french, david aclj

---

now a New York Times columnist, ~ trump good on rhet BS

PBS NEWSHOUR ~ STUDENTS GAZA

---

an 9 26

President Donald Trump was reportedly surprised when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll tendered his resignation last week, but he should not have been. Under the reign of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, America's military has undergone a purge, with the man who never rose above the rank of major either firing or blocking promotions for more than 80 high-ranking officials. Many of those targeted were either women or African American, leading to allegations of discrimination, but a Republican columnist argued there is an even bigger problem — Hegseth also targets competence, and therefore is putting American lives at risk.

"To maintain the stalemate against Iran, the United States is drawing resources from other, more dangerous theaters of potential conflict," New York Times columnist David French wrote on Sunday in a column titled "Pete Hegseth Is a Wrecking Ball." "There are now no active carrier battle groups in the Pacific region, for example, exactly when China has ramped up its military activities around Taiwan."

He added, "The lack of interceptors is escalating the crisis in Ukraine. Russia is able to pound Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles virtually at will, creating a critical vulnerability for the Ukrainian war effort. Last week, for example, Kyiv endured the longest sustained bombing campaign on the Ukrainian capital since the opening days of the war."

After noting how The Economist reported Putin plans on escalating his attacks in Ukraine and on NATO, French went on to say that "as long as Iran — a longstanding ally of Russia that’s closely linked to its neighbor through the Caspian Sea — remains in the fight, it can continue to deplete our interceptors to the point where it might take years to bring our stocks back to acceptable levels, even if we ramp up production at immense cost."

Along with undermining America's ability to meet its global responsibilities, French continued that "the long-term threat is to the character and competence of the armed forces. They are becoming politicized, and the politicization of a military can both destroy its combat effectiveness and turn it into an instrument of domestic oppression. If you are under the delusion that Hegseth’s purges are about competence more than loyalty — a welcome corrective to the excesses of D.E.I. programs — well then, as we say in the South, bless your heart."

In August, NYU law professor Ryan Goodman calculated that Hegseth's removal of 25 senior military officers alone cost the military "over 900 years of military experience." Elaborating on this point, fellow NYU law professor Eric Schmitt wrote that "since January 2025, the Defense Department has removed, replaced, or forced the early retirement of a remarkable concentration of operationally experienced senior officers. Among them are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Army, and the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, who concurrently serves as director of the National Security Agency.”

He concluded, “Most recently, Gen. Christopher Donahue, one of the most decorated and combat-experienced officers of his generation, has been forced out as commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and, in his NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) role, as commander of Allied Land Command. Public explanations have been sparse and, to the extent they have been offered, largely general."

Speaking with AlterNet in April, Dr. Robert Shapiro, a former top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, identified how Trump's war against Iran (which Hegseth encouraged) is also inflicting long-term damage to the United States in a different way — economically.

“Even if hostilities do not restart, the price of oil will not return to pre-Trump levels because there’s a new risk premium that they could restart at any time, increasing tanker insurance costs for example, and because oil infrastructure has been degraded, reducing supply for some time,” Shapiro told AlterNet at the time. “An Iran-controlled toll to use the Strait will produce big bucks for Iran, but its impact on world prices for oil, natural gas, helium, etc. should be minimal. Another source of economic friction will be the now-intense uncertainty about what the Trump administration will do next—in the Mideast and in scores of policies at home; and uncertainty dampens investment.”

He went on to say, “As it is, the economy was weakening before this crisis began, and these and other factors will exacerbate those downward pressures. A resolution over the next two weeks will not stop the deterioration in economic conditions.”

-=-=-=

AN 2 26

Donald Trump is planning to do everything he can to subvert the 2026 midterms and prevent Democratic victories, but according to conservative commentator David French, there is a new bill in Congress that stands a chance of stopping his quest for "permanent power."

Writing for the New York Times Thursday morning, French reiterated his past warning that voters should not expect the midterms to be "free or fair" under Trump's watch. Indeed, he noted that the recent FBI raid on an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump's assertion on a right-wing podcast that election control ought to be "nationalized" as clear evidence of Trump's intentions.

"President Trump has made it clear — very clear — that he is set to accept only one outcome: MAGA wins," French wrote. "Any other outcome is proof that the Democrats cheated."

French said that while anything that might properly stop Trump's election plans "feels impossible," he highlighted a portion of the U.S. legal code, 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, which "gives you the right to sue for damages when state or local government officials deprive you of 'any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws,'" including your voting rights. While federal officials like Trump and his allies are immune from being targeted by this law, there is a bill currently before Congress that aims to change this.

"In November, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representatives Hank Johnson and Jamie Raskin reintroduced a bill called the Bivens Act," French explained. "It’s remarkably simple. It would amend Section 1983 by stating that officials “of the United States” can be held liable on the same basis as officials of any state. That’s it. That’s the bill. And it’s worth shutting down the Department of Homeland Security to get it passed."

He continued: "If the bill passes and Trump signs it, he would be able to pardon his cronies if they commit federal crimes, but not relieve them from potentially immense civil liability. Money judgments don’t present the same deterrent as prison time, but they’re consequential nonetheless... Yes, a corrupt president may pardon the crooks and cronies who act on his behalf, but a modest change in the law could give them pause. Violating civil rights should carry a profound cost, and the message to the Trump administration should be simple and clear: Protect the integrity of the election, or we will make you pay."

