolical. Satanic.
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 the first group he and his Nazis went after weren’t the Jews or even the communists. There were supporters of both groups across the country at the time, and he needed a genuinely “other” minority group to attack first, one that only a small handful of people would ever rise to defend.
So, he went after trans people. The famous book-burning picture is from in front of the Berlin Institute of Sexology, where Magnus Hirschfield was supporting trans people undergoing the first sexual reassignment surgeries in the modern world.
Fascists always start by declaring themselves the victims of evil “others.” Victimhood is essential to the fascist worldview; it’s at its core. And it’s their excuse for destroying other people’s lives.
They then cast the weakest and least popular minorities in a society as the victimizers of the fascists. Fascism is never directed against the rich or powerful, but always against those least able to defend themselves. It’s bullying turned into a political movement.
Trump has gone after multiple groups during his political career, including trans people, Black Haitian immigrants, Central- and South American immigrants, teachers, librarians, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protestors, the media, and Democrats generally.
To really turn America into a hotbed of violence and retribution, though, he’s going to need to infamize groups one at a time.
Where will he begin? Who will he turn into the first super-villains?
Will it be members of the press, dragged before congressional committees and subject to millions in lawsuits? Will he join Nancy Mace in demonizing queer people? Will he join Putin in calling Ukrainians Nazis? Can he convince enough people that Democrats are a danger to America that elected officials will shut up and hide the way so many did in 1930s Germany?
Trump and his bully boys have big plans for America, and getting people behind more tax cuts for billionaires, mass deportations, killing Obamacare and Medicaid, imprisoning the press, and gutting our civil and human rights will be a big lift. He’s going to have to identify his enemies in terms that are so stark that few Americans will dare speak up.
So, where do you think he’ll begin? Who will be his first victims, justifying his going beyond the law and the Constitution?
Post your thoughts below in our comments section.
NOW READ: A new ugly streak in American politics
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10/16/24 mma
Fox anchor Bret Baier tried to explain away Trump's “enemy within” remark. Trump just proved him wrong — on Fox News.
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 10/16/24 mma
Former President Donald Trump said during a Fox News town hall which aired Wednesday that when he recently threatened to deploy the military against the “enemy from within,” he was talking about mainstream Democrats like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her family. Trump’s damning admission should be humiliating for people who tried to help Trump clean up his initial comments — including Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier.
Trump claimed that “the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” which he described as “radical left lunatics” during a Fox interview that aired Sunday. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he told Maria Bartiromo. Later in the interview, Trump returned to the subject of “the enemy from within,” citing as an example Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
Trump’s meandering and nonspecific commentary is often difficult to follow. But he constantly uses authoritarian rhetoric, frequently accuses his political opponents of committing crimes including treason, and was recently described by his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “fascist to the core.”
As critics pointed out the danger inherent in someone like Trump threatening to use the military against a nebulous domestic group, some of his supporters tried to rewrite the remarks to make them seem more palatable.
Baier took up their cause on Tuesday's Special Report. After saying Trump’s comments about “the enemy from within” were “raising eyebrows,” the Fox anchor aired a portion of the former president’s statement, criticism from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s claim that his “belief” is that Trump was referring to undocumented immigrants who commit crimes.
“Gov. Youngkin trying there,” Baier said. “But I think JD Vance more on point where he said that if there is some big protest or something, that that is what the former president is talking about. He later talked about Adam Schiff, about being one of those enemies from within, or crazy left. And so a lot of people jumped on that. It is his words that cause some concern in a lot of corners.”
Video
CitationFrom the October 15, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report.
Baier later asked Josh Holmes, a former Republican congressional staffer and co-host of the Ruthless podcast, about the comments. Holmes replied that Trump was “obviously” discussing the possibility of urban unrest after the election, adding, “I think that’s what we’re talking about very clearly here. They can try to make it into something else.”
But at the town hall, which Fox reportedly stocked with Trump’s supporters, Fox’s Harris Faulkner asked Trump to address criticism of the “enemy from within” comment. In his response, Trump cited “the Pelosis” as an example of who he was talking about, adding, “these people, they are so sick and they are so evil.”
Video
CitationFrom the October 16, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus.
HARRIS FAULKNER: Mr. President, Kamala Harris said you sounded unhinged and unchecked power is in our future. What do you say about that?
DONALD TRUMP: I thought it was a nice presentation. I wasn't unhinged. You know what they are? They're a party of sound bites. Somebody asked me can they be brought together? I never thought — I wasn't thinking like they could because they are very different. It is the enemy from within and they're very dangerous. They are Marxists and communists and fascists. And they say I use a guy like Adam Schiff. They made up the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It took two years to solve the problem. Absolutely nothing was done wrong, etc. They are dangerous for our country.
We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are the Pelosis, these people, they are so sick and they are so evil. If they would spend their time trying to make America great again we would have — it would be so easy to make this country great. But what I heard about that, they were saying I was like threatening. I'm not threatening anybody. They are the ones doing the threatening.
In October 2022, a right-wing conspiracy theorist broke into the Pelosi home in San Francisco reportedly intending to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage. Finding the then-speaker absent, he assaulted and critically injured her husband Paul with a hammer. The assailant was ultimately found guilty of a slew of federal crimes and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Baier’s Fox colleagues responded by spinning up more conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi’s assault, while Trump has repeatedly cracked jokes about it on the campaign trail.
Baier regularly downplays Trump’s authoritarian comments and actions on his Special Report program, where he is interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris for tonight’s broadcast.
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CLAREMONT INST says const only for xian reaL am
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trump ally Laura Loomer: “You are an enemy to this country if you do not vote for donald Trump”](
https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-loomer/trump-ally-laura-loomer-you-are-enemy-country-if-you-do-not-vote-donald-trump)
04/24/24
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aha recall you cannot negotiate with irrational, so only force violence defend yourself family; rabid dog foams at mouth
not just foreign, black but horde mob is powerful and irrational thus must kill; note hype fear; two scary mysterious tech cell phone [5g] and dna germ [ plus brainwash
https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/alex-jones-says-gang-racist-foaming-mouth-black-people-are-coming-your-family-advises
// an 2 23
Infowars host and chief conspiracy theorist Alex Jones warned on Sunday's show that "foaming-at-the-mouth Black people" would wage war on white populations after they flee "race-specific bioweapons" attacks in Africa later this decade. Jones issued these racist predictions while declaring himself a "vessel" of God.
"They intend on making the world so hellish in the build-up to 2030 that everybody will just 'wink, wink' when they release the race-specific bioweapons starting with Africa that are gonna wipe that continent absolutely out. And you'll be under such invasion from the refugees of the economic warfare in Africa that you will quietly, while you're playing cards with your buddies say, 'well, it had to be done.'And when you go along with that metaphysically, spiritually, culturally, the devil's got your soul," said Jones.
"So I don't like the big giant African hordes being brainwashed against us and the left programming brown people to hate white people. It's all part of a plan, folks. It's all part ofa very sophisticated planand I don't just study history. I don't just study the New World Order," Jones continued. "I have the Holy Spirit. Doesn't mean I'm a perfect vessel, far from it. But I do have deep connection to God and God tells me that if I take part in wiping out the brown people, the Black people, that I will be cut off from God. We’re supposed to lift each other up."
Jones then encouraged responding through violence.
"Now that doesn't mean when a gang of racist,foaming-at-the-mouth Black people come to rape, rob, or kill you, which is just, it's out of control right now, that you don't defend yourself and kill every person you need to protect your family if they're attacking you," he suggested.
"That said though, just because they're brainwashed, some of them, and are being part of that doesn't mean we have to fall into the brainwashing either," the right-wing provocateur added. "And they tell you everything they're doing in the movie, the 'Kingsman,' where they send out the program through the cell phones andcell phone towers to make everybody start killing each other. That's what Klaus Schwab talks about, the angrier world, this is part of that plan. And so the Black people that have succumbed to this have succumbed to it through mind control. Doesn't make them any less dangerous."
Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/brazil/new-right-pretends-be-isolationist-their-rhetoric-brazil-shows-couldnt-be-further-truth
no lnx vid
The new right pretends to be isolationist. Their rhetoric on Brazil shows that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Right-wing pundits are increasingly embracing the Monroe Doctrine, one of the oldest expressions of US imperialism, and looking to manufacture a new cold war against China in the process
WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL
PUBLISHED 01/13/23
Right-wing media personalities are increasingly embracing a two-century-old expression of U.S. imperialism called the “Monroe Doctrine,” and exposing their own militaristic impulses in the process.
Fox News’ top star Tucker Carlson and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon have both recently endorsed the Monroe Doctrine as a guiding principle, undercutting their supposedly isolationist views on U.S. military policy. In both cases, the conservative pundits invoked the doctrine as a means of opposing what they see as China’s increasing political and economic importance in South America, specifically in Brazil.
Bannon and Carlson both position themselves as antagonists towards the neocons, a faction of the conservative movement that ascended during the presidency of George W. Bush and was a driving factor in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The so-called America First ideology that Bannon, Carlson, and others in the Trump-aligned wing of the conservative movement identify with is sometimes described, incorrectly, as isolationist. Their recent invocations of the Monroe Doctrine suggest that, far from being isolationists, these conservatives are increasingly interested in dominating China militarily, especially in the Western Hemisphere.
Carlson, Bannon, and their allies have adopted a new Cold Warrior posture, with China replacing the great boogeyman of the USSR, and Brazil — for now — taking the place of Vietnam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and other countries where the U.S. waged proxy wars against the perceived communist threat. But whatever investments China has made in South America don’t, or shouldn’t, justify the recent insurrection in Brazil, which right-wing media in the United States celebrated.
A much better approach would be to support interstate partnerships following the “pink tide” that has surfaced across Latin America since 2018. Leftist leaders have been elected across the region in recent years, most recently in Colombia and Brazil. The ability of these left-of-center governments to fulfill their promises toward greater social equality remains in question, as their countries are still shackled with the conditions created and defined in many ways by the Monroe Doctrine.
“The United States deployed this doctrine [the Monroe Doctrine] to keep Latin America subordinate to U.S. interests, whether through direct interventions like coups, invasions, and assassinations or institutional arrangements like free-trade agreements and painful structural adjustment programs,” write David Adler and Guillaume Long in The American Prospect. “As a result, Latin American countries remain highly dependent on exporting raw materials to large powers like the U.S., and importing high-value products and sophisticated technology.”
The two argue that “Latin America must be free to build the independent institutions that it deems necessary to guarantee health, security, and a strong economy in an increasingly turbulent world.” The Biden administration could — but hasn’t — adopted this approach, which would likely have the added benefit of building regional resiliency against a potentially unwanted Chinese incursion. But because the Latin American leaders who could implement this policy are various stripes of socialists, they face strong headwinds from U.S liberals and overt hostility from conservatives.
Carlson, the Monroe Doctrine, and “our hemisphere”
Last year, Carlson’s team made a documentary-style film about Brazil that conspicuously avoided discussing whether then-President Jair Bolsonaro would respect the results of the upcoming election, or if he’d attempt to stay in power using extrajudicial means.
Carlson began the film by offering his definition of the Monroe Doctrine, and explicitly claiming U.S. imperial domain over the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
Video
CitationFrom the September 22, 2022, Tucker Carlson Original The China Takeover: Brazil
“In 1823, President James Monroe announced a policy that has been the center of American foreign policy for the last 200 years, called the Monroe Doctrine,” Carlson began.
“Great powers would not be allowed to control nations in the Western Hemisphere,” he continued. “That would be a direct threat to the interests of the United States. And for 200 years, we haven't allowed it.”
Carlson then accused President Joe Biden of changing that policy, saying the doctrine was “no longer enforced,” in part because the administration was overly focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The Biden administration has abdicated its responsibility and into the void left by the United States moves a new superpower,” he concluded. “We've come to Brazil to see for ourselves the rise of China and how the government of China is replacing the United States as the dominant power in our hemisphere.”
Carlson’s use of the first-person plural, possessive phrases here — “our hemisphere” — is key. The “our” clearly refers to the United States, not a broader collective of self-governed countries in the hemisphere. In Carlson’s rendering, the fight is between the United States and China for dominance over Brazil – not for Brazilian sovereignty in itself.
The rest of the movie is a series of fearmongering accusations leveled against China, all in support of Carlson’s primary thesis: that the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to turn Brazil into a de facto colony. Carlson appears more upset that China is supposedly taking on this role (instead of the United States) than that any country is engaged in this kind of imperial project in the first place. “There is one government left in South America that is sympathetic to the United States, and it's this one here in Brazil,” Carlson said to conclude his film. “But it's being ignored by the Biden administration for ideological reasons. When the smoke clears, China may control Brazil too.”
Carlson has casually asserted the United States’ rightful domain over Latin and South America before. In February, he reported that China had “announced a partnership with Argentina, in part on currency.”
“Argentina's president also said his nation would join China's Belt and Road Project,” he continued. “Again, it's in our hemisphere. Monroe Doctrine, anyone? But it's happening, and nobody is even mentioning it.”
Bannon’s New Cold War
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Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is almost monomaniacally obsessed with China’s rise and the threat he believes it poses to U.S. hegemony, both globally and specifically in the Western Hemisphere. As one small but telling example, his show’s bumper music is a rap song by Chinese dissident — and Bannon-backer — Miles Guo whose hook is: “Let’s take down the CCP.”
Shortly after pro-Bolsonaro forces staged an insurrection by storming multiple Brazilian governmental buildings, Bannon invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify the rioters’ actions. Bannon falsely characterized President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, as nothing but a puppet of the Chinese government, and argued that China is attempting to seize power across the region.
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The CCP aims to create “Latin America as a communist superstate backed by the Chinese Communist Party directly aimed at the United States,” Bannon said. “This is what the Monroe Doctrine is about.”
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“Our founders, our framers warned us, ‘Don’t go searching for monsters to slay in Ukraine — watch what they do here in the Western Hemisphere,’” he continued.
“We’re not in a great position, and now we have it in our hemisphere,” his guest,Matthew Tyrmand,responded. “China, under Lula, will have control of the entire wealth, and power, and geopolitical strategic positioning of South America.”
South America “will be a Marxist superstate should the Brazilians accept Lula as their leader,” Tyrmand added.
Video
CitationFrom the January 9, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
Bannon and Tyrmand had previously had almost the exact same discussion, including the invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, on the night of Bolsonaro’s loss in late October.
“The communists, the CCP foothold in this hemisphere has been growing already, and this would be very deleterious,” Tyrmand said. “And of course we’ve got corrupt, senile, comatose vegetable in the White House fiddling as our Rome-hemisphere burns.”
“And so, all of MAGA should understand, these are our allies in Brazil,” Bannon responded, referring to Bolsonaro and his supporters.
“Remember, this hemisphere was kept orderly because of the Monroe Doctrine,” Bannon continued. “We absolutely had a line in the sand from the beginning of this republic that there would be no foreign interference in this, in this — and by the way, for 200 years we've been adamant about that.”