---

AN 126

One prominent conservative writer is arguing that the White House's response to the fatal shooting of 37 year-old U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota last weekend marks a turning point in how President Donald Trump's administration views its relationship with the law.

In a Monday conversation hosted the New York Times' Matthew Rose, conservative columnist David French – speaking alongside the Times' Lydia Polgreen and Michelle Goldberg — asserted that Pretti's death is merely the latest escalation from a president who has continued to push the legal envelope. French cautioned that Americans are collectively "witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials."

"The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States," he wrote. "The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption."

French — a retired major in the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General Corps — went on to observe that Trump was "exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability." He posited that the American legal system has been shaped by years of belief that the federal government is a rational, good-faith actor while people who criticize the government are presumed to be "almost always wrong." Now, in Trump's second term, French warned that Americans are "tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies" with little recourse.

"The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law," he wrote. "The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic."

Rose prodded French on his recent argument that the United States during Trump's second term is similar to the system of government described by Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel as "the dual state." Fraenkel's theory was that German citizens under the Nazi regime simultaneously lived in "a capitalist economy governed by stable laws" and under a brutal dictator who carried out heinous acts of genocide. French commented that while the "the dual state" under Trump is "not to the same extent as the Nazis," Fraenkel's theory was "still relevant."

"The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation," French said. "But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law."

---

AN 12 25

In his New York Times column and frequent appearances on MS NOW, journalist David French isn't shy about attacking President Donald Trump from the right. Like other Never Trump conservatives — from attorney George Conway to MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace to The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson — French believes that Trump and the MAGA movement have been terrible for the GOP and terrible for conservatism.

But French examines MAGA's belief system in his December 14 column for the Times. MAGA, according to French, believes that Trump is fighting to save the United States from a "death spiral" — and that combination of anger and "despair" is one of the things that makes MAGA and the "New Right" so dangerous.

"In this telling," French explains, "the 'strong men' of the American past had created a glorious and powerful nation. Our peace and prosperity had spawned a weak and feckless generation that had squandered America's strength and cultural identity, and now, it was time for hard men to arise to reclaim what was lost. This view of America's glorious past is indispensable to understanding MAGA's appeal — and the extremism of MAGA youth. After all, the slogan, 'Make America Great Again' implies the loss of greatness."

French continues, "This sense of loss provides the intellectual and — crucially — emotional foundation of the right's authoritarian turn. It's hard to overstate how much the New Right idealizes America's past. Online spaces are full of memes and images, for example, of families from the 1950s in idyllic settings, often with the caption, 'This is what they took from you.'"

The New Right, French observes, typically "contrasts its vision of a glorious past with a miserable present."

"Now, combine that hyperbole with smartphones and social media, and you've got a recipe for a nonstop sense of alarm," the conservative New York Times columnist warns. "I can open my Twitter feed and see video after video of outrageous conduct, and no amount of telling myself that these are isolated incidents in a nation of over 340 million people can blunt their emotional impact."

*David French's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

---

AN 10 25

Conservative journalist David French, in his New York Times columns, has often stressed that religion — including Christianity — plays a valuable role in American life. But in his October 16 column, the Never Trump conservative offers a grim critique on the state of U.S. Christianity almost nine months into President Donald Trump's second term.

French, on one hand, laments that many Americans are still turned off to religion in 2025. But he also fears that MAGA converts to evangelical Christianity are embracing a mean-spirited view of faith.

"Despite what you may have heard about the renewal of interest in religion in America," French explains, "we are not experiencing a true revival, at least not yet. Instead, America is closer to a religious revolution, and the difference between revolution and revival is immensely important for the health of our country — and of the Christian church in America. At this point, it's almost beyond debate that something important is stirring in American religion. There is too much data — and too many anecdotes — to ignore."

French argues that "as a Christian who has long lamented the decline of church attendance in the United States," he "should be very happy about" a growing interest in religion on college campuses. But he is worried about MAGA's role in these conversions.

"There is darkness right alongside the light," the conservative columnist warns. "Christians stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Christians have believed and applauded dark prophecies that compare Donald Trump to Jehu, a murderous Old Testament king who commanded the slaughter of the previous queen, Jezebel, and had the severed heads of the previous king's sons brought to him in baskets. Incredibly, Christians are attacking what they call the 'sin of empathy,' warning fellow believers against identifying too much with, say, illegal immigrants, gay people or women who seek abortions. Empathy, in this formulation, can block moral and theological clarity. What's wrong is wrong, and too much empathy will cloud your soul."

IFrame Content

French continues, "There was the ReAwaken America tour that crisscrossed America during Joe Biden's presidency, during which angry Christians called for vengeance at sold-out venues from coast to coast. And, as I wrote last month, the (Charlie) Kirk memorial itself mixed calls for love — most notably, Erika Kirk's decision to forgive her husband's killer — with the Trump administration's explicit hate."

French finds the us-versus-them rhetoric of MAGA evangelicals especially troubling.

"Revival begins with the people proclaiming, by word and deed, 'I have sinned,'" French writes. "MAGA Christianity has a different message. It looks at American culture and declares, 'You have sinned.' And it doesn't stop there. It also says, 'We will defeat you.' In its most extreme forms, it also says, 'We will rule over you.' That's not revival; it’s revolution, a religious revolution that seeks to overthrow one political order and replace it with another — one that has echoes of the religious kingdoms of ages past."

*David French's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

---

an 9 25

During a Sunday, September 21 memorial for Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, a speech from his widow, Erika Kirk, was followed by a speech from President Donald Trump — who told attendees that unlike her, "I hate my opponents."

The following day on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough discussed Trump's call for revenge with one of his guests: New York Times columnist and fellow Never Trump conservative David French, who warned that the obsession with revenge is one of the things white evangelical Christians like about Trump. VID]

, a former GOP congressman, "You have, on the one hand, a church that will rise and rightly applaud the incredible words of Erika Kirk and then turn around and happily go to the polls not in spite of Trump's vengeance, but because of Trump's sense of vengeance….. If you've been paying attention to American religion and American politics over the last decade, it wouldn't surprise you to see that Erika Kirk speech and to hear the applause and then to hear the Donald Trump speech and hear the laughter and applause to that as well — and realize that, in many ways, that is what politics is doing to American Christianity."

French continued, "It is creating this face of vengeance. Because Americans know he has the power to work his vengeance because of the church. It is the church that put him into office — the evangelical church — more than any other American constituency. And so, what we watched unfold in front of us — when he spoke like that, this wasn't in contradiction of what so many Christians wanted out of their president here. It is exactly why so many Christians voted for this president…. That is the frustrating complexity of what is happening in this moment."

Scarborough, who was raised Baptist in the South, argued that the vengeance theme of Trump's speech was a major contrast to what former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) — a vehement critic of Trump — said about the U.S. president.

IFrame Content

Scarborough told French, "This takes me back to practicing Catholic Nancy Pelosi saying that she prayed for Donald Trump every day. As Jesus commanded us in Matthew 5, you love your enemies. You pray for those who persecute you."

---

an ah 7 25

With the Jeffrey Epstein controversy continuing to dominate headlines, President Donald Trump is using much of the rhetoric he used during Russiagate back in 2016 and 2017 as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Trump is accusing the mainstream media of pushing "fake news," railing against "the deep state," and repeatedly using the word "hoax." The president is also describing himself as the victim of a "witch hunt," a phrase he used during his two impeachments as well as when he was facing four criminal indictments.

Never Trump conservative David French, in his July 31 column for the New York Times, emphasizes that Trump and his allies are responding to the "ongoing Epstein saga by playing one of MAGA's greatest hits: the claim that Trump was the victim of a witch hunt, that the establishment attempted to destroy him even before he began his first term."

"The (Trump) Administration's claims about the Russia investigation are designed to alter our understanding of history, to foster MAGA’s fake narrative of Trump and MAGA as perpetual victims of a maliciously corrupt 'deep state,'" French explains. "In fact, the response to the Russia story provided the template for how MAGA has responded to nearly every Trump scandal. And once you recognize the pattern, you can see it play out time and time again. It comes in four distinct steps."

IFrame Content

Those "steps," according to French, are: (1) "redefine the scandal on the terms most favorable to Trump," (2) "lie relentlessly," (3) "ignore genuine concerns," and (4) "reverse the villains."

"Trump has run this same playbook for more than eight years," French argues. "Whether he was facing impeachment in 2019 over charges of threatening to hold back aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine investigated the Biden family or facing impeachment again over his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the pattern is the same. It has worked on Republicans every single time. It works because he's telling them what they want to hear: Trump is not corrupt; his critics are."

French continues, "But for the first time since he announced his first campaign in June 2015, Trump's team has told his base something many definitely did not want to hear — and very much did not expect: that the Epstein scandal is less expansive than they thought, that there was nothing to see here. He has been flailing ever since. So it's no surprise that he turned back to the 'Russia hoax.' It was the first significant scandal of his administration, and the fight over the (Robert) Mueller investigation helped bond Trump to his base. But the real Russia hoax is the idea that there was nothing to investigate."

*David French's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

---

an 6 25

During the June 7-8 weekend, major media outlets in the United States shifted their focus from what had been their biggest story a few days earlier — President Donald Trump's bitter feud with Tesla/SpaceX leader Elon Musk — to the tensions in Downtown Los Angeles, which has been rocked by large protests in response to immigration raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

Trump, according to California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, crossed a dangerous line when he ordered 2000 California National Guardian troops to the area. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is threatening to deploy 500 active-duty U.S. Marines.

California National Guard troops, Trump's critics say, shouldn't be ordered in response to the protests by anyone but Newsom — and only if the California government decides it is necessary.

One of Trump's critics on the right is conservative New York Times columnist David French.

IFrame Content

In his June 8 column, French points to the unrest in L.A. as an example of how dangerously unstable the United States has become.

"It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump Administration is spoiling for a fight on America's streets," the Never Trump conservative warns. "On Saturday, (June 7),after a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests degenerated into violence, the administration reacted as if the country were on the brink of war. The violence was unacceptable. Civil disobedience is honorable; violence is beyond the pale. But so far, thankfully, the violence has been localized and, crucially, well within the capacity of state and city officials to manage."

French notes that Newsom described Trump's actions as a "serious breach of state sovereignty" and that California "possesses immense resources to deal with urban unrest."