He added that now “the CCP” is “deeply involved in a takeover” of “the most significant country in Latin America, South America.”
Video
CitationFrom Steve Bannon's Gettr account, streamed October 30, 2022
In the summer of 2021, Bannon spoke with conspiracy theorist and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec at least twice about China’s role in the Western Hemisphere. As protesters took to the streets in Cuba, cheered on by right-wing U.S. media, Posobiec expressed his outrage that foreign countries would warn the United States not to meddle in the demonstrations. Like Carlson, he referred to “our hemisphere” in describing U.S. dominion over sovereign countries.
“Yesterday you had China, Iran and Russia — came out and they put out a statement jointly saying the United States needs to not interfere in Cuba,” Posobiec said. “I'm sorry. No, you don't get to tell us in our homes what happens in our hemisphere. This is the Monroe Doctrine."
“That was U.S. policy, bipartisan for generations in this country,” he continued. “Who are you to say that you were going to tell us what's going on in our backyard? No, I don't think so. Are we a great power or not?”
As in the more recent case with Brazil, Posobiec invoked the Monroe Doctrine explicitly as a justification to counter hypothetical Chinese expansionism. “What's Joe Biden going to do? What's [Secretary of State Tony] Blinken going to do when you've got Chinese subs off the coast of Havana?” Posobiec asked. “Because you know that's coming next. You know, what are you going to do? Are you going to stand up and defend our hemisphere, to defend our national interest or not?"
When they returned to the topic that October, the two were even more explicit in their comparisons to the Cold War. During the segment, Bannon’s producers showed a graphic that was reminiscent of anti-communist propaganda from the 1950s, lest the point get lost on any War Room viewers.
Video
CitationFrom the October 20, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic
Bannon asked Posobiec to “talk about the Chinese Communist Party, what they are doing in South America and the Caribbean, and the direct impact on the United States of America.”
“The United States has largely, you know, in the past been sort of seen as sort of the hegemon when it comes to the Western Hemisphere,” Posobiec replied. “This goes back to Monroe Doctrine.”
“This is classic U.S. policy,” he continued. “It's the idea of when the Soviet Union wanted to get a foothold in Cuba and plant their missiles.”
Posobiec then argued that “now you're seeing China come in to play that role,” before claiming that “of course they're going to Cuba; of course they're going to Venezuela, but they're doing everything they can to get into these countries like Colombia, like Brazil, like Bolivia, Argentina.”
He added that then-President Bolsonaro is “the guy that's fighting back against what China is doing” and that if China “can take over Brazil, they are going to be able to use that to control the entire South American continent.”
America First means MAGA empire
Carlson and Bannon both exert considerable influence over the shape of the Republican Party. They are not simply talk show hosts, but political operators whom Republican politicians often seek to curry favor with. Both played significant roles in the GOP’s approach to the midterms, for example. Carlson provided Republicans with messaging support, endorsed candidates in primaries, and then attempted to help those candidates win. The same is true for Bannon, who dedicated his show to pushing an unrelenting stream of election denialism prior to last November’s contests.
Both Carlson and Bannon — as well as the rest of the Republican Party — fared poorly in the midterms, but that doesn’t retroactively negate their influence. Indeed, the early days of the new House GOP majority suggest that hardliners in the Carlson and Bannon mold are as empowered within the caucus as they’ve ever been. When the two of them show their true colors as imperialist neo-Cold Warriors, they can be seen as a stand-in for a much larger element within the broader conservative movement.
For Carlson, Bannon, and their fellow travelers, America First isn’t a call for directing public policy to benefit people living in the United States, no matter their protestations. It is instead a rearticulation of a standard ideology based on U.S. dominance, both in the Western Hemisphere and in what they see as the larger geopolitical battle with China. In this way, their philosophy is not nearly as different from the neocons as they claim it is.
Where the neocon project was largely justified under a flimsy pretext of spreading democracy, America Firsters are reimagining and recreating Cold War-style global power struggles. This context is key to understanding and deciphering conservative foreign policy goals and rhetoric in the coming election cycle. The Trump wing of the movement may pay lip service to opposing U.S. foreign wars, but their chauvinistic invocation of the Monroe Doctrine shows they believe in maintaining U.S. military and political hegemony, just like their factional rivals.
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girl athletes recall rt xian natl are fine with big gubmint to go after enemy or threat
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/florida-history-of-mentrual-periods/
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an 6 22
on January 6, 2021, far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers rioted at the U.S. Capitol to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president. Their members didn’t act alone, often relying on funders and others who supported their violent efforts.
This compelled The Hill to question **how many U.S. residents actually support political violence**. According to academics from institutions like John Hopkins, Stanford, Cornell, and the Universities of California and Chicago, the number could range anywhere from 3 to 20 percent of the U.S. adult population, signifying between 7 to 51 million people.
For comparison, the population of New York City is around 8.6 million and the population of California is 39.6 million. So, put another way, the U.S. has enough supporters of political violence to nearly fill New York City or to just under two Californias.
This may seem like a theoretical exercise. After all, if that many people actually supported political violence, why aren’t we seeing revolt in the streets or daily attacks on political leaders?
But, as the Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual points out, supporters of political violence offer all sorts of assistance which can aid the growth of violent insurgency movements.
“Active popular support often has the greatest impact on the insurgency’s long-term effectiveness,” the manual says. “Popular support results in safe havens, freedom of movement, logistic support, financial support, intelligence, and new personnel.… As the insurgent group gains in support, its capabilities grow.”
However, recent studies suggest that voters often misbelieve that members of their opposing political viewpoint approve of violence more than they do. This makes people more inclined to support using violence against them. Conversely, if someone is shown data to prove that their opponents don’t favor using political violence, their own support of political violence lowers.
Also, studies suggest that one’s own support of political violence also decreases the more serious the offense. So while some voters might support property damage or theft against an opposing political party, their appetite for violence decreases with more serious offenses, like death threats or actual physical assault.
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aha abortion key to polarization/ DEMONIZATION; kava home attack (pray harder and get a better dr]
attempt to grab moral high ground (~ -phobes) THOSE PPL SELFISH EVIL MURDER DEFENSELESS BABY, obligates them to nothing aside from attack other tribe (at min vote?), vs adopt a kid or even pay taxes for decent schools
az gop mtg kegger big fat guy claimed ex cop started rant w/ baby killer, mantra, BLM guy in a mask knocked down, blake masters defend womanhood
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see hype fear: THEY are coming for your kids, want to destroy all you hold dear: america, farmers, mfg, freedumb
aha: conspiracy: supply chain is complex mult factors vs dem arsonists; plus supply chain problem made worse by trump fail and their refusal to vax
Marjorie Taylor Greene and conspiracy theorists are now suggesting Dems are torching facilities to cause food shortages
no lnx twt
Meaghan Ellis May 14, 2022
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is pushing a new conspiracy theory centered around the food and baby formula shortage currently plaguing the United States.
During a recent appearance on the far-right broadcast, InfoWars, the Republican lawmaker echoed the bizarre claims of conspiracy theorists as she suggested that Democratic lawmakers are responsible for torching food facilities to create shortages. According to Rolling Stone, the latest theories appear to be based on the fires that actually do occur.
Greene suggested that: "Democrats are starting the fires on purpose in order to deprive the nation of food, which would be advantageous for them because they’re playing some sort of globalist long gameand don’t want anything to be manufactured in America … or something like that. It’s not totally clear."
Citing a report from the National Fire Protection Association, Rolling Stone noted: "Nearly two dozen food processing plants have gone up in flames this year. This isn’t out of the ordinary — there are thousands of fires at manufacturing facilities every year." But in true conspiracy fashion, Greene and other far-right extremists have misconstrued facts to fit into a disturbing narrative they appear to have created.
When Greene appeared on InfoWars, she ranted about the current issue with host Alex Jones.
"The Biden administration and the Democrats … are destroying the very important, most critical part of the fabric of America, and that is our farmers,” Greene ranted. “They’re doing it on purpose. They want to be the global economy. They want to be completely involved. And here we have these ‘random,’ supposedly accidental fires at food processing plants.”
Jones also signaled in agreement with Greene. Claiming to have spoken with "mathematicians," Jones said, it seems “'mathematically impossible' for processing plants to be catching fire like they have been so far this year."
He added, “Everything the globalists are doing is about destroying real sustainability and making things collapse to bring in their new world order."
Greene's latest conspiracy theory follows criticism for a multitude of previously debunked claims.
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// putin use of nazi
2022 is ABOUT trumpier than thou, clickbait, pwning the libs; GOP civil war?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/groomer-speech/
edit bd
Something I’ve been meaning to tell you. My dad is a pedophile. I’m not the victim. As always, though, there’s never just one. The ties that bound my family have largely come undone. Pain is now a feature, not a bug, of our lives. It’s a story without ending, nevermind a happy one.
So you can imagine what it felt like to see Republicans in the United States Senate using the word “pedophile” (as well as “child-predator”) during the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Their use of it was loose, irrelevant, warped and worse. The purpose was advancing conspiracy theories already spreading. The goal was smearing the new Supreme Court justice with the smell of evil.
Worst of all, by overusing it, they watered down the word. They hollowed out its primary moral essence. They created conditions in which my dad and other pedophiles can now plausible say their crimes aren’t as bad as they say. Just look at what the Democrats are doing.
Child abuse, predation, child molestation and rape – these are real problems responsible citizens much find humane ways of addressing while serving the often conflicting needs for rehabilitaton and justice.
These are real social, political and criminal problems.
By belittling them, the Republicans insult us.
They piss into the wounds of real victims, too.
That’s what you’d expect from a political party operating on the edge of political violence. Justice Jackson’s confirmation hearings were a case in point, according to Gabriel Rosenberg, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke. During our interview, Professor Rosenberg walked me through the four stages of “groomer speech.”
“You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.”
On Twitter, you offered an analysis of the rhetoric surrounding Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay legislation. That rhetoric seems to weaponize words like “pedophile” and “child predator” and other things beyond the pale. You outlined four items. Can you explain?
The basic thesis of what I'm calling the “groomer panic,” which I think is coherently understood as a moral panic, or sex panic, is that has the capacity to be significantly more dangerous than comparable sex panics in the past in which similar sorts of rhetorical weaponization of the terms “pedophile” or “child predator” had been deployed.
It has the possibility of spilling into actual political violence.
I made four points.
First, “groomer speech” is using the metaphor of child sexual abuse to describe educational content that rightwing forces disapprove of.
This metaphor of violent physical harm is being used to describe a disagreement over educational content and the underlying speech acts constituting that content. There is a confusion about different kinds of harm and a confusion about the difference between speech and act.
Second, this confusion means concrete evidence of child sex abuse is no longer necessary. Instead, the evidence is the speech act itself.
It becomes the case then that anyone can be credibly accused of being a “groomer,” not because there's evidence of grooming, but because such person has dissented from a preferred framework among conservatives for the understanding of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.
“Groomer” describes dissent from conservatism writ large.
There is specificity to the claim about “pedophile” that is itself unique and dramatic. I describe it as having an eliminationist intention.
Third, “groomer speech” is distinguishable from “subjugating speech.”
“Subjugating speech” might incite violence. It's possible. It has before. But broadly, it’s intended to justify social and political inequalities.
“Pedophile” is a specific term, however. It carries, at least in rightwing communities, a claim that the individual in question is pathologically invested in harming the most vulnerable members of society.
There's no interest in governing such individuals.
It's not about establishing them as second-class citizens.
It's about putting them to death.
That separates it from a general class of what I’m calling “subjugating speech” intended to degrade or lessen a person but isn't necessarily a suggestion that they and all people like them ought to be eliminated.
Fourth, “groomer speech” is not being directed at minorities.
At various points in American history, conservatives have accused gay people and other sexual (and sometimes racial) minorities of intending to prey on kids – they behave in a predatory fashion toward children.
What's interesting about “groomer speech” and what's most alarming about its use by the right is the charge being directed at powerful people who cannot by any measure be identified with a minority.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene said Mitt Romney is “pro-pedophile,” she's talking about the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.
When James Lindsay called Nate Hochman, a writer for National Review, a “groomer,” he's talking about a conservative in good standing, or was. He's saying this individual also wants to abuse children.
This is radically different.
It's now about disciplining ingroup versus outgroup identity within conservatism writ large. It’s about reformatting and hardening the line between people who are conservative and people who are not.
In the end, conservatives are the good ones. They're anti-pedophile. Anyone who dissents from the conservative framework is therefore pro-pedophile. They constitute individuals who must be eliminated.
Ted Cruz used to talk about “San Francisco values.” Others talked about “the gay agenda.” Those are more abstract than “pedophile.” You’re saying we’ve arrived at a new and more explicit point in the evolution of conservative rhetoric. Is that accurate?
That's generally correct.
I would add that on the right, they're open to the idea of people who prey on children deserving the most extreme forms of violence.
I don't think anybody on the far right is trying to hide that.
That’s fundamentally important.
“Groomer speech” is deployed to advance virtually anything that fits within the broader political program of the conservative movement.
Right now, it's about targeting people who dissent from a particular kind of orthodoxy around interpretation of educational content.
But then we saw it coming into play in specious arguments about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's sentencing record – that she was “pro-pedophile.” Therefore Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski [“moderate” Republican senators who voted for her confirmation to the Supreme Court] were also “pro-pedophile.”
It's spilling into confirmations of Supreme Court nominees.
That's a break from the past.
That speaks to the flexibility and centrality of the charge eventually becoming the basis of things like criminal policy, militarization, policing, tax policy and labor policy. It can become a basic rhetorical strategy the far right uses to justify whatever they want to justify.
You're with us and the children.
Or you're on the other side with the pedophiles.
I’m thinking of eugenics. The antipathy toward LGBTQ people comes from the idea that LGBTQ-ness infects white people. As a result, they don't have enough babies. With too few white babies, white people risk becoming a minority. How would you understand that?
During the early human eugenics movement, there was a great deal of enthusiasm in the United States for coercive sterilization of anyone who exhibited homosexual tendencies or who desired sex with men.
There was this idea that homosexuality constituted a dangerous social contagion that needed to be eliminated from society regardless of whether it could be passed on as a congenital defect. It was that grave.
Immediately after World War II, there was something the Lavender Scare period in which heightened concern about male homosexuality resulted in the creation of a lot of criminal psychopathology laws.
These law created legal justification for jailing and sterilizing gay people under the auspices of gay people preying on innocent children.
So the far right isn’t punching down. It's punching sideways – or even up in the case of senators. Is there a link historically between that and a leap into political violence? Do they go hand in hand?
I think Judge Jackson's confirmation hearings clearly illustrate how this works. The Republican Party did not want to see anyone vote for her. Various Republican senators fixated on a specious charge that she'd been light on sentencing people who possessed child pornography.