"If the (Trump) Administration, in its sole discretion, believes that this first, limited deployment is insufficient, then it will escalate," French warns. "It will shout 'Insurrection!' and 'Migrant invasion!' to justify more military control and perhaps the invocation of the Insurrection Act. As I wrote before, the Insurrection Act’s dangerously broad language gives the president all the legal authority he needs to put tens of thousands of troops in the nation’s streets…. It’s too early to declare a constitutional crisis, and in any case, debating the label we attach to any new event can distract us from focusing fully on the event itself."

French continues, "But each new day brings us fresh evidence of a deeply troubling trend: America is no longer a stable country, and it is growing less stable by the day."

*David French's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

---

AN 5 25

YEAH BUT

Columnist David French knows the Democratic Party has a "man problem" with young males pushing Trump and MAGA over the finish line in the last election. But the party’s $20 million proposal to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality” in the growing manosphere is a waste, he says, because the roots of the manosphere are about “deep personal need,” not politics.

“You can’t write a history of the manosphere without acknowledging that it was a response to a genuine crisis,” reports French in the New York Times.

Of course men are still unquestionably at the top of the American pyramid, French concedes. American boardrooms are still mostly male, however the “vast majority” of U.S. men are “falling behind women at a startling rate.”

More girls are enrolled in college than boys, and their G.P.A.s are higher, while more boys are getting suspended. Boys also commit suicide at a much higher rate than girls. A higher percentage of them suffer from mental illness, and they’re roughly twice as likely to be diagnosed with adulthood-derailing A.D.H.D. or autism.

IFrame Content

“At the same time, there’s considerable evidence that fatherlessness has a terrible impact on young men. In other words, boys have a desperate need for male role models and mentors,” writes French. “Enter the manosphere.”

They may be seizing power in the White House, but the manosphere’s legion of writers, podcasters and influencers didn’t evolve from a political strategy, French says. They arose in response to a “genuine void in many young men’s hearts.” Andrew Tate, despite facing 21 new charges of rape and human trafficking in the U.K., sells love and affection to his male audience.

“‘I like you,” is the message. ‘I want you to live a good life. Let me show you how.’”

But the manosphere preaches this while celebrating aggression and defiance as a form of strength and moral courage. They defy the “woke establishment” without realizing anti-left (or anti-feminist) “is not the same thing” as “pro-male.” And they don’t realize misogyny “should be anathema to any truly virtuous definition of masculinity.”

That’s why you have personalities like Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan, Dana White and Trump at the Republican National Convention, celebrating MAGA masculinity, he said.

“But how many fathers want their sons to grow up to be like those men?” French asks. “They’re successful, certainly, but Kid Rock has a sex tape and faced an assault charge for a fight in a Nashville strip club,” while White was caught on camera slapping his wife.

“And Donald Trump is, well, Donald Trump.”

French admits MAGA excess provides an opportunity, “but it’s an opportunity for civil society far more than it is for a political party.”

“America doesn’t need a left-wing version of Joe Rogan,” French argues. “What it needs is our parents, pastors, teachers and coaches to fill the void in young men’s hearts. Our sons should not have to turn to books or podcasts or social media to hear this simple and powerful message: I like you. I want you to live a good life. Let me show you how.”

Read the full New York Times report here.

---

hmmn

an 3 25

In the 2024, voters who helped put Donald Trump back in the White House ranged from hardcore MAGA Republicans to swing voters and independents — some of them 2020 Joe Biden voters — who blamed the Biden Administration for inflation. The economy was a major concern of Biden-to-Trump voters, and the term "buyer's remorse" is being used in connection with swing voters and independents who now regret voting for Trump and are worried about steep new tariffs or possible cuts to Social Security.

But diehard MAGA voters have no regrets about voting for Trump. In a conversation published by the New York Times' opinion section on March 21, four conservative columnists — David Brooks, David French, Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat — lay out some reasons why those voters continue to be diehard Trump supporters.

The writers aren't promoting Trump's policies during the conversation — French, in fact, is very much a Never Trump conservative — but rather, are explaining the president's unending appeal to his hardcore MAGA base.

Brooks cited **:{"brokenism" as a key reason for their support. The columnist describes "brokenism" as "the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down."}:

Brooks told his Times colleagues, "Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption."

French, who is a scathing critic of Trump but also has major complaints about the left, interjected, "In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there's a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans, sadly, want their opponents to suffer. They're actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the 'deep state' or RINOs. So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who's being disrupted really matters — and if it's the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain."

French added, "Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms. Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire."

According to Brooks, diehard MAGA voters enjoy seeing him target institutions they feel excluded from.

Brooks told French, Douthat and Stephens, "I'd offer up one more word for consideration: 'exclusion.' Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions. Trump has gone after these institutions big time — the universities, the Department of Education, the State Department. Of course, the MAGA crowd feels justified revenge."

Douthat alluded to the fact that Trump's strongest support continues to be within the MAGA movement.

Douthat told his colleagues, "First, I would stress that Trump is not terribly popular, and undoubtedly will become less so if the stock market trends down and recession fears mount. He has a commanding position within his party, but even at his apotheosis, his approval ratings barely got over 50 percent. Second, Americans lived through the first Trump term, when sky-is-falling rhetoric was commonplace, but the average American did not experience a crisis until COVID hit."

*Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).

===

an 7 24

Despite facing three criminal indictments, Donald Trump campaigned on a law-and-order message during the 2024 Republican National Convention. Now, with President Joe Biden having dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Trump may be up against a candidate with a long resumé as a prosecutor — first as San Francisco district attorney, then as California state attorney general.

Never Trump conservative David French examines Trump's law-and-order promises in a scathing New York Times column published on July 21 — emphasizing that he promises "peace and stability" despite a history of causing "violence" and "chaos."

"If past performance is any indicator of future results," French warns, "Americans should brace themselves for more chaos if Trump wins. The most egregious example of Republican deception centered around crime. The theme of the second night of the convention was 'Make America Safe Again.' Yet the public mustn't forget that the murder rate skyrocketed under Trump."

French continues, "According to the Pew Research Center, 'The year-over-year increase in the U.S. murder rate in 2020 was the largest since at least 1905 — and possibly ever.' That's a human catastrophe, and it's one that occurred on Trump’s watch. Republicans want to erase 2020 from the American mind, but we judge presidents on how they handle crises."

The Never Trump conservative argues that it is "particularly rich for" Trump to campaign as "the candidate of order" even though the "crime rate rose during his presidency and is plunging during Joe Biden's."

French notes that Democrats have been the aggressive ones from a foreign policy standpoint, adding that "it's the Democrats who are facing down Russian aggression."

"Trump wants you to be a goldfish," French laments. "He wants you to empty your mind of the past so that he can fill it with his own 'alternative facts.' The Republican National Convention was one long exercise in creating memories of a Trump term that never existed."

French adds, "The real Trump term was chaotic and dangerous from start to finish, and if Americans' memories don't improve soon, the voters who seek peace and stability will instead bring us violence and tears."

===

AN 5 24

The GOP over the last decade, Reuters noted in March, has transformed into a "Republican electorate that is more isolationist, more skeptical of globalization, more suspicious of the electoral process and more likely to view Democrats as a threat than it was when former President [Donald] Trump launched his first run for the White House in 2015."

University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst J. Miles Coleman said the stark changes "reflect an electorate that has become more populist, both feeding off of Trump's populism and influencing the broader party." Now, he added, "It's hard to see the (party) going back to nominating Mitt Romney-type candidates."

In a Tuesday, May 7 op-ed published by MSNBC, columnist Charlie Sykes discusses the right-wing's shift through the eyes of conservative ghost writer Nancy French.

French's new book, Ghosted: An American Story, according to Sykes, is "a powerful and horrifying account of how a once fringe movement, the alt right, has come to occupy the central seat of the Republican Party."

The book reveals "the vicious racist attacks against her and her family after she and her husband, David French, a well-known conservative commentator who is now a New York Times columnist, broke with Trump," the Bulwark founder notes.

Sykes writes:

*In late 2015, online trolls seized on the existence of their daughter Naomi, who the Frenches had adopted from Ethiopia, as an attack tactic. In her book, French recalls the moment she saw the picture online: a photoshopped image of 7-year-old Naomi “in a gas chamber, with Donald Trump — wearing a Nazi uniform — pulling a lethal gas lever.”

*There was more. Other online trolls photoshopped the girl’s face onto images of enslaved people and identified her with racial slurs that don’t bear repeating here.

French writes in her book, "The alt right tried to inflict as much personal pain as they could on us, in the most intimate ways possible. These radicalized Trump supporters harassed us, mocked us, maligned us, and believed we should lose our jobs, and — at least according to our email inboxes — our lives."

"This casual racism and brutality was not pushed by a fringe element,” French emphasizes. "It had become the main political strategy of many conservatives. These people spouting conspiracy theories and shouting invectives were now embedded, wrapped up, and intertwined with mainstream Republicans."

Sykes notes:

In 2019, the Trump-supporting magazine American Greatness published a blatantly racist poemtitled 'Cuck Elegy,' which accused 'parasites' of surrendering to the 'mocha-skinned' and 'low-life reprobates.'* In case the references were too subtle, the magazine accompanied the poem with a photo of David and Naomi French.

The same year, "the Aspen Institute featured a panel that included both French and Christopher Buskirk, the editor and publisher of American Greatness, titled'Can the Republican Party Survive the Alt Right?' (In the spirit of transparency, I helped moderate that panel.)," Sykes emphasizes. "French writes that Aspen’s decision to invite the publisher of American Greatness to talk about the alt-right 'was akin to asking an arsonist to give advice on putting out fires,' adding, 'but they did not ask me for my advice.'"

*Sykes' full op-ed is available at this link.

===

---

an 8 22

Using an essay he wrote explaining that Christian political ethics have become extremely muddied during theDonald Trump years as a springboard, conservative writer David French appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" where he dropped the hammer on evangelicals who have excused the former president's transgressions for their own pursuit of political power.

Speaking with host Willie Geist, French expanded on his essay where he wrote, "American political culture is a toxic, hyperpartisan, corrupt, and increasingly violent mess," before adding, "The longer I live the more convinced I am that our Christian political ethic is upside down. On a bipartisan basis, the church has formed its members to be adamant about policies that are difficult and contingent and flexible about virtues that are clear and mandatory. "

"In 2016 and '17, David," host Geist prompted. "I know you heard this, when you'd ask about Donald Trump, 'How can you support a man who is so cruel, profane, and pays off porn stars after having affairs while his wife is pregnant?' The laundry list is long and they say, 'we are electing a president, not a saint, he is going to stand up for us and our way of life.' Boy, has that been exposed in the last few years."

"Yeah. I always hated that saying because no one was arguing that we are electing saints. But there's a world of difference between holding the standard of a saint and no standard at all," the author replied.