It was so specious that Andrew McCarthy, who is a notable and extremely right wing figure with National Review, basically labeled it “demagoguery.” He said there were better reasons to oppose her.
The right mobilized after labeling her “pro-pedophile.” From there, they disciplined GOP apostates by labeling them “pro-pedophile,” too. They wanted to show as much opposition as they could.
Actual sexual harm to children had nothing to do with it.
But once it got invoked, it became a disciplinary tool.
You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.
That kind of irresponsibility, with no bottom, carries with it its own momentum. It can become more and more difficult to control.
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an 2 22 bill blum
...The political scientist Robert Paxton, one of the world’s leading authorities on fascism, has identified five stages of fascism:
- The initial creation of movements;
- The rooting of the movements in a political system;
- The acquisition of power;
- The exercise of power; and
- Radicalization or entropy, the stage at which movements reach their most extreme heights, or exhaust themselves and fizzle.
We are well beyond the first two phases. We flirted with the third and fourth during Trump’s first term, but our democratic institutions—weak and tattered as they are—were able to resist.
The election of Joe Biden offered only a temporary reprieve. Now, with Biden’s coalition fraying, the GOP and Trump have another opportunity to impose their will and vision, and deal a death blow to what remains of our diminished democracy.
As I have written before, fascism is a loaded term, but if used correctly, it aptly applies to Trumpism.
In his seminal study, “The Anatomy of Fascism” (Harvard University Press, 2004), Paxton offers an instructive definition:
“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great Italian writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:
- A cult of traditionalism.
- A rejection of modernism (cultural, rather than technological).
- Acult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
- A framing of disagreement or opposition as treasonous.
- A fear of difference.… Fascism is racist by definition.
- An appeal to a frustrated middle class—either due to economic or political pressures from both above and below.
- Anobsession with the plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.
- A requirement that said enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
- A rejection of pacifism. Life is permanent warfare.
- Contempt for weakness.
- A cult of heroism.
- Hypermasculinity.
- A selective populism,relying on chauvinist definitions of “the people” that it claims to speak for.
- A heavy usage of Newspeak—impoverished vocabulary, elementary syntax and a resistance to complex and critical reasoning.
As the current situation demonstrates, fascism is by no means a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22, 2020 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s,the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Trump in 2016.
Churchwell’s article is aptly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” In it, she offers another working definition of fascism, noting that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:
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bannon/putin disinfo to destabilize, erode civil society to the pt --> authoritarian fascism // orban
no lnx
'To defy Trump's wishes is to defy God's plan': The scary truth about modern right-wing misinformation
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/right-wing-misinformation/
John Stoehr January 13, 2022
Death threats will change a person. During previous testimony before a Senate panel, the nation’s top infectious disease expert was calm and deferential. This week marked a break from the past. Enough is enough, apparently. Dr. Anthony Fauci was no longer in the mood.
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas kept pressing the question of financial disclosures, implying that Fauci was benefiting from the effort to vaccinate the country against the covid pandemic.
Fauci, as head of the White House pandemic response, is a public servant. By law, he must disclose financial information. So of course he didn’t understand Marshall’s question, because his “financial disclosure is public knowledge” and has been for more than three decades.
Two things. Marshall knew this and was pretending not to or he didn’t know this, which should be embarrassing for a sitting senator. Either way, Marshall said his staff could not find the document. Well, it’s here. Ultimately, he was pandering to believers of rightwing misinformation.
READ: One sentence from the Supreme Court's ruling against an OSHA vaccine rule reveals its upside-down logic]
After a heated exchange in which Marshall kept insisting Fauci was hiding something and Fauci kept insisting he’s not – “all you have to do is ask” for the disclosure – Fauci said, “What a moron! Jesus Christ!” (He said this to himself, obviously, not realizing his mic was still on.)
Is Fauci showing us how to handle rightwingers? That’s what I asked Sara Aniano on Wednesday. She’s a Monmouth University graduate student studying rightwing rhetoric and conspiracy theories on social media. She co-authored a new report for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology analyzing QAnon trends a year after J6.
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She said Fauci’s pushback felt good, but in the end, it probably doesn’t help. “The reality is pretty dire,” she said. Propaganda, conspiracy theory and misinformation have “already infected the population.” It’s too late even for the Washington press corps to do much about it.
The way Anthony Fauci talked to the Republicans is how everyone should talk to rightwing extremists. Am I on to something?
READ: A right-wing talking point about Jan. 6 just completely collapsed after indictment of the Oath Keepers]
Absolutely. For a lot of people on the left, Fauci's pushback was refreshing.People are tired of the pandering, and of watching misinformation be lumped into the category of “free speech.”[ = wht priv?]
While Fauci’s “moron” comment was indeed a great moment of transparency, we should also consider his ability to humanize the situation with the anecdote about his own harassment.
The left is often considered "soft” in contrast with the alleged "hard truth" attitude of the GOP. While Fauci's position is not about partisanship, anti-vaxx movements have unfortunately aligned with the right and the far-right. So it feels like Fauci is speaking for us, even though he's really speaking on behalf of everyone.
It seems to me speaking for everyone is often interpreted as soft. In other words, acting for the benefit of the common good immediately marks you as an enemy by rightwingers.
READ: DOJ unveils explosive sedition charges against the Oath Keepers for the Jan. 6 attack]
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For a party that increasingly demonizes collectivism, it's in their best interest to continue promoting "individual responsibility,” as it works for their messaging politically. But for the extreme far-right, it's more sinister. In their minds, there is a war going on between good and evil. And if you're not on their side, their black-and-white thinking places you into the "enemy" category.
The irony is that they are actually collectivists, too, no?
I hear that a lot. In comparison to other countries, America is not a collectivist culture. In my opinion, anyone who pushes extreme nationalism here is also pushing extreme individualism.
As a leftist researcher of far-right misinformation, I admit to a certain level of bias. But January 6 marked a clear turning point in how we view partisanship, I think, and we can't discard that.
READ: Michigan Republicans who circulated fake 'Electoral College' documents are being investigated by the Jan. 6 committee: report]
Why is it a turning point? We turned from what to what?
For a lot of us studying far-right extremism and misinformation, we couldn't help but feel this collective "we told you so" when January 6 happened. For the first time, we had a visual manifestation of far-right conspiracism that wasn't limited to social media or fringe news programs. In other words, everyone saw people act on the ideologies that misinformation researchers sift through every day.
Of course, how people interpret what they saw is what's shaping their opinion now.
Which is where misinformation comes back, right?
Here's something I tweeted on the anniversary of the insurrection: “By the end of January 6, 2021, Americans were left with the most damaging relic of all: Yet another unfathomable event, born of hate and delusion, for far-right conspiracy theorists to contort into a self-serving narrative that unfairly demonizes the innocent.”
I want to cry.
A lot of us can relate to that.
To what extent is anti-vaccination about purity of blood? To what extent is anti-vaccination cover for plain old white supremacy?
It's interesting, because even if anti-vaxxers don't realize it, the "pure blood" characterization of the unvaccinated has roots to eugenics, which of course has roots to white supremacy.
But to go back to the idea of "infiltration," I think vaccine skepticism ties into that too.
Please go on.
I've been thinking about what types of infiltration the far-right finds most threatening. So far I've come up with three categories: 1) member infiltration, 2) spiritual infiltration and 3) bodily infiltration.
Member infiltration seems to stem from a fear of the "other" hiding in plain sight, trying to live among them but with heinous intentions. We see that a lot with paranoia about Antifa, the feds, Jews or journalists "posing" as patriots.
Spiritual infiltration has a lot to do with "demonic forces" among us. Satanic panic stuff. With QAnon, we see allegations of Satanic rituals in Hollywood or even reptilians wearing skinsuits to pass as humans.
Physical infiltration is a lot about co-opting "my body my choice" messaging to push back against the vaccine, which many think is the mark of the beast or a 5G transmitter or radioactive or a microchip. A lot of crossover with pseudo-science.
There is so much overlap that it's hard to make exclusive categories, but you get the idea.
We haven't talked about religion. What does your research say?
Yes, religion or spirituality is inextricable from far-right narratives overall. My thesis, currently in progress, focuses on QAnon Instagram comments in the week leading up to J6.
Rhetoric that pushes a higher power is always mixed in with far-right narratives, and overwhelmingly, that's Christianity. A lot of people who believe election fraud theories in QAnon circles genuinely think that Donald Trump was anointed by God – he is the chosen leader to usher in "the storm" and defeat the evil Democrats, once and for all.
In their minds, to defy Trump's wishes is to defy God's plan. I wouldn't say that this is ubiquitous across the right, to be clear. That's a pretty extreme version. But religion presents itself across far-right rhetoric in general, even when it doesn't involve Donald Trump.
Trump abruptly hung up on Steve Inskeep after the host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” challenged him repeatedly on the big lie? Are such challenges what a democratic republic needs?
I think Inskeep did a great job, although many were upset with NPR for bringing Trump on in the first place. Your question is a hard one. People asked the same thing during and after the 2020 election when Trump alleged fraud on TV before the ballot counting was even complete. Some networks cut his speech off, while others aired it.
Any time we platform misinformation, especially when we can see it coming, we must provide context and a good reason for showcasing it. If we can shut it down in the meantime, then yes, we should.
But if I'm being honest, I think that ship has sailed.
I don't know if it matters anymore if we cut off conspiratorial rhetoric from Trump and others when it's already infected the population.
Are you suggesting the press can’t really mitigate the spread?
Once Trump normalized discourse that was hateful, xenophobic, conspiratorial and sexist, he made it more mainstream. People who previously self-censored those thoughts felt free to not only think them, but say them – particularly on social media, where anonymity removes accountability. That hasn't really changed.
I guess my point is – the press should do what it can to mitigate misinformation, of course, but the reality is pretty dire.
There's a serious epistemological crisis going on, and that's gonna require systemic change.[// heated pod occupy sunrise guy too late to stop authoritorian, congress paralyze so only prez can at,crisis will give opening]
Again, I want to cry.
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recall fox raison d'etre is ATTACK DEMS
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WE GOP didn't steal the election (by gerry and voter suppression of POC] DEMS stole by chicago style dead pll vote; WE did not have insurrection, the REAL one was election.
aha: bannon is just latest extension of rove's dismissal of reality-based journalism?
alt rt trolls win by owning the libs, often by making outrageous claim they know to be false to provoke an emotional reaction in weak woman-y snowflakes.
recall early graphic of blogs red/blue but red more insular/echo
flood the zone bannon/ troll it is a deliberate strategy to overwhelm correction [by lamestream media, fake news?!] and thus moderation; you cannot trust news nor gubmint thus civil society erodes and --> authoritartian/fascism strong MAN/strict FATHER to fix, maga
soc media co attempt to tamp down BS evaved by misspell or vol/forved migrsation to gab etc that prides self on lack of moderation [censorship]
flood the zone with shit/disinfo might originally been troll tactic to deflect accurate critiques/blame and rubber glue inverse crypto bizarro mirror world --> Earth2; but always hype fear about THEM enemy threat to all that's good, grift for $ to fight the evil
amplify/accelerate --> radicalization; enemy // target // tyrant
aha echo is the opposite of correction,[WELL THERE'S A SORT OF CORRECTION BUT IN THE WRONG DIRECTION BY A SMALLER AND SMALLER SUBSET OF WACKOS THAT IS IRONICALLY GETTING LARGER AND LARGER AND FINDING/MAKING EACH OTHER [[CRAZIER]]; and algo gives incremental DOSE of crazy that builds on previous slightly less crazy:--> earth2 delusional break from reality is phase shift/level up/ tip pt? doom spiral?
12 21 an salon https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/tucker-carlson/
the TV was talking to me. I was in the midst of a delusion that the news anchors on CNN were operatives of a shadow government run by the Clintons. Every time I crossed the living room of my father's dingy basement apartment, their heads followed me and the news anchors interrogated me about my role in the Russia investigation. I believed "Russia investigation" was really code for a global conspiracy to enslave humanity through mind control. President Donald Trump and the Republicans were secretly working to overturn this shadow government and end the deep state programs. Targets of torture like me would be set free.
I turned the channel to FOX News. They repeated over and over that Hilary Clinton was a criminal. Even though I was a Democrat and had voted for Bill Clinton twice, I mailed in the form to join the Republican Party. Then I faxed evidence to the Russian consulate and sent a letter to the CIA offering to cooperate in the investigation.
What I didn't know I was that I was in the advanced stages of untreated paranoid schizophrenia. I was experiencing a psychotic break from reality.
It all seemed so real.
When I was eventually treated, my psychiatrist explained to me, "With paranoid schizophrenia it's just like "The Bourne Identity" — there are people for you, people against you, and somebody always has to be the villain."
I know what you're thinking — thank God they have medication for these people.Now, I wonder, is the average American so different from me? Are we all susceptible to paranoid thoughts, conspiratorial thinking and bias when executive function in the frontal lobes and our ability to reason are disabled by fear?
Terrified by a global pandemic, there are people who believe Bill Gates is an evil mastermind who engineered the coronavirus, with plans to depopulate and microchip the world's population, while profiting in the process. Antivaxxers refuse to take a vaccine they think will alter the structure of human DNA. Our brains seek to impose order. Conspiracy theories can provide answers to people who feel overwhelmed. But ideally the frontal lobes should step in to challenge strange thoughts by asking the question: Is what I am perceiving based in reality?
Dr. Oliver Freudenreich, Co-Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychosis Program, states that there is no generally agreed-upon definition on what constitutes a delusion. From a psychiatric or biological perspective, delusions are driven by excessive amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine. There is a biological basis to them, and treatment can correct this abnormality. A person with such delusions (e.g., somebody with schizophrenia) is expected to respond to being treated with an antipsychotic medication which blocks dopamine. In other words, one can take a pill and think rationally.
However, many people can't do that if their delusional thinking is part of a worldview that is more an ideology. According to Dr. Freudenreich, when people create their own insular groups — where delusional ideas are never corrected, but simply bounce around in an echo chamber — it is much harder to fight those types of delusions.
Policy divides are now often framed as a battle between good and evil.The most obvious consequence of overheated partisan rhetoric is that someone with an untreated psychiatric illness can go on to commit an act of violence against a person or group that they believe is a perpetrator of their suffering. This is rare. More common is the normal person who goes down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and finds a world that makes sense to them.
On January 6th, 2021, incited by President Trump and believing the election had been stolen, a mob attacked the Capital building. Some in the crowd showed up for the "Storm," which is a QAnon conspiracy theory that posits that Trump was planning mass arrests of a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles and coup plotters, headed by Hilary Clinton and George Soros. Capitol police described the scene as being like fighting a medieval battle.
Social dynamics can propagate conspiracy-based thinking that mimics biologically triggered delusions. But there is no medication that will stop mass violence fueled by conspiracies.
I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America's broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.