"This is what has happened, there is now no standard at all," he continued. "One of the things that I do in the piece is I contrast the movement that is dominating, for example, the MAGA right with the civil rights movement, which was Christian to its core. It was thoroughly Christian and confronting an injustice as grotesque as Jim Crow, and confronted it with an ethic of non-violence, with love and grace. I quote John Lewis in the piece to that effect."

"Here, we have a MAGA movement that is proclaiming some sort of national emergency," he elaborated. "It is nothing on the scale of Jim Crow it's not within shouting distance of that. Yet, they have utterly abandoned, in many ways, even the most basic requirements of human decency. Again, in their interactions with each other, interactions with political opponents, in their interactions with truth. This is turning that Christian political ethic utterly upside down."

Watch the video below or at this link.

---

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/chris-buskirk-supposed-be-respectable-face-new-peter-thiel-backed-far-right

when The New York Times disclosed the existence of a new multipronged right-wing project, the Rockbridge Network, backed by multibillionaire Peter Thiel in April, the paper named only one person with an official position in the new organization: its founder, Chris Buskirk. Little is known about the new venture, and Buskirk himself remains relatively obscure, although he maintains considerable access to mainstream media outlets.

In reporting on the new organization, the Times didn’t mention that the website Buskirk edits and publishes, the far-right and nationalist outlet American Greatness, is home to an array of January 6 conspiracy theories, supplemented with defenses of military coups and a combination of thinly coded and occasionally overt racism. In general,American Greatness aims to stay just barely inside the mainstream discourse, typically avoiding the kind of open white nationalism that can relegate an outlet to being rejected by legacy right-wing media.

Given the near-total secrecy around Rockbridge, it’s difficult to know what its exact plans are, but the Times reported that the group is planning to spend “more than $30 million on conservative media, legal, policy and voter registration projects, among other initiatives.” It’s not hard to determine what kinds of candidates it’ll back — both Thiel and Buskirk are supporters of far-right Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. As for its media ambitions, the group budgeted $8 million in 2021 towards the goal of creating a “new conservative ecosystem.” It’s not clear who got that money, but Thiel is rumored to have funded the efforts of a cadre of right-wing nationalist media figures. Whether that was through his foundation or Buskirk and Rockbridge is unclear. Regardless, Buskirk is an admirer of the late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and the best window into the types of projects the organization is likely to support — or is already supporting behind the scenes — is probably his site, American Greatness.

As the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, riot prepares to present to the American people, starting this week, facts and evidence about the events of that day and those leading up to it, the need to examine the role Buskirk’s website has played in spreading misinformation about the attempted coup is especially urgent – particularly since Buskirk’s money-man, Thiel, wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel also has close ties with figures who openly opine about their anti-democratic ideologies, and it's worth considering that one of Thiel’s main interests in Buskirk may be his site’s attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Buskirk himself serves two audiences. As publisher of American Greatness, he’s the ringmaster of a motley collection of firebrands and trolls looking to find how far they can push the concept of “nationalism” before it crosses into something more openly ugly.In his own writing and public speaking, he’s not a provocateur but a kind of human Botox that smooths out the rough edges of the far-right, presenting its palatable if slightly anesthetized face. “‘Build the wall’ … — that’s like a shorthand version of saying ‘let’s have a more sensible immigration policy,’” he implausibly in an interview with Charlie Kirk in 2020.

Unlike many of the writers he publishes, he presents as a fairly mainstream figure. He is a contributing writer to the Times op-ed page, though he hasn’t published a piece there in over a year. He has written for The Washington Post and has appeared numerous times on PBS and NPR. In 2019, he spoke on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, criticizing mainstream outlets for writing profiles of the white nationalist Richard Spencer. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to give oxygen to that sort of thing,” Buskirk said. It’s a fair point, if a bit misleading, because his site has also provided a platform to Spencer.More generally, American Greatness has given oxygen to a host of far-right, anti-democratic ideas.

Buskirk in his own words

Buskirk sees himself as a champion of the working man as a household provider, albeit one calcified by Fordist-era nostalgia. And while he will regularly rail against “elites,” he has no problem with billionaires like Thiel as such. “The problem isn’t that rich people are getting richer. It’s that almost everyone else is, at best, running to stand still,” Buskirk wrote in December 2020.

Because Buskirk is committed to preserving capitalism while adopting an anti-elitist pose, his analysis is often superficial. He has railed against “globalism,” which he argues “wants two things above all others: consumers and cheap labor.” There is, of course, an economic mode of production and accompanying ideology that demands cheap labor and the constant flow of commodities; it is called capitalism.

Buskirk’s anti-“globalism” and facile pro-worker affect is a common strain among reactionary nationalists across the world, alliances Buskirk and company hope to deepen. Toward that end, he dined with far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2019, and he has referred to Italy’s far-right politician Matteo Salvini as a “charismatic” candidate with “powerful ideas.” Salvini is virulently anti-migrant and often makes barely hidden allusions to fascist tropes or ideas. The neo-fascist group Forza Nuova supported Salvini as well.

When Buskirk approaches the right’s more extreme ideas, it’s often with a degree of plausible deniability, carefully calibrating his message to satisfy readers of his site without losing access to mainstream outlets like NPR or PBS. He recently retweeted an endorsement of “Christian nationalism,” which one scholar of the far-right has described as a way to “cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism.” Similarly, in 2018 he quoted a piece he’d published pushing a toned-down version of the racist “great replacement” theory....twt]

his belief in the theory is to be expected, given his admiration of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the person most responsible for mainstreaming it. Carlson “is the most articulate spokesman for a set of principles and priorities that are important to middle America, but anathema to the bipartisan ruling class,” Buskirk wrote in 2019.

Buskirk hasn’t appeared on Carlson’s show often, but in one segment ostensibly about how conservatives can protect the environment in which Buskirk was a guest, Carlson pushed eco-fascistic talking points. “Crowded places are ugly places. I mean, you could make a really strong case for restricting immigration on environmental grounds. We've made that case on the show,” Carlson said. Buskirk did not contradict or challenge Carlson, which is not surprising given that Buskirk had previously exploited a family’s tragedy to argue for lowering immigration levels.

In 2018, the death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts became an anti-immigrant propaganda tool for the xenophobic right, because her killer had entered the country without authorization. “The way many people see it, if a foreign national, apparently in the country illegally, kills an American citizen, it underscores the urgency of Trump’s message of putting Americans first,” Buskirk wrote in the Times, passing off the xenophobia off on to “many people” rather than owning it himself. (Tibbetts’ family asked the right to stop using her death to demonize immigrants.) His writers don’t bother with the act, though. On June 1, Daniel Oliver asked whether immigrants, specifically Muslims, know how to “behave in a ‘civilized’ society?”

Like most in the Trump wing of the conservative movement, Buskirk supported Judge Roy Moore in the Alabama Republican Senate primary in 2017. After multiple women came forward to report that Moore sexually assaulted them, including one who was 14 at the time of the incident, Buskirk continued to back Moore. Buskirk dismissed Moore’s behavior as “actions while he was single” and suggested the candidate was “someone who appears to have lived a life of personal probity since then.” Moore was in his early 30s during the alleged incidents.

That wasn’t the first time Buskirk had downplayed abusive behavior toward women. After tapes of Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” were revealed in October 2016, Buskirk dismissed the recording as “comments about the women he [Trump] tried to have sex with,” writing that the occasion “offered the GOP’s prissy moralizers yet another opening to leap on top of a soap box.” Most importantly for Buskirk, “Trump’s lewd and crude comments 11 years ago do not diminish the dangers of a Clinton election in 30 days” (emphasis original).

As for Buskirk’s ambitions with the Rockbridge media project, his praise of Roger Ailes may provide clues. “It wasn’t until Ailes built Fox News into a powerhouse that broke the monopoly of Left-liberal legacy media on television news that he became public enemy number one,” Buskirk wrote. “It’s a role he seems to have relished.”

“Ailes was energetic, ambitious, unorthodox, creative, brilliant, charming, disarming, and a bunch of other things that made all kinds of different people yell, at critical moments, ‘Get Ailes!’” Buskirk gushed. “I didn’t know him, but I wish I had.”

American Greatness and the January 6 attempted coup

American Greatness, and specifically senior writer Julie Kelly, is one of the key sources of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the January 6 insurrection. Kelly is a regular guest on right-wing media outlets, including appearing at least 17 times on Fox News to discuss the riot and its aftermath. Her purported investigations have propelled much of the manufactured confusion about that day.

Kelly has referred to January 6 as an “inside job,” suggested it was a false flag, and pushed a conspiracy theory that the FBI planted pipe bombs at the offices of the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee the day before the riot. [vid?

July 2021, Kelly tweeted that Washington, D.C., police officer Michael Fanone – who was testifying before Congress about the January 6 attack at the time – was acrisis actor. She said that prosecution of the insurrectionists is an attempt to “silence political dissent,” and said it is “encouraging” that Republican voters “do not think that Joe Biden was fairly elected in 2020.” Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander praised Kelly, along with Tucker Carlson, as “patriots that are doing great work out there.”

Buskirk is a consistent champion of Kelly, calling her “indispensable,” and although he typically stays away from outright election denial, he walks up to the line. One day after the 2020 election, Buskirk tweeted in support of a “protect the vote” rally in Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the states Trump’s allies targeted in their effort to change the election results. In a recent interview on America First with Sebastian Gorka, he said a ridiculous new Dinesh D’Souza film about the election was “very, very well-researched” and “the evidence it presents, I think, is conclusive.” His site took a similar line, running a piece with the headline “2000 Mules Documentary Provides Compelling Evidence That 2020 Election Was Stolen.” The Washington Post, on the other hand, captured the reality of the film: “‘2000 Mules’ offers the least convincing election-fraud theory yet.”

Beyond Kelly, American Greatness regularly runs pieces that downplay January 6 and has accused liberals of being the real coup-plotters. Immediately after the election, the site published a conspiracy theory-addled piece alleging voting irregularity with Dominion Voting Systems, which was completely unsubstantiated at the time and remains so today. (Dominion sued Trump-affiliated lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for making similar claims.)

John Eastman, whom the New York Times recently described as “the architect of a strategy to overturn the 2020 election,” has written for American Greatness, including about his own role in attempting to keep Trump in power. In a piece headlined “Trying to Prevent Illegal Conduct From Deciding an Election Is Not Endorsing a ‘Coup,’” Eastman repeated the lie that there was significant illegal voting in 2020. He also argued that a legal memo he wrote, outlining various other ways the electoral vote could be certified in Trump’s favor, was simply advice on how to defend the legitimacy of the election. “The memo outlined ways to ensure election integrity in the face of significant and demonstrable violations of state election law,” Eastman wrote in his own defense.