Years of my life are now gone. I try not to be bitter that I ended up unemployed, bankrupt and almost homeless, when all I needed was proper medical care. Every day I am grateful that I didn't wind up living on the streets or locked up in prison, like so many people with schizophrenia.
It's easy to mock people who think Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in them with the coronavirus vaccine. But it's much harder to separate conspiracy theorists' larger existential fears from our own. We're approaching the second year of a global pandemic, which is causing mass anxiety and depression. The internet routinely displays images of future roads in major cities as gushing rivers due to climate change. Billions of fish were boiled in the American Northwest and Canada during an unprecedented heatwave this summer. If someone's mind starts spinning with their wildest fears and finds solace in a conspiracy theory, can you really blame them?
Television is a powerful medium. CNN and FOX News repeat the same headlines, the same phrases, over and over in the same news day. Back then, these read to my unhinged mind as coded speech; to the unsuspecting public, it is more akin to propaganda. When I was psychotic, I thought a shadow government had a ministry of propaganda and they colluded across networks. I worry about living in a country where the two major political parties are always at war, unable to get anything done, and the public is fed a delusional world by networks and social media companies competing for viewers.
People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don't actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame. [q or trump sent me]
Dr. Anthony Fauci has complained about the extraordinary divisiveness surrounding the public health crisis created by the pandemic. The current battle is over masks and vaccines. FOX News paints the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy that has invented domestic enemies, such as the unvaccinated, to desperately cling to power. News anchors across CNN repeat the phrase "viral blizzard" to warn the public and scare the unvaccinated about the new variant. Fear mongering is psychologically destabilizing to the most normal person. But this media environment can be toxic to someone with an untreated psychiatric illness. I wish politicians and their media allies would stop contributing to the collective unraveling of the American mind.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/trump-captiol-riot/
1/6 analysis, sm sample here
12 21 raw an relationship coach kind // life coach?
...Both men overtly invoke the apocalypse, and self-consciously make QAnon references in their respective podcasts.
“What is going on here in America?” Cusick said in the Oct. 19 episode of his podcast. “They have us — we’re enslaved…. When the pilgrims came to America in 1620 — four hundred years from then goes to 2020 — when did this awakening start in the United States? Everyone started realizing what was going on with our elections, with Hollywood, with all these elites. It started in 2020, thanks to our president, Donald Trump.”
Cusick offered an allegory, comparing Americans from the settling of the colonies in the 1600s to the Israelites who, according to the Old Testament, were enslaved in Egypt under the pharaoh. By way of explaining how the United States, which after all, was supposedly “founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” had been “enslaved” since before its founding, Cusick claimed that “it was infiltrated and it became Satanic.”
For Cusick, Trump is to be credited for awakening a sense of nationalism in Americans and helping them define an enemy, which happens to be their fellow citizens.
“Trump’s the one who made people all of a sudden realize we have a country, and we have an opposition, whether you were on the left side or the right side,” Cusick said.
While concerned with something entirely different — helping men have more sex, as opposed to saving souls for Jesus — Stedman offered a similar chronology in his Dec. 9 blog post entitled “Why Your Woman Stops Wanting Sex.”
“We have been experiencing a gradual dark night of soul these past 100 years; as I write this in December 2021 we are near the culmination of it,” he wrote. Then, he went straight to the apocalypse: “In this collapse all that has been hidden is becoming seen. We are living through the apocalypse— the great revealing. The great awakening.”
After invoking apocalypse as a force for a transformation in gender relations, Stedman advised young men that they should strive for “consensual polarity” while making it clear that he was not advocating for equality: In his view, the men are protagonists; women are material to be “forged.”
“Such a relationship is well within your grasp,” Stedman advised. “In spite of all the programming, suitable women are all around; though many do need guidance — you will need to help forge them. But the limiting factor is you. Because you can only take a woman as far as you yourself have gone.”...
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21 21 an 1/6 was practice
Barton Gellman, a staff writer for The Atlantic, has an excellent track record when it comes to predicting the ways in which former President Donald Trump and his allies would assault U.S. democracy. Before the United States’ 2020 presidential election, Gellman predicted that Trump would attempt a coup d’état if he lost to now-President Joe Biden —which is exactly what happened. And Gellman is now warning that Trumpistas will be better equipped to pull off a coup in the 2024 election; the journalist discussed that warning during a December 7 appearance on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show.
Maddow and Gellman’s appearance on Maddow’s show followed the December 6 publication of an article headlined “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun” on The Atlantic’s website. That article is also available as a cover story in the January/February 2022 issue of The Atlantic’s print edition.
Describing Gellman’s reporting as “terrifying,” Maddow asked Gellman to discuss the possibility of Republicans “throwing out thousands, if not millions, of votes in the 2024 election.”
Gellman told Maddow, “I think it’s very real. I’m personally, just as a citizen, very worried about it. I think you have people who are bound and determined not to allow Republicans to lose another national election — and not to allow Trump to lose another election. And they are giving themselves permission to do it.”
The journalist went on to say, “They are characterizing the Democrats as tyrants, as thieves of an election who actually stole the presidency, as communists, as people who hate America — and they couldn’t discuss it with any more extremity than they’re doing. When you do that, you give yourself permission to take all kinds of steps in opposition. I mean, if you have an existential threat to the United States of America — which is what Republicans are saying about Biden — then what remedy would not be allowed to you?”
Maddow asked Gellman why the “openness to violence” among “Trump supporters” has been “growing worse,” and he responded, “I think there’s a strong ongoing message that is amplified thousands of times by the whole ecosystem on the right that is a propaganda ecosystem, and it is telling people that someone stole the election from them — that the Democrats are destroying the country, that more and more so-called evidence proves these things. And yeah, I think there’s this very large mass of Trump supporters who believe both that Biden is an illegitimate president who stole the office, and that violence is justified.”
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an 12 21
Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.
A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering, voter suppression, or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results. Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster. So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."
In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."
A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter, in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day. "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.
Most Americans?
The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.
None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.
Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollettguilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree. I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.
Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats, such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. Thebad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.
The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting.) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as oneFox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.
No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.
The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires.
Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.
But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.
Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.
We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race, helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse, the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.
Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.
Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.
But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.
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aha: almost truism but true that 1st step is to make enemy subhuman thus ok to kill; in fact it is your duty to kill enemy that threatens the sacred 14 words white children or OUR Way Of Life = capitalism freedumb
xian end days = // qanon storm // turner diary cleansing fire of race war; madison [girl name?] cawthorne evokes satan? MTG? boebert?
nancy aoc, ilhan omar greta are women/ POC with power which is unnatural; nanny STATE gubmint take guns freedumbs vs strict fr who will punish/ put THOSE ppl back down in their rightful place //PHOBES basket of deplorables.
to apologize is unmanly, admitting defeat, esp to trump/istas for whom loyal tribal solidarity litmus is all; played inevitable victim card? gop minority in both houses explicit aim is obstructionist, gerry maintain minority power yet he bemoan/threatens this will be weapon in future?
aha: polarization --> demonization--> death threat --> death squad pinochet helo rides did nothing wrong Kyle
mantra of demonization can make name eg pelosi into a devil term; she was actively hunted 1/6 shoot bitch in the brain? AOC = commie? radicalization // demonization
landed here pol cartoon accidentally but interesting analogy? pirate creshaw action here, gosar flies? defeats evil? scott perry chr freedom cocks we must destroy dems/nazis
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/ocasio-cortez-gosar/
put in context of huge surge in death threats and 1/6 attack; gabby scalise shot; how signif is that this is pix? cartoon? anime genre? trump WWF vs CNN?
gosar censored for aoc kill anime, also biden; tired to blame staff? alt rt ploy just kidding? shooting bills in ads cliche so he just escalated to claiming that he was killing a rep/symbol of their policies [that are destroying am // scott perry freedom cock?]; prev border patrol agent vid rape aoc? threw burritos?
pretty good speech:
Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, a far-right MAGA Republican and conspiracy theorist who has never been shy about making inflammatory remarks, has been drawing vehement criticism from Democrats for posting a cartoon that depicts him murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City and inflicting harm on President Joe Biden. He has previously been criticized for appearing at a conference organized by white supremacists.
Many House Republicans, however, have been silent about the controversies. And Ocasio-Cortez, during a speech on the House floor this week, called them out them out for it.
The congresswoman, during her speech, made it clear that amuch more vehement response from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other GOP leaders is needed.
AOC: "It's a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong, and instead decides to venture off into a tangent about gas prices and inflation"pic.twitter.com/fi13Jb396s
— Justin Baragona (@Justin Baragona)1637178021
AOC: "Does anyone in this chamber find this behavior acceptable? Would you allow depictions of violence against women, against colleagues? Would you allow that in your home? ... And if it\u2019s not acceptable there, why should it be accepted here?!"pic.twitter.com/Bas9dS5dfo
— Justin Baragona (@Justin Baragona)1637178312
Ocasio-Cortez told fellow House members, "What I believe is unprecedented is for a member of House leadership of either party to be unable to condemn incitement of violence against a member of this body. It is sad, it is a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong…. What is so hard, what is so hard about saying that this is wrong?"
The Democratic congresswoman added, "This is not about me. This is not about Rep. Gosar. But this is about what we are willing to accept."
Gosar has maintained that the anti-AOC cartoon was meant to be a joke, but Ocasio-Cortez stressed that depictions of murder should never be taken lightly.
"This nihilism runs deep," Ocasio-Cortez explained. "It conveys and betrays a certain contempt for the meaning and importance of our work here — that what we do, so long as we claim it is a joke, doesn't matter."
jihad squad: https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/rep-ilhan-omar-torches-lauren-boebert-following-bizarre-rant-on-house-floor/
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omg
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/clear-and-present-danger-majority-of-trump-voters-believe-its-time-to-split-the-country-in-two/
no lnx table
'Clear and present danger': Majority of Trump voters believe it’s 'time to split the country' in two
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement September 30, 2021
The highly-respected University of Virginia's nonpartisan Center for Politics has released a new study that finds a majority of Trump voters believe it's time to split the country into two, with "red states" and "blue states" seceding from the Union.
:{
}:
The organization, headed by Larry Sabato of "Sabato's Crystal Ball," reports that four in ten Biden voters agree.
"The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous. The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed," said UVA Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato.
"In order to figure out ways to bridge these divides, we need to understand not just the divides themselves, but also understand the ways in which we can, together, move forward to reach common ground. This project helps us do both," said Larry Schack of Project Home Fire, a new initiative partnering with the UVA Center for Politics.
The report top-line revelations include: "Trump and Biden voters are at crisis stage"; there is tremendous "fear and distrust among Biden and Trump voters"; and "Many Trump and Biden voters believe the deck is stacked against them, and their commitment to democracy is wavering."
Crystal Ball's managing editor, Kyle Kondik, tweeted out some charts (below) from the project. Among the disturbing but unsurprising revelations:
Eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say elected officials from the opposition party present a "clear and present danger" to democracy. Almost eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say Americans who support the opposite party have also become a "clear and present danger" to the American way of life.
The report also finds strong areas of common ground, including on the need for improvements to the electric grid, water supply, roads, rail, and bridges, and raising taxes on the wealthy.
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an ah 921
Veteran shock jock Howard Stern, now 67, has grown increasingly fed up with far-right anti-vaxxers, noting all the MAGA radio hosts who railed against COVID-19 vaccines before dying from COVID-19. And Breitbart News' John Nolte has come up with a very imaginative conspiracy theory, claiming that Stern — along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — is using "reverse psychology" in the hope of keeping "Trump supporters" unvaccinated.
This conspiracy theory, reporter Matt Gertz stresses in Media Matters, shows the ridiculous and "toxic" lengths Nolte will go to in order to vilify political opponents.
Nolte believes that Stern and others are railing against unvaccinated supporters of former President Donald Trump because they hope that they will be offended, express their displeasure by remaining unvaccinated, get sick with COVID-19 and die from it. Even by Breitbart standards, that conspiracy theory is, Gertz writes, "far-fetched."
In an article published by Breitbart on September 10, Nolte wrote, "Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the coronavirus? Because leftists like Stern and CNNLOL and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated."
Nolte went on to say, "If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing…. I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be: Hey, fuck you, I'm never getting vaccinated! And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything."
In essence, he's blaming Democrats and advocates for the vaccine for conservatives' refusal to get the shot that could save their lives. It paints Trump supporters as victims with little agency of their own.
Gertz, in Media Matters, slams Nolte's conspiracy theory as not only ludicrous, but outright hateful.
"Nolte is saying that his readers have been deceived into thinking that they can own the libs by refusing the vaccine, when they can really own the libs by taking it," Gertz explains. "It's incredibly toxic for Nolte to posit, without anything resembling evidence, that the president is literally trying to kill a vast swath of Americans for political gain — asking Breitbart readers, 'In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?'"
Nolte, according to Gertz, is so twisted in his thinking that it doesn't occur to him that Biden and Fauci are urging Americans to get vaccinated because they are trying to save lives.
"It is much more logical to interpret Biden and others taking steps to encourage higher vaccination rates as the result of them wanting more Americans to live," Gertz writes. "It makes more sense to view the 'bullying' Nolte perceives as coming from celebrities and others as genuine frustration at the anti-vax right endangering themselves and others. He is also curiously uninterested in the right-wing commentariat's role in discouraging vaccinations and undermining the vaccination campaign, making it unclear whether they are foolish dupes for falling for the 'reverse psychology' gambit or willing partners in the effort to kill their audience members."
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rww 921
Lauren Boebert of Colorado
Saturday at a conference held by the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a religious-right political organization founded by right-wing pastor Andrew Wommack.
Addressing a crowd of conservative Christian activists gathered in the auditorium at Wommack’s Charis Bible College, Boebert called on the audience to put faith into action by calling on God to remove ungodly leaders in Washington, D.C., and replace them with “righteous men and women of God” who realize that the government should be taking orders from the church.
“When we see Biden address the nation and the world and show more contempt and aggravation and aggression towards unvaccinated Americans than he does terrorists, we have a problem,” Boebert
. “And that’s why I have articles of impeachment to impeach Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.”
“We cannot take another 18 months, we cannot take another three years of this poor, failed leadership,” she continued. “We are sons and daughters of revolutionaries. They went to battle for a lot less. They took a stand for a lot less. And it’s time we get involved. I need you involved in every local level. I need you speaking up. I need the world to hear your voice. You know the word of God, and you know that there is power in your words, that the world was framed by words. You have the Lord God Almighty on your side. I need you to use your voice and speak.”
“What if Jesus showed up today and said, ‘From this point forward, everything you say you will have it’?” Boebert asked rhetorically. “He said it! That’s exactly what he said to us. So, what are we saying? Are we going to sit and agree with the enemy? Are we going to agree with what the enemy is doing? Are we going to sit back and complain and murmur? Or are we going tospeak life into this nation? Are we going to speak victory? Are we going to declare that God removes these unrighteous politicians, these corrupt, crooked politician, and installs righteous men and women of God?”
“You have the God kind of faith, and that faith speaks,” she added. “That faith speaks to mountains, those impossible, immovable situations, and I think there’s some mountains they need to hear your voice. … It’s time the church speaks up. The church has relinquished too much authority to government. We should not be taking orders from the government; the government needs to be looking at the church and saying, ‘How do we do this effectively?'”
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qanon house wackos calling for biden impeach from git, but treason now so common all purpose like turrets tic?
"logic": i am a patriot, i love and know what is best for US, if anyone does anything i like THEY/THEM OTHER ENEMY are traitors and should be righteously executed[plus re blinken/biden, US superpower cannot be defeated by primitive muslim towelheads unless betrayal //VN? nazi WWI jews versailles treaty?
eg
right-wing commissioner snaps after reporter points out her anti-vaccine resolution is toothless: 'That is treasonous'
This week, an anti-mask county commissioner in western Michigan suggested President Joe Biden would be committing treason if he implemented vaccine mandates, when...
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aha-ish biden basically runs/appeal based on competent mgmt/govt so gop must degrade image, plus war is their turf?
A far right wing U.S. Congressman hijacked the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Afghanistan on live TV Monday, accusing the President of the United States of treason then trying to block the Secretary of State from responding to his attacks.
After accusing President Joe Biden of manipulating intelligence coming out of Afghanistan, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) declared, "in my opinion that's absolutely aid and comfort to the enemy," which is the definition of treason.
"I absolutely wonder if you were complicit in this as well. I find it hard to believe that President Biden would do that without you being aware of this and these are things that we deserve to know, better answers, have better hearings on this, I do not believe a word that you're saying on this. Simply put, I do not wish to hear from you," Congressman Mast told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
As Blinken tried to respond, Mast took over the hearing, talking over Blinken and repeatedly telling him he did not want to hear him, calling him a liar, and announcing he would not listen to him.
"I do not believe a word that you're saying on this," he interjected. "I do not wish to hear from you. I'm not yielding you a moment of time. I don't wish to hear your lies."
Mast's time had already expired, and Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) tried to get it back under control.
"What the Congressman said is simply wrong," Blinken replied. "Period."
"I think every member of this committee has been apprised of or had access to the intelligence assessments throughout the year – and you know what they were, and you know what they are," Blinken charged.
The Florida congressman did manage to introduce lies into the record, including the common GOP-told falsehood that the U.S. forfeited tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban.
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demonize dems?
an 621 igor salon
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., is returning to her QAnon roots to push a conspiracy theory suggesting that the Clintons may be behind the death of a journalist who is believed to have died by suicide.
Boebert suggested on Twitter that the "Clinton Crime Syndicate" may be behind the death of local Alabama news anchor Christopher Sign, who broke the story about former President Bill Clinton's tarmac meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch during the 2016 presidential campaign and FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, which itself has been the target of countless Republican conspiracy theories. Local police have given no indications of foul play in Sign's death and told NBC News that the death is being investigated as a suicide.
"Why is it that so many who cross the Clinton Crime Syndicate end up dead?" Boebert tweeted along with a clip of Sign promoting his book about the meeting during a 2019 interview on Fox News. Sign said in the interview that he left his job in Phoenix to move back to Alabama because he and his family "received significant death threats shortly after breaking this story." [twt vid?]
it's not the first time Boebert has pushed conspiracy theories about Clinton. Asked during a town hall in March about whether Hillary Clinton and the former heads of the CIA and FBI would be arrested, the freshman congresswoman echoed QAnon-style conspiracy theories claiming that "with that information that I have, I believe we will see resignations begin to take place and I think we can take back the majority in the House and the Senate before 2022 when all of this is ended."
Boebert has previously expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory but denies being a follower. QAnon conspiracy theories have long targeted Clinton, baselessly alleging that she is part of a globalist child trafficking ring that cuts the faces off babies and wears them on video.
Donald Trump Jr., who has a long history of spreading conspiracy theories himself, also suggested that Sign's suicide may be some nefarious plot.
"Has anyone ever seen so many suicide coincidences EVER???" he wrote on Instagram while sharing a screenshot of a headline about Sign's death.
Trump Jr. similarly pushed long-debunked conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed in Washington D.C. in what police suspected to be an attempted robbery. Conservatives pushed conspiracy theories that Rich was killed because he was somehow connected to the release of stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign. The conspiracy theories were also promoted on Fox News, which ultimately retracted its reporting and settled out of court with Rich's family.
Debunked conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons' "body count" date back to Bill Clinton's days in the White House, when right-wingers claimed that many of those connected to the Clinton's had died under "suspicious" circumstances even when they hadn't. Many have focused on the suicide of Vince Foster, Clinton's former deputy White House counsel who died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in 1993. Multiple investigations, including the infamous Ken Starr probe, concluded that the death was a suicide but Republicans like Trump Jr. have continued to refer to in the decades since. Former President Donald Trump and others renewed the conspiracy theory in 2019 after the suicide of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump shared tweets alleging that the Clintons, longtime associates of Epstein, were behind his death even though Trump also frequently hung out with the disgraced financier.
"This conspiracy just sort of hung around," Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami professor and author of the book, "American Conspiracy Theories," told NBC News. "Mainly because the Clintons have been in power for so long and because she's the most recent face of the Democratic Party. She's a good boogeyman for Republicans to use now still."
Uscinski said the conspiracy theory has become especially popular with "QAnon" followers, who have gone even further than the nutty conservative claims in the 1990s.
"Q also absurdly implied that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible for the tragic plane crash that killed JFK Jr. in 1999," Travis View, a podcaster who tracks QAnon, told NBC. "A minority sect of QAnon followers believe that Clinton merely tried and failed to kill JFK Jr, and he is still alive today."
Clinton recently responded to the decades-old conspiracy theories in a video with "Borat" star Sasha Baron Cohen."It's hurtful, I'll be really honest with you," she said. "It's hurtful not just to me and my family, but, you know, to my friends, and other people who know that this is not just false, but you know, sometimes painfully false."
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aha note politics no longer about legislation [cf guy said i have no legis staff just PR, // cawthorne] but attacking libs/dems score pts in media eg talk radio and soc med
an 621 ah
no lnx twt
When Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, the progressive Democrat expected to have frequent policy differences not only with Republicans, but also, with centrists in her own party. However, attacks on Omar from the far right — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and pundits at Fox News — go way beyond policy disagreements, painting her as fundamentally anti-American and an outright enemy of the United States. And on June 9, Omar tweeted a racist, threatening message her office received following a tweet by Boebert and the June 7 publication of an anti-Omar article by Houston Keene on Fox News' website.
In a June 8 tweet, Boebert — a supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy cult — described Omar as an "honorary member of Hamas" and one of the "terrorist [NOTE SUBS COMMIE-] sympathizers in Congress." Members of QAnon were among the violent extremists involved in the January 6 insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol Building.
In her June 9 tweet, Omar — who is a Muslim and is originally from Somalia — noted that it isn't unusual for her to be "inundated with death threats." And she cited the call that she tweeted as a prime example. That racist caller can be heard saying, "Muslims are terrorists. And she is a raghead n*****. And every anti-American communist piece of shit that works for her, I hope you get what's fucking coming for you."
Omar tweeted that calls like the one she posted are "incited directly by articles like this" — a reference to Keene's article for Fox News' website — and "far-right politicians like" Boebert.
TW: Every time I speak out on human rights I am inundated with death threats. Here is one we just got. “Muslims ar… https://t.co/tKLay3dwdl
— Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan Omar) 1623286390.0
This is incited directly by articles like this and far right politicians like this. And it is enabled by a politic… https://t.co/6Ogf2nXnMX
— Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan Omar) 1623286456.0
Here are some reactions to the racist, threatening call Omar's office received:
@IlhanMN Its really ironic since Boebert is literally a terrorist sympathizer (if not directly involved) when it co… https://t.co/RBMVTRqWyJ
— AnarchyPunished2:ElectricBoogaloo (@AnarchyPunished2:ElectricBoogaloo) 1623287545.0...
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-white-nationalist-tucker-carlson-hosts-white-nationalist-stephen-miller-discuss
systematic rev racism?
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trms? says fox resAon to exist is attack left, not good on trump defense?
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/conservative-mind/
cody f
observers of the Republican Party and the American right wing have noticed a perplexing pattern of beliefs about the COVID vaccines. While many in conservative media are critical or skeptical of the vaccines, highlighting supposed dangers while also downplaying the risk from the virus itself, many have also insisted that former President Donald Trump deserves much more credit for the vaccine than he's getting.
It creates something of a paradox in the conservative mind: The vaccines are dangerous and overhyped, but also they're something Trump deserves endless praise for having helped create. These ideas do not easily fit together. It's not exactly clear how many people are making these exact claims in parallel, seemingly contradicting themselves, but there's no question that both strands of thought exist comfortably in right-wing discourse without appearing to come into conflict. And there's no real sign of major right-wing figures resolving the contradiction by saying: "The vaccines are bad, and Trump is bad for having had a hand in their creation." Such a thought is anathema.
There have been some conservative figures, such as Fox News' Geraldo Rivera, who have fought against the anti-vax strains in their movement while praising Trump for his administration's role overseeing the development. This is a more consistent view, but it's more marginal in right-wing circles, which tends to be welcoming of anti-vax sentiment, like Fox News prime time host Tucker Carlson.
When it comes to the attack on Jan. 6, a similar paradox emerges. Much of the right wing has come around to the idea that the insurrection at the Capitol was no big deal — indeed, the Trumpy outlet "American Greatness" recently even argued that the rioters themselves should be elected to Congress. This reaction, and the fear that Democrats were making too big a deal out of the attack, was a large part of why Republicans in Congress blocked the formation of a bipartisan commission to study it.
But since the day of the attack, there's been an alternative view on the right. In reality, some claim, it wasn't Trump supporters who violently stormed the Capitol, but leftists and Antifa. This idea came up even this Thursday when "Women for Trump" co-founder Amy Kremer claimed that video of a Trump supporter at the Capitol riot didn't actually show a Trump supporter[kremer twt pix]
if this were really true, that the left was responsible for the violence at the Capitol, then surely Republicans would be demanding an investigation that would expose this reality. Of course, it's not true — the U.S. Justice Department has arrested hundreds of right-wing Trump supporters involved in the attack with ample evidence of their identities and beliefs.
There's been some internal pushback among those on the right who suggested Antifa was responsible for the attack — including from many of the right-wing rioters themselves. Still, somehow these narratives — the insurrection was no big deal, and also it was infiltrated by violent leftists who framed Trump supporters — somehow manage to exist peaceably within right-wing discourse.
But there's a unifying explanation for both of these contradictions. They derive from the principle that, in the parlance of the internet,the thing that matters the most is "owning the libs."
This simple phrase has somehow become the dominant motivational force for conservatives. It, of course, explains the success of the uber-troll Donald Trump. The right-wing movement and the Republican Party are defined so much more by their opposition to their perceived enemies than any other coherent principles. That's why they can claim to be defenders of the U.S. Constitution while also arguing it should be ripped up if it will keep Trump in power.
When it comes to vaccines, it's clear the libs love them, which immediately makes them suspicious to many conservative thinkers. And even if the conservative is personally willing to take the vaccine, the liberals' insistence that vaccines should be widely encouraged, is anathema, so they're willing to tolerate and accommodate the anti-vaxxers. But liberals also hate Trump, so it's just as appealing to the conservative mind to demand that Trump get credit for the vaccines that the liberals love so much. Whether this all makes sense is less important than if it can make liberals feel bad.
The same goes for Jan. 6. Obviously, the liberals are concerned about the attack, so dismissing it is one way to "own the libs." But if you can also somehow blame the attack on the libs — all the better.
There's another similar paradoxical thought process I found vexing at the start of the pandemic. At the time, many conservatives, following Trump's lead, dismissed the seriousness of the virus. But they also sought to blame the virus on the Chinese government, often insinuating that it was an intentional attack. These ideas didn't make much sense together. If the virus is no big deal, how is it plausible that it's a bioweapon?
Again, though, it didn't have to make sense. This time, it wasn't all about owning the libs. But it was still about knowing who the enemy was. And the Democrats, the public health establishment, and those taking the virus were clearly the enemy. And so was China (even though just weeks before Trump had been praising Chinese President Xi Jinping). This view didn't provide for a coherent response to the virus, but it triggered the emotions conservative figures and their audiences want to feel. And that's much more important than a little cognitive dissonance.
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521 edit bd
Journalist John Harwood had a piece in CNN Sunday reflecting on an essay published in 2012 that accurately predicted the coming of today's GOP. "Let's just say it: the Republicans are the problem" was written by Thomas Mann, who was at the time with the Brookings Institution, along with Norm Ornstein, who is still with the American Enterprise Institute. The Republicans, they said, had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." Sound familiar?
I have been teaching a class for a few years, on and off, at Yale and Wesleyan on how to understand American politics. I assign Mann and Ornstein's essay every time. But I didn't know some important context Harwood provides, meaning that the essay landed with a thud nine years ago, even among what are now called anti-GOP conservatives.
Hardwood calls on Charlie Dent to comment. He's a former Republican moderate from Pennsylvania, who is now a talking head for CNN. He told Harwood that, "I thought they overstated things." He added: "I don't like where we're heading, but don't think it's inevitable that we get to that terrible place." William Kristol pooh-poohed Mann and Ornstein's essay, too. He told Harwood of his feelings at the time. "People like me were thinking, 'Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c'mon.'" That was before Donald Trump's ascent and the consequent demise of his magazine, The Weekly Standard. (Kristol later joined other anti-GOP conservatives to found The Bulwark.)
Harwood's piece is good. I encourage you to read it. But I want to make the case for a more prescient essay. It was published in 2004 in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by The Chronicle Review, an obscure monthly supplement to The Chronicle of Higher Education,itself obscure. I assign it alongside Mann and Ornstein's essay. But if theirs had little impact, Alan Wolfe's had none at all. (No one in the United States Congress or the Washington press corps is being asked how they feel about it now.) With all due respect to Mann and Ornstein, I think Wolfe's is more important, because it gives a name to "where we're heading," a name that even John Harwood seems to avoid.
Alan Wolfe is a political scientist and sociologist at Boston College. He is or was the director of its Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. In 2004, he was searching for ways to explain Republican behavior after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the launch of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was, in other words, doing what Harwood did, but instead of looking to pundits like Mann and Ornstein, Wolfe looked way, way back to scholars like himself, this time to Carl Schmitt, who was briefly the leading exponent of fascist political thought. Fascism is "where we're heading" now, but Wolfe saw the first stirrings of it over 17 years ago.
Using Schmitt's The Concept of the Political as a lens through which to see the politics of the early 2000s, Wolfe wrote that "the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself." Wolfe goes on to explain that:
Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies;conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition.Liberals believe policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes.
Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency … the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.1
I think Alan Wolfe used the word "conservative" for a couple of reasons. One, because he didn't feeling like being charitable that day. Two, more likely, because "fascist" was not available to him in 2004.I like to think if he were to rewrite this essay, he'd make room for conservatives like Norm Ornstein, or Liz Cheney for that matter, in order to establish the boundaries of acceptable behavior in a liberal democracy in which some things really are above politics, such as the political legitimacy of a rival faction.
"Fascist," however, continues to get side-eye from mainstream commentators like John Harwood, I think because it so easily evokes images of gas chambers. But as Wolfe makes clear, it doesn't take genocide to make a fascist. What it takes a particular and particularly coherent worldview in which everyone outside one's group is the enemy. As Harwood said, Mann and Ornstein were right. Their diagnosis of the GOP is undeniable. But Alan Wolfe was more right. What's more, he gave us a vocabulary.
We should use it.
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1220
flynn in dc stop steal jericho maga attacks deep state
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==
aha2 covid plague not scourge of god for gay sex but chicomm.
aha CNP is everywhere in trump/ crazytown slide into polarization in this case dobson; satan usage getting pretty common/casual, it's manichean light/dark tribalism, you're with us or THEM; they are so evil/irrational only settle/cure with war; they hate america and freedom; armageddon is the final orgasmic punishment /vanquishing of coastal elite who looked down on us and called us crazy (ghost dance) aha3: this is the dark side of magical thinking vs prosperity gospel.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-evangelicals-2649541067/
alexh
Christian Right is in mourning over President Donald Trump being voted out of office. Pat Robertson, the far-right evangelical who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, has declared that the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20, 2021 must be prevented, saying, "We will not give up this great country. And Satan, you cannot have it." But the irony is that the incoming president is much more religious than Trump, who has demonstrated how little he knows about Christianity and the Bible.
Although Trump was raised Presbyterian, religion was never a high priority in his life. But when he ran for president in 2016, Trump realized that the Christian Right was a prominent voting bloc in the GOP and went out of his way to pander to the far-right White evangelicals he had no connection to in the past. The Trump of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s was more of a Blue Dog Democrat than a GOP culture warrior, and he spent a lot more time in casinos than in churches.
Journalist Ed Kilgore, in an article published by New York Magazine on December 17, notes Trump's history of butchering Biblical references during his speeches.
Kilgore explains, "Before Donald Trump became the very favorite politician of White conservative evangelicals, he was regularly a figure of sport for displaying exceptional ignorance in all matters religious. A particularly rich example of his clumsiness occurred when he was campaigning at evangelical stronghold Liberty University early in 2016 and tried to quote a Bible verse that was very familiar to the audience, since it's etched on several buildings there."
Kilgore adds that there were many other "religious gaffes Trump committed while stumping for votes" in 2016.
"On another occasion along the campaign trail," Kilgore recalls, "Trump was asked about his favorite line of scripture. He delivered a word salad for a while and finally tried to recall 'an eye for an eye,' not the sort of thing Christians of any variety consider normative for the faith of the Prince of Peace…... Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, Trump was in a Council Bluffs church when a plate came down the pews with communion bread on it. The billionaire misidentified it as a collection plate and put a couple of bills on it."
Kilgore also notes that in 2017, Trump met with two Presbyterian minsters and was surprised to learn that they didn't consider themselves evangelicals but rather, described themselves as "Mainline Protestants."
Of course, anyone with even a basic knowledge of Christianity realizes that Presbyterians aren't evangelicals any more than Episcopalians or Lutherans — two other examples of Mainline Protestants — are evangelicals. And there's no way that either Biden, a devout Catholic, or former President Barack Obama, a Mainline Protestant, would have made that mistake or confused a communion plate with a collection plate. Unlike Trump, Biden and Obama both have a long history of being churchgoing Christians and obviously have an extensive knowledge of the Bible.
[twt]
if Pat Robertson were to sit down with Biden or Obama, they could have an in-depth conversation about scripture. Yet Robertson, like much of the Christian Right, adores Trump while hating Biden and Obama — which underscores the deeply tribalist nature of the Christian Right.
The Christian Right has long been a hate movement, and it is as much about White nationalism and far-right identity politics as it is about Protestant fundamentalism. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of Liberty University and co-founder of the Moral Majority, was a notorious segregationist during the 1950s and 1960s, when he vigorously defended Jim Crow laws in the pulpit and argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a not a true Christian because of his anti-segregation views. During the 1980s, Falwell defended the racist apartheid regime in South African and encouraged Christians to buy krugerrands to support it.
The late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, known for being an arch-conservative in his day, was vehemently critical of Falwell and the Christian Right during the 1980s — describing them as dangerous fanatics and warning that the GOP was making a huge mistake by allying itself with that movement. But many Republicans ignored Goldwater, much to the GOP's detriment.
To the Christian Right and far-right White evangelicals, the fact that Biden and Obama are more religious than Trump is irrelevant. Robertson, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and other evangelical Trump supporters are extreme tribalists, and they view Trump as part of their tribe — which is why Trump got a pass when, according to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, he had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet.
Trump repeatedly attacked Biden as anti-Christian during his 2020 presidential campaign. But in 2017, Trump didn't even know the difference between Presbyterians and evangelicals.
The Christian Right will miss Trump dearly when he leaves off on January 20, 2021. And no matter how much Biden goes to church or accurately quotes the Bible, it won't matter to the far-right evangelical extremists who value White identity politics above all else.
===
1220 an hunter
sow doubt disinfo
...
In this particular case, however, (most) House Republicans do not sincerely intend to win. But neither would they feel chagrined if their actions further provoked the sort of far-right violence seen in Washington, D.C., this weekend—the very public suggestion that non-Republican rule can simply no longer be tolerated by the unwashed masses, and that their non-Republican opponents should begin contemplating their own safety if they intend to continue thwarting Republican demands. That is the goal behind nearly all of this nonsense: to delegitimize; to put the stochastic notion in public heads that if The Base suffers a setback in its ambitions, it can only be because The Base was conspired against.It was conspired against by theurban, and the globalists, and the socialists.
===
===
now literally targets, bogeyman, paid by soros?
db antifa also target portland, pipe bomb? see spec ops
Several recent violent plots associated with the anti-government Boogaloo movement have also allegedly been carried out by veterans or active service members. In May, two veterans and a current Army Reserve soldier were arrested in an alleged plot to throw explosives at aBlack Lives Matterrally. That same month, a current Air Force staff sergeant was arrested for allegedly killing a federal security officer PORTLAND] and attempting to kill another, in an apparent plot to kick off a new civil war that Boogaloo adherents believe is imminent.
==
N an 920
When I published my book two years ago, people accused me of hysteria, of exaggeration, and they listed reasons why we shouldn’t be afraid of fascism in America, despite its deep roots in this country. And the reasons they’ve given, I’m afraid, have fallen to the wayside. They’ve given reasons like, you know, the institutions remain independent, the Justice Department remains independent. They’ve given reasons like there are no right-wing militias tacitly endorsed by the administration. So, Arendt calls our attention to the fact that the Nazi government refused to condemn the violence of right-wing — right-wing, far-right violent people on the streets attacking Jews. They refused to condemn them. They didn’t endorse them; they just refused to condemn them. And Arendt said that was giving them permission.
So, you know, we’ve seen four years of chaos here, and yet we’re being told that this is law and order. So, we’re seeing militias on the street endorsed by the president. We’re seeing the administration echo a conspiracy theory that looks, really, a great deal like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is the early 20th century conspiracy that Judeo-Bolsheviks were behind liberalism and controlled the media, controlled the cultural institutions, where bankers were in cahoots with media and the art world to bring about world communism. We saw that at the RNC. Senator Tim Scott talked about Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls supposedly trying to bring socialism to the United States. This mixture of a wealthy elite and communists is reminiscent of some of the worst conspiracy theories of the 20th century. So I’m very concerned here.
We’re seeing — people said, “It’s not fascism, because they’re not attacking democracy.” Well, what are the attacks on the elections about, if not attacks on democracy? So, while I don’t think Trump himself has a vision, has some kind of grand vision, as the fascists of yore has, as Timothy Snyder has called it, this is “not-even fascism.” I think we’re seeing a structure emerge, with figures like Stephen Miller, with all the sort of white supremacist ideologues in this administration, that could bring about, definitely, a turn to authoritarianism. It’s definitely an attack on democracy that the RNC represented.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to — back to the Republican convention, to President Trump formally accepting the nomination before a crowd of about 1,500 people crowded onto the South Lawn of the White House. During his acceptance speech, Trump made no reference to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, or the killing of the two protesters that had just happened in Kenosha by a 17-year-old white Trump-supporting vigilante.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When there is police misconduct, the justice system must hold wrongdoers fully and completely accountable. And it will. But when we can never have a situation where things are going on, as they are today, we must never allow mob rule. We can never allow mob rule. In the strongest possible terms, the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities all, like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York and many others. Democrat-run. There is violence and danger in the streets of many Democrat-run cities throughout America.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Professor Stanley, as you have a white officer shooting at point-blank range seven times in the back Jacob Blake just days before, and then two Black Lives Matter activists shot dead in the streets of Kenosha by a Trump-supporting gunman, no mention of them, but talking about mob rule in the streets somewhere of cities that are run by Democrats.
JASON STANLEY: OK. So, there’s two chapters in my book — my book is a 10-part characterization of fascist tactics. There’s two parts in my — two chapters in my book that are deeply relevant for what is happening now: obviously, chapter seven, “Law and Order,” and chapter nine, “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
What is meant by “Sodom and Gomorrah”? Chapter two of Hitler’s book Mein Kampf is called “My Study and Struggles in Vienna,” and he talks about his time in Vienna, a city, the capital of Austria, filled with foreigners, dirty, diseased, all sorts of different languages, filled with immigrants, and then the hated minority group, which for him were Jews. So, what we see is a repetition of this tactic: an attack on cities. Hypocritical, of course — Trump is from Queens. But what Trump is doing is trying to represent cities as filled with foreigners, minorities and disease. Earlier, he described New York City as filled with — as disease-ridden. And I think yesterday or, I think, in the last 24 hours, he said he blamed the COVID deaths on New York City. So, the idea is an attack on — you know,cities are dens of iniquity and foreignness. Real Americans live in rural areas outside the cities. And the cities are where you have mobs out of control, immigrants. There’s sanctuary cities. This is a classic tactic of this kind of far-right fascist politics.
And then law and order. What’s meant by “law and order” here? Not when — you know, Kyle Rittenhouse is not a violation of law and order. Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people, who killed two people, is — he’s a radicalized 17-year-old. He’s not a violation of law and order, because white Trump supporters are law-abiding by their nature. The Trump rally we saw in Portland, shooting paintballs, aggressive against the counterprotesters, that was law-abiding. They were peaceful protesters, because on this notion of law and order, young Black men are, in and of themselves, violators of law and order. Leftist protesters against Trump can be doing nothing but rioting and looting.
Now, any protest — almost any protest is going to have elements with bad apples that become violent. Look at the Hong Kong protests. The Hong Kong became much more violent than anything we’ve seen here. Nevertheless, the Republicans did not denounce the Hong Kong protests as riots. Do you know who denounced the Hong Kong protests as riots? The Chinese government. What we’re seeing here is our government behave like the Chinese government, representing largely peaceful protests, with some bad elements that grow violent and should be condemned, as riots. And that’s a counterinsurgency, authoritarian tactic.
“Law and order” here does not mean law and order. Does this feel like law and order? Do the last four years feel like law and order? That very speech that we witnessed at the RNC was a violation of law and order, because it was given from White House grounds in violation of the Hatch Act, so, you know — and proudly so, because this administration revels in its violation of law and order, because, in fascism, “law and order” means whatever the leader says, and “law-abiding” means whoever the leader is, and “lawless” means the men of the minority group and leftists and radicals, supposed leftist radicals.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump has said New Jersey’s first African American U.S. senator, Cory Booker, will help Joe Biden destroy peaceful suburbs by bringing low-income housing and crime. This is Trump speaking to Fox News Monday night.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You have this beautiful community in the suburbs, including women, right? Women. They want security. I ended where they build low-income housing project right in the middle of your neighborhood. I ended it. If Biden gets in, he already said it’s going to go at a much higher rate than ever before. And you know who’s going to be in charge of it? Cory Booker. That’s going to be nice. OK?
AMY GOODMAN: Cory Booker, the president says. Professor Stanley?
JASON STANLEY: So, there’s no evidence at all that Cory Booker, a senator, an African American senator from New Jersey, is going to be running any such program. He throws his name in.
He mentions women. Why does he mention women? Well, this harkens back to what Langston Hughes called “our native fascisms.” This harkens back to the worst moments in American history, the history of lynching. Ida B. Wells, in Southern Horrors, the great Ida B. Wells, the great anti-lynching activist and intellectual and journalist, said, “Look, racism and sexism go together.” They’re treating white women as victims who need to be protected from marauding Black men by a strong leader, by — you know, by white militias, the KKK.
Trump is directly harkening back to that horrific time in American history, which is this sort of lynching in the late 19th, early 20th century to mid-20th century. This is something that Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction, calls fascism, so American fascism. This is the aspect of America that influences Hitler, that influences the Jim Crow laws, the racial subordination.
Here, so I have a chapter in my book called “Sexual Anxiety.” You know, in Germany, the idea behind both Nazi Germany — Nazi German ideology and the Ku Klux Klan, often called the first fascist organization, was that Jews, Marxist Jews, were trying to promote a race war to get Black Americans to — to get Blacks and immigrants to overthrow the white Christianity. And the idea, you know, Hitler fomented this, as I document in my book. It’s also the case that you had this propaganda, that overlaps between here and QAnon, that we need to protect our women and children from these predators, pedophile rings.
But this echoes the classic American, supposed and completely fictional Black male rapist fiction, fictional narrative, that underlay lynching. And the random evocation of Cory Booker is a case in point. Ida B. Wells is, sadly, more relevant than ever.
AMY GOODMAN: During the Republican convention, speakers used apocalyptic language to describe the dangers of a Biden presidency. This is Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point.
CHARLIE KIRK: We may not have realized it at the time, but Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization. Trump was elected to protect our families from the vengeful mob that seeks to destroy our way of life, our neighborhoods, schools, churches and values. President Trump was elected to defend the American way of life.
AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point. Professor Stanley, respond to this and also people raising their eyebrows and saying, “Oh, come on, Nazi Germany, you’re comparing this to?”
JASON STANLEY: That speech is highly evocative of a speech that Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, gave in 1935 called “Communism with Its Mask Off.” In Goebbels’ speeches, including that speech, which I encourage people to look up, he regularly represents the threat as being a threat to Western civilization. He says the Nazi Party is going to protect social conservatives, Christians from the Armageddon of communism, which seeks to destroy civilization as such. Goebbels says the communists are in cahoots with the international underworld. So, that’s that link betweencommunism and crime and supposed lawless crime.