Far from how he portrays himself in his American Greatness blog, Eastman appears to have been intimately and proactively involved in overturning the election results, including working behind the scenes to get a Pennsylvania legislator to “strip Mr. Biden of his win in that state by applying a mathematical equation to accepting the validity of mail ballots, which were most heavily used by Democrats during the pandemic.”

In reality, there was never any evidence of voter fraud that could change the outcome of the election. In March, a federal judge concluded that Trump and Eastman probably committed felonies in their pursuit of overturning the election, which he referred to as “a coup in search of a legal theory.” According to Judge David Carter’s findings, Eastman participated in two meetings in the immediate run-up to January 6 “explicitly tied to persuading Vice President Pence to disrupt the joint session of Congress.”

Others with direct ties to Trump’s effort to overturn the election have also written for the site. American Greatness has published Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was recently subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee because, the committee said, she “promoted false claims of election fraud to members of Congress.” She was on a phone call when Trump tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “‘find’ enough votes to reverse his loss there,” according to the New York Times.

There’s also no shortage of hyperbole and exaggeration in American Greatness pieces regarding the aftermath of the insurrection and subsequent prosecutions. “American conservatives are, right now, on a course for being every bit as ostracized and alienated from broader society as Jews were in the years leading up to Nazi Germany,” wrote Eric Lendrum. He added that January 6 defendants were being abused by prison guards because of “their race and political beliefs.” Two defendants were, in Lendrum’s telling, “forced to undergo political indoctrination from judges and prosecutors” when they “were ordered by the courts to declare that Joe Biden was legitimately elected, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

And when American Greatness isn’t whipping up conspiratorial frenzies or allowing coup-plotters to rewrite their own narrative, it just does straight revisionism. “The immense and justified outrage of President Trump and his 75 million followers never led to violence or illegality and the gathering in Washington on January 6 demonstrated solidarity with the outgoing president,” wrote Conrad Black, in March 2021.

American Greatness’ bigotry

American Greatness generally eschews open racism in favor of barely coded dog whistles, but not always. One of the site’s most overtly racist pieces was a poem called Cuck Elegy. The anonymous poem was published after “Never Trump” conservative David Frenchconfronted Buskirk about harassment he’d received from Kelly regarding comments French’s wife had made about Justice Brett Kavanaugh.Separately from Kelly, French had been subjected to racist harassment from alt-right trolls regarding his Black adopted daughter, suggesting that the child was the product of French’s wife sleeping with Black men.Kelly was not implicated in that harassment, but she had alluded to it in a tweet to French. Shortly after French confronted Buskirk about Kelly’s harassment, American Greatness published Cuck Elegy and included a photo of French with the post. The piece has since been removed from the site, but a tweet from the official American Greatness account promoting it is still up.[aud]

far more common on the site are familiar complaints against wokeness and claims that anti-racism efforts are the real racism. The headline of one piece referred to Juneteenth as “George Floyd’s Critical Race Holiday.” The subheading elaborated that the decision to make the day a federal holiday is an “enormous win for the racism industrial complex.” The piece called the holiday an act of “reifying unjustified contemporary black grievance” and suggested it “could at least be combined with Martin Luther King Day.” Another argued that anti-racism is simply “thinly veiled anti-white hate.”

Apocalyptic visions of armed Black people are common on the site as well. “The African American militants who were allowed by the Democratic big-city mayors to ransack urban America all summer and were rewarded for their murder, vandalism, and looting with the defamation and defunding of the nation’s urban police forces, are agitating and threatening with redoubled vigor,” wrote Conrad Black, in March 2021. He added, “Many of the great anti-Trump newsrooms are being overrun by belligerent white-hating minorities.”

Another recurring theme is writers lamenting a perceived deficiency in Black culture. “Unfortunately, American blacks were made to think that because of landmark legislation [of the civil rights era], their major socio-economic problems could be solved through direct political action—a disastrous misconception,” wrote Paul Gottfried. “There could be no substitute for communal cooperation, hard work, and the maintenance of the family bonds that existed in the black society that I observed as a child.” He added that the Voting Rights Act has resulted in “a radicalized black electorate that has empowered the racially divisive, antiwhite Congressional Black Caucus.” Another piece enumerated the “pathologies of inner-city black culture,” including: “fatherlessness, crime, nihilistic alienation, and the exaltation of thuggery.”

Variations on white pride abound as well. A post written by Jeremy Carl argued that Democrats have “attacked, on a relentless and increasingly hysterical basis, white Americans, who as the overwhelming majority population, were the primary developers of America’s cultural, intellectual, and political heritage.” Carl went on to echo sentiment from the white supremacist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which called for the creation of a white ethnostate in the American West and Pacific Northwest. “We must begin to relocate physically to welcoming local geographies and rebuild our capacity for independent action by creating parallel institutions to the existing corrupted ones,” he argued. Another piece, dripping with resentment, argued that the “media and elite-driven” message is “white America will always be guilty and white America can never put the past behind it.”

The site is often virulently anti-trans as well. A recent post about a fascist attack on a drag show in Dallas used the bigoted term “transvestite” to refer to a drag queen. Buskirk himself called the drag performers “evil