So you have the same idea here. There’s Trump, on the one hand, protecting Christianity, protecting Western civilization, and anyone opposed to Trump is a lawless mob in cahoots with communists seeking to destroy civilization itself. And this is the friend-enemy distinction that is so antithetical to democracy.
===
omfg
https://twitter.com/LouDobbs/status/1283531243548741635
portland secret police
ms 13 barbarian jul 15 dobbs miller interview finally declared terrorists
==
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620
aha: us vs them enemy: we are the reasonable rational people, within accepted norms, but THEY are dangerous, deranged, cannot be reasoned with so MUST be met with FORCE, strict father must punish mis-behavior; [fundamentalist they are evil? end time armageddon?]
RANGE:
alarmist is irrationally worried about an issue, worst case will get some policy enacted that will increase friction/cost/bureaucracy
activist, same as above but is ACTIVE in street or politics, so can increase cost/damage
extremist sorta tied with militant, but latter ominous suggestion of force? well doth do, but hard to picture Pelosi busting out AR 15?
easy slide over to terrorism (eco economic)
fascist one man alone can fix the (single?) threat/problem
takes immediate swift unilateral Executive order action
aha: do nothing congress was an actual thing, commented on (repeatedly?) by Maddow in comparison on recent GOP led senate (recall mtg right after BO where (openly vs leaked?) declared we will pass nothing even if we favor it); so lack of any gov't action that could help ppl is blamed on dems; plus a MAN of action will get it done whatever it takes, HARD vs soft dems/fems
@realDonaldTrump
Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier [FREUDIAN TYPO?] from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet thesesame weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/fox-news-removes-unethical-digitally-altered-images-of-police-brutality-protests-in-seattle
ok he was there, but a week before?
no lnx pix twt
fox News removes ‘unethical’ digitally altered images of police brutality protests in Seattle
Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1288386304 Tallinn, Estonia - 01/18/2019: Fox News website homepage. Fox News channel logo visible through a magnifying glass.
Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon June 16, 2020
Fox News over the weekend removed misleading images from stories about protests against police brutality in Seattle from its website after it was revealed they had been digitally altered in a manner which made the scene appear dangerous.
The Seattle Times published a report Friday calling out multiple images from Fox News coverage of the police-free “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) in the city.
One photo illustration appearing on the Fox News homepage showed a masked man with an assault rifle and tactical vest standing in front of a sign reading, “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.” The outlet did not originally disclose that the photo of the scene and the photo of the armed man had been spliced together using two different photos, which were taken more than a week apart.
The original photo, from Getty Images, shows the armed man in front of a car.
He was digitally placed in front of the entrance sign.
The same image of the man appeared in at least one other image on Fox News’ website, in front of a smashed retail storefront. According to The Times, it was also a combination of multiple images.
“It is definitely Photoshopped,” freelance photographer David Ryder, who took the original photo and published it through Getty images, told the outlet. “To use a photo out of context in a journalistic setting like that seems unethical.”
Conservatives, including President Donald Trump, have attempted to sculpt the CHAZ storyline into a political flashpoint. Protesters converted the area into a street festival after police, who teargassed demonstrators, left the precinct in an effort to de-escalate tensions.
Trump tweeted Thursday that “Radical Left Governor [J]ay Inslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped [sic] IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!”
The mayor told the president, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”
Fox News on Friday used a photo of a man running through an urban inferno as a banner image for a group of stories about Seattle under the headline, “CRAZY TOWN || Seattle helpless as armed guards patrol anarchists’ autonomous zone, shake down businesses: cops.”
:{
}:
The photo was unaltered, but it was an AP photo taken May 30 in St. Paul, Minn. Fox News later removed it.
The articles did not notify readers that the photos were altered, and it remains unclear who was responsible for the decision to do so. A Fox News spokesperson did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment.
In an emailed statement, a Fox News spokeswoman told The Times: “We have replaced our photo illustration with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront, both of which were taken this week in Seattle’s autonomous zone.”
However, that statement itself was inaccurate. While the gunman was photographed that week — June 10 — the smashed storefront images were first published by Getty on May 30.
Fox News fully apologized Saturday in an editor’s note accompanying its CHAZ coverage, acknowledging that it “did not clearly delineate” the photo illustrations, which it labeled a “collage.” The site also apologized for falsely attributing the shot of the Minneapolis fire. “Fox News regrets these errors,” the note said.
Talent at the conservative network have attempted to use the Seattle protests as a political wedge issue. For example, primetime host Tucker Carlson accused the people in the zone of advocating segregation.
:{
}:
The network also reported an anecdotal claim from Seattle Assistant Chief of Police Deanna Nollette.
:{
}:
“We’ve heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area,” Nollette said. “This is the crime of extortion.”
:{
}:
Police Chief Carmen Best later corrected that statement.
:{
}:
“We haven’t had any formal reports of this occurring,” she said, indicating the reports had come from rumors spread on social media.
Though the Seattle protests have at times been home to contentious scenes of unrest — including a cop filmed forcibly removing his partner’s knee from someone’s neck and a man filmed driving into a crowd of protesters and shooting a black man — the CHAZ street scene has been almost entirely peaceful, featuring musical and visual artists, free street food, concerts and movies.
Best said she did not think the officers should have abandoned the precinct, a move which she claims has led to longer 911 response times.
Trump called demonstrators “domestic terrorists” over the weekend and threatened federal action unless local officials “take back” the area. He also falsely claimed that antifa forces had taken over the city.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet thesesame weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!
256K
1:47 PM - Jun 14, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
121K people are talking about this
“City officials have not interacted with ‘armed antifa militants’ at this site,” a city spokesperson told CNN.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-has-no-grand-strategy-and-hes-going-all-in-with-losers/
ms 13
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aha dics have to neuter courts so their crimes and corruption can go unpunished, but also use law to crush dissent:
cdv antifa
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-and-his-regime-have-again-turned-crisis-into-an-opportunity-to-advance-their-neofascist-authoritarian-agenda/
In his 1838 Lyceum Address, a young Abraham Lincoln warned:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
In the year 2020, the United States in the Age of Trump has arrived at one such moment. Donald Trump is an authoritarian and a neofascist. Such a description does not need the modifiers of “apparent” or “would be” or “impending” or “inclinations” or “autocratic.”
That language is all too often deployed by journalists and others to soften the hard blows of the full and horrible reality that the United States is a failing democracy where Donald Trump is now only barely restrained in his anti-democratic behavior by the country’s now much weakened political norms, institutions and culture.
In his response to the protests and people’s uprising that was sparked by the savage killing of a black man named George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, Donald Trump has fully graduated from “would-be tyrant” and “apparent authoritarian” to full-on membership in such a category of ignoble leaders,
just as Derek Chauvin snuffed out the life of George Floyd, Donald Trump has his knee on the throat of American democracy.
Because he is mentally unwell and lives in his own malignant reality, worships power in the service of his own fabulism, narcissism, ego and greed, lacks empathy and concern for other human beings, and is an authoritarian and a neofascist, Donald Trump is only capable of destruction. Healing and creation are anathema to him.
As such, Donald Trump’s response to the protests was to slur those Americans who are sickened by police thuggery and brutality and are therefore moved to force positive social change as being “thugs.” Trump also summoned his paramilitaries and street thugs to defend him at the White House by participating in “MAGA Night.”
Trump threatened to enforce martial law by invoking the Insurrection Act through which he would deploy at least 10,000 active duty soldiers to crush and “dominate” protesters.
Trump also threatened to attack the protesters outside of the White House with the Secret Service and their “ominous” weapons and “vicious dogs.” The protesters outside of the White House were shot with rubber bullets, choked with tear gas, and beaten by police and other law enforcement forces at Trump’s and William Barr’s command. Why? So that Donald Trump could have a photo op where he could look “strong” as he walked from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street in what was a Christian fascist authoritarian spectacle.
The resulting images were supposed to be akin to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” but instead Trump and his coterie looked like something out of an Ed Wood movie.
Donald Trump’s reaction to these protests was so dangerous and reckless and likely illegal that the country’s most senior military and civilian leaders decided to ignore his orders to unleash the United States military on the American people.
Lost in this maelstrom of events is how Donald Trump and his regime have again turned crisis into an opportunity to advance their neofascist authoritarian agenda. In response to the George Floyd protests, Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr declared “antifa” to be a “terrorist organization.” Such a designation means that offering material support to antifaor perhaps even being a “member” is now a very serious federal crime.
In a master stroke unnoticed by most Americans, the Constitutionally guaranteed rights to protest, free speech, and criticize elected officials are imperiled. In total, by declaring “antifa” a terrorist organization Donald Trump has criminalized dissent by the American people (and others) against him.
The facts:
Antifa is not an organization. It is an organizing strategy and an ideology.
As Billie Murray, professor of communications at Villanova University and an expert on rhetoric and social justice, explained to Salon in a phone conversation, “Antifascism is self-defense. They believe they are protecting their community, they are defending their community from fascist organizing and violence.”
Murray also clarifies the false equivalencies that are often made by too many reporters and other members of the commentariat when they discuss and write about “antifascists”:
We have a history of fascist violence that has led to world war. You are forgetting your history when you are assuming that fascist organizing is just a bunch of crazy people. You allow it to be a non-problem in your mind.
Too many people assume that fascism died in 1945. We won the war. Mussolini is gone. Hitler’s gone. Franco’s gone. We’re good. That is absolutely not true.
The first antifascist groups started in the late 1940s by Jewish people who were walking around Germany and seeing fascists on the side of the street touting the same things that Hitler did. Those Jewish people said, “We were soldiers in this war. We won this war and this guy is still on the corner saying such things!”
Clearly, we did not get rid of all of fascism because it’s an ideology. You are never going to completely eradicate it even with a world war. I think people assume that fascism died and, therefore, is no longer a problem.
Then, when you have antifascists on the scene, you can say, “Well, what are they even fighting for? They must just want to engage in violence. They just are being crazy and they’re just crazy just like those other people.”
We talk about these right-wing fascists as being “hate” groups or something like that because fascism is supposed to be dead.
Contrary to Trump’s and Barr’s and the broader right-wing echo chamber’s lies and fantasies, antifa is not responsible for the violence which took place during the protests following George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police. The FBI’s own data shows that violent acts such as arson, other property crimes, and physical assault was committed by local criminals who took advantage of the chaos, as well as “boogaloo” and other right-wing extremists.
As with “Obamagate,” “antifa” is an empty phrase, a type of signifier that can be made to mean whatever Trump and the right-wing disinformation machine want it to mean in the service of criminalizing Democrats, liberals, and progressives as somehow being “un-American.”
Trump and his agents use of “antifa” also represents the type of conspiracism and propaganda now rampant among American conservatives and other members of the right wing — and the resulting damage it has caused to American politics and society.
Writing at Business Insider, Sonam Sheth details how:
Paul Barrett, the deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights who released a report last year on how disinformation would affect the 2020 election, told Business Insider thatefforts to frame the George Floyd protests as “a violent leftist conspiracy” bear “all the earmarks of current-day disinformation.”
“The now-familiar elements include profuse social media posts of dubious provenance, flat-out falsehoods by President Trump, and deft amplification by right-wing figures on Fox News,” said Barrett, who is also the author of a newly released report on content moderation.
The theory that antifa is behind organizing the riots is the most prominent piece of misinformation flying around about the demonstrations, according to Zignal Labs, which tracked and analyzed certain types of mis- and disinformation connected to the protests.
Out of 873,000 pieces of misinformation linked to the demonstrations, 575,800 mentioned antifa, Zignal Labs told The New York Times.
The allegations gained traction after Trump tweeted on May 31 that antifa and other left-wing radicals were responsible for the violence. But they started bouncing around social media days earlier, according to The Times, which found more than 6,000 Facebook posts linking antifa to the protests that garnered 1.3 million likes and shares from May 25 to June 1.
On Thursday, the hashtag #exposeAntifa began trending on Twitter as the president and his allies continued amplifying the theory.
Legal scholars and others have warned that Trump’s decree against antifa is “unconstitutional“. That may in fact be true. However, Donald Trump, an authoritarian and neofascist, has no respect for the rule of law. “Unconstitutional” is increasingly no longer a useful analytical category.
What role does Trump’s and the broader right wing movement’s misrepresentation and weaponization of “antifa” fulfill?
By criminalizing antifa (which literally means “anti-fascist”), Donald Trump is announcing that he is a fascist. He is doing this through the façade of fighting against “terrorism.”
Trump and the right wing’s lies about antifa legitimates violence against Trump’s political enemies. The logic is simple: To support Donald Trump is to love America. Anyone who stands against Donald Trump or otherwise opposes him is, by definition, a member of antifa and a “terrorist.” It is good and right that terrorists are to be subjected to violence and ultimately destroyed to keep America “safe.”
Trump’s recent comments about Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old man who was pushed to the ground by members of the Buffalo Police Department, suffering a fractured skull while his blood poured out of his ear on to the sidewalk and police officers walked over him like he was human trash, is one such example.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump said via Twitter that: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
Trump and his followers feel no human care of concern for “protesters” like Martin Gugino because they are supposedly antifa members. In Trump’s authoritarian worldview protesters are enemies of the state who are to be destroyed.
Other Republicans have been even more clear and direct in their public claims that antifa members should be hunted down and killed.On Twitter, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz recently said, “Now that we clearly see antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?”
The criminalization of dissent by labeling anti-fascists as “terrorists” is a preview of how free speech and other rights will increasingly only apply to Donald Trump’s right-wing Christian followers.
Such an escalation is taking place in how the FBI and local police are now interrogating people who they detained during the protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police.
The Intercept reports how:
Joel Feingold was in his apartment in Brooklyn when he heard the sound of police beating protesters outside of his building Wednesday night. Having spent much of the week in the streets joining the waves of demonstrations against police brutality currently sweeping the nation, Feingold rushed outside. He was swiftly tossed to the ground by a senior New York City police officer in a white shirt, thrown in a police van, and placed under arrest along with four other individuals for having ostensibly violated a recently imposed curfew on New York City residents.
Feingold and the others were taken to the NYPD’s 78th Precinct, where they were told that they were being cited for violating the city’s 8 p.m. curfew. It was there, Feingold told The Intercept, that they were interrogated by the NYPD and the FBI about their political beliefs and their reasons for participating in the nationwide protests — subjects that should, under the Constitution and local NYPD rules, be off-limits from law enforcement inquiries following an alleged curfew violation.
The Intercept continues:
After being processed and taken to a cell, Feingold said he and the three men he was locked up with were approached by two men in plainclothes. “One of them is from NYPD intelligence and the other is an FBI agent,” he said. Feingold said a third officer confirmed the affiliations of the two men as they were being discharged.The FBI agent’s line of questioning was clearly focused on his political views.
“We want to know who’s hijacking your movement and making it violent,” Feingold recalled the agent saying. “That is what he said verbatim.”
The FBI’s involvement in protest interrogations is part of an emerging pattern, New York City civil rights attorneys say, that seems to have followed Attorney General William Barr’s designation of the leaderless movement against fascism known as antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly alleged that outside agitators affiliated with the movement are stoking violence and unrest across the country.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party’scriminalization of dissentby targeting antifa is also best understood as part of a much larger effort to undermine America’s multiracial secular democracy.
This effort consists of: Voter suppression, voter theft, and gerrymandering; attacks on the free press and journalists as being “enemies” and “fake news”; targeted harassment and threats against those reporters, journalists, professors, and other public voices deemed to be enforcing “political correctness” against conservatives and Trump supporters; Trump’s use of white supremacist and other right-wing paramilitaries and extremists to enforce his will through violence and intimidation obedience to Trump’s political-religious cult; legal threats against the news media if they dare to criticize Donald Trump; and an effort to punish Twitter and other corporations if they disobey Trump’s orders.
Donald Trump and his Republican Party also command a massive disinformation propaganda machine consisting of Fox News, the OAN network, social media, radio, television, print, film, websites and other digital means of circulating right-wing lies and propaganda more generally.
Writing in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt previewed the type of authoritarian movement that Donald Trump now commands:
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.
There are many examples where Trump and his propagandists have created an alternate reality for members of their movement. These include: “antifa” and “Obamagate” and “Benghazi”; Trump was a “victim” and “exonerated” by the Mueller investigation; a “deep state conspiracy” exists against Donald Trump; and Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden are the real “criminals” and “traitors” in the Ukraine extortion scandal and subsequent impeachment.
The truth and empirical reality as they exist must be silenced if the power of Trump and his movement’s malignant reality is to endure. Dissent is not allowed because the truth threatens the artifice of Trump and his movement’s “greatness.”
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For three weeks, by the many hundreds of thousands (if not more) the American people have been protesting, struggling and engaging in both symbolic and corporeal politics where channeling the power of George Floyd’s death, they have faced down rubber bullets, tear gas, police batons, National Guard troops, militarized police, and literal loss of life and limb, in an effort to force a better and more just America into existence.
These protesters in this nationwide and now global people’s uprising against social inequality in its many forms are also braving death from the coronavirus. This is also true of black and brown and other Democratic Party supporters who have shown in Wisconsin and Georgia that they will wait for hours and days to vote — even during a pandemic — to remove Donald Trump, his regime and the Republican Party from power.
The birth of this new and better America will be painful. Those who engage in such a patriotic struggle are hope warriors.
Donald Trump, his Republican Party, and the other members of the right-wing power elite (and the corporatocracy) have been temporarily disoriented by these weeks of protests and people’s uprising.
Their response will be crushing. The empire always strikes back. Trump and his enforcers’ efforts to criminalize dissent will be amplified. The American people must not let themselves be cowed.
On Election Day 2020, the American people have a choice to make. Will they save the United States and its democracy by voting for Joe Biden, or will they commit national suicide by reelecting Donald Trump?
The American people will have to be their own heroes in the centuries-long story of defending and improving American democracy. In doing so they should heed journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers’ recent warning and advice that, “because truth is the foe he most fears, he has banned it from his administration and his lips. Yes, Bernie, you are right: the man in the White House has taken all the necessary steps toward achieving the despot’s dream of dominance. Can it happen here? It is happening here. Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us. For that, we have only ourselves.”
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https://theconversation.com/trumps-use-of-religion-follows-playbook-of-authoritarian-leaning-leaders-the-world-over-140050
It was a striking moment: Donald Trump, Bible in hand, posing for photos in an apparent moment of political theater made possible by the dispersal of protesters through the use of tear gas.
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The president’s visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church, known as “the Church of the Presidents,” came immediately after giving a Rose Garden speech framing himself as “your president of law and order” and threatening to send federal troops to “restore security and safety in America.” The next day, Trump made another high-profile visit to a place of worship, this time Washington’s St. John Paul II National Shrine.
Coming at a time of social turbulence, critics accused Trump of following authoritarian-leaning world leaders by sidling up to religion to reinforce an image as a strongman defending a particular brand of tradition. Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington Mariann Budde said as much, commenting that Trump used the Bible at St. John’s “as if it were a prop or an extension of his military and authoritarian position.”
As a scholar who has researched the interaction of politics and faith for decades, I know how potent religion can be as a political tool.
A powerful tool
Religion creates meaning in our lives by articulating values about how we relate to one another. But just as it can unite us, religion can also be a source of division – used to “other” people who are not of the faith and don’t share the same traditions and rituals.
When enough people perceive – or can be convinced – that traditional elements of the social fabric are at risk, religious signaling through the use of symbols and images can help would-be authoritarians cement their power. They present themselves as protectors of the faith and foes of any outsider who threatens tradition.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sunbathes with a cross on display over his bare chest. Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images]
In Russia, this phenomenon is seen in President Vladimir Putin’s forging of a strategic alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. For his part, Putin presents himself not just as a commanding leader, but also as a devoutly religious Russian. When he appears shirtless, for example, the large cross he wears around his neck is always visible. Meanwhile, the Church promotes traditional moral values and maintains a distance from the rest of the worldwide Orthodox Christian community, thereby separating the “truly Russian” from the outsider. In their most recent collaboration, Putin and the Church proposed amendments to the Russian constitution that would enshrine Russians’ faith in God, define marriage as the union of a man and a woman and, tellingly, proclaim “the great achievement of the [Russian] people in defense of the Fatherland.” These changes, all of which are intended to reinforce Putin’s base of support, would be jarringlynationalistic additions to the constitution.
Putin benefits from this insider-outsider dynamic in advancing his goal of restoring Russia to his vision of its past territorial glory. In justifying the Russian incursion into Crimea, Putin argued that the region had “sacral importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.” Defending and expanding Russian territory is a much easier sell if it is framed as the defense of the holy.
Religious imagery
We see a similar dynamic in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s grip on power relies in large part on his embrace of a version of Hindu nationalism that elevates Hindus as “truly Indian” insiders and singles out Muslims as outsiders.
Like Putin, Modi wraps himself in religious imagery. He makes high-profile visits to remote Hindu temples while electioneering and never wears green because of its association with Islam.
Then-prime minister candidate Narendra Modi visits a shrine on horseback while electioneering in 2014. Strdel/AFP via Getty Images
Modi’s Hindu nationalism cements his popularity among devout Hindus and builds public support for anti-Muslim policies, such as stripping the only majority-Muslim state in India of its autonomy and enacting a controversial new law preventing Muslim migrants from attaining Indian citizenship.
Trump as savior
Trump has stumbled in attempts to portray himself as personally devout, declining to name a favorite passage from the Bible and stating that he has never sought forgiveness from God for his sins.
Nevertheless, public opinion polls have consistently shown that white Christians comprise the core of Trump’s base, although there are recent signs of a dip even among this key group.
And while it is important to note that many white Christians do not support Trump, 29% of evangelicals go so far as to say they believe he is anointed by God.
Where Trump succeeds is in presenting himself as a Christian nationalist, much as Putin and Modi style themselves as the stout defenders of their countries’ dominant religions.
One way Trump achieves this end is by making statements such as this one on the campaign trail earlier this year: “We’re going to win another monumental victory for faith and family, God and country, flag and freedom.”
In their new book “Taking America Back for God,” sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry contend that many of Trump’s white Christian supporters see him as their long-awaited savior – not just the protector of traditional religion, but also the defender of a bygone way of life.
In that imagined past, white men ruled the roost, families went to church every Sunday and outsiders knew their place.A deep-rooted desire for a return to that past may have been why Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan has proved so potent. As Yale scholar Philip Gorski has argued, that phrase can be interpreted to mean “making white Christianity culturally dominant again.”
As such, we should not be surprised that in the current moment of crisis Trump is attempting to use religion to reinforce differences between his supporters and his opponents. Like Putin, he is posing as the defender of a particular version of a glorious past. And echoing Modi, he is doing this by building support through the denigration of the outsider.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-sends-letter-threatening-permanent-freeze-of-us-funding-to-who-written-for-his-base-and-to-deflect-blame/
... Trump on Monday sent a four-page letter to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, threatening to permanently freeze U.S. funding to the United Nations agency in the midst of a global pandemic that has made international cooperation as crucial as ever.
Trump’s letter, which he posted to Twitter Monday night, repeats the president’s accusations that WHO is deferential to China and says that if the organization “does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization.”
The president also alleged that WHO ignored early warnings about the spread of the coronavirus and made “grossly inaccurate or misleading” claims about the virus. Observers noted that much of Trump’s critique of WHO’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic applies to the White House’s handling of the crisis, which has been condemned as fatally slow and inadequate.
“This is a phenomenally damning letter—of the president’s own response,” tweeted HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte. “All of those early dates? Late December and January? Were known to U.S. officials and relayed to Trump. Who did nothing.”...[lancet disputes]
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meat plant so dak smithfield blames migrant workers for covid
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| *Fox & Friends* was behind Trump's deceitful tweet about an Iran order to the Navy |
Fox & Friends ran a series of reports Wednesday morning about Iran launching its first military satellite into orbit. Those reports also referenced an April 15 incident in which 11 Iranian military vessels “repeatedly conducted dangerous and harassing approaches” to U.S. Navy ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf, according to a Navy press release. After those reports, and after Donald Trump sent a series of tweets referencing other parts of the program, Trump tweeted that, "I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea." It turns out that Trump's tweet was a lie. The New York Times reported, “a tweet does not constitute a military order, and a Defense Department official said the Navy had not received any formal policy directive from Mr. Trump ordering it to change its criteria for opening fire on Iranian gunboats.” |
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Why Trump is so eager to bring back professional sports
President Donald J. Trump waves to the crowd after participating in pre-game ceremonies Saturday, Dec. 8, 2018, at the Army-Navy NCAA College football game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)]
Written by Robert Lipsyte / TomDispatch April 23, 2020
As controversies about the “reopening” of America loom over our lives, nothing seems as intrinsically irrelevant — yet possibly as critically important — as how soon major spectator sports return.
If sports don’t trump religion as the opiate of the masses, they have, until recently, been at least the background music of most of our lives. So here’s my bet on one possible side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic to put in your scorebook: if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual — or, at least, to his twisted version of the same.
That’s why he announced at a recent daily coronavirus briefing-cum-rally his eagerness to bring professional sports back quickly. Though it was Major League Baseball that he mentioned — “We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old” — thesport that truly matters to him is football, the only major mass entertainment (other than Trumpism) that endorses tribalism and toxic masculinity so flagrantly and keeps violence in vogue. Football supports Trump in its promotion of racial division, the crushing of dissent, and the spread of misinformation, inequality, and brutality.
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Trump is frantically trying to scapegoat immigrants — but his trollish attempt is laughable on its face
Amanda Marcotte / Salon
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punish china for covid?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/did-lindsey-graham-just-violate-the-14th-amendment-during-an-appearance-on-fox-news/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/heres-the-data-that-proves-americans-who-rage-against-political-correctness-are-the-most-xenophobic-and-most-likely-to-vote-trump-in-2020
no lnx
Here’s the data that shows Americans who rage against political correctness are the most xenophobic — and most likely to vote Trump
Written by Samuel L. Perry / Religion Dispatches March 24, 2020
Admittedly, Trump’s initial references to “the Chinese Virus” earlier in March seemed rather ad-hoc. Though clearly xenophobic in context and implication, it seemed that Trump was casually parroting the language of other far-Right commentators like Charlie Kirk. Within the past week, however, Trump has ramped up his labeling campaign, often going out of his way to refer to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus” in Twitter storms and White House press briefings.
Two key strategies likely drive Trump’s efforts here. Both involve distracting Americans from his own administration’s failings at dealing with the coronavirus earlier on. The first is simply to blame China, laying responsibility for America’s situation solely at their feet. The fact that a Chinese propaganda director recently suggested the virus may have originated with American soldiers who brought it to China provided the perfect (and tacitly justifiable) motivation for Trump to remind the world forcefully and repeatedly where the virus originated.
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The second factor also involves distraction from Trump’s failings, but one in which “China” is only incidental. They are merely a stand-in for all “dangerous outsiders.” By repeatedly and brazenly referring to “the Chinese Virus,” and provoking a media backlash against the xenophobic implications of his language, Trump wishes to remind his base who our internal threats are: politically correct liberals who care more about defending foreigners than they do the American people.
Though Trump has previously raged against political correctness explicitly, and indeed, campaigned on it in 2016, when it comes to this recent COVID-19 labeling campaign, other far-Right thought-leaders have been doing this for him. For example, in a March 14th interview on Fox News, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton stated, “Anyone who complains that it’s racist or xenophobic to call this virus the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan virus is a politically correct fool, and they ought not to be listened to about anything.”
And March 20th, Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Glenn Beck: “The worst thing in this pandemic virus outside of the actual illness itself of course is the political [sic] correct media still, still peddling garbage that hurts the American people.” Quoting an ABC News reporter, O’Reilly said in a whiny, mocking voice, “A lot of people think it’s racist if you call it the Chinese Virus. …It’s sickening.”
But survey data confirm that white Americans—like President Trump, Senator Tom Cotton, Bill O’Reilly, or their followers—who attack politically correct language as the enemy are in fact the most likely to hold racist or xenophobic views. In a nationally representative survey fielded in February 2020, we asked Americans to indicate how much they agreed with statements about using politically correct language. We also asked Americans for their views on refugees from the Middle East and America’s control over its Southern border.
In the first figure [left], we see that, as Americans’ agreement with the statement “Too many people are easily offended these days over language” increases, the more likely they are to believe that the federal government should do more to secure the Southern border and that Middle Eastern refugees pose a terrorist threat.
In the second figure [below, right], we see a similar trend, but in the opposite direction. The more strongly Americans disagree with the statement “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” the more likely they are to hold xenophobic views about refugees from the Middle East and to want stricter border control.
In sum: both figures show that white Americans who voice the strongest opinions against politically correct language also hold the strongest anti-immigrant attitudes.
Just as important, they are also the group most likely to plan on voting Trump in 2020.
[no graf]
The last figure [left] shows the percentage of white Americans who indicate they plan on voting Trump in 2020 by their level of agreement with our two statements regarding politically correct language. Nearly 80% of white Americans who strongly disagree that “People need to be more careful with language to avoid offending people,” or who strongly agree that “Too many people are easily offended these days over language,” intend to vote for Trump in November.
Seen in light of these data, Trump’s dual strategy is clear. By unapologetically referring to COVID-19 as “the Chinese Virus,” Trump is first able to signal to his white base that he too is disdainful of scheming, disease-ridden outsiders. But he can also intentionally provoke a backlash against his hurtful and xenophobic language, which he and his followers can dismiss as leftist “political correctness.” Trump shores up support against both a perceived external threat (immigrants) and an internal threat (liberals) with a single dangerous and offensive swipe.
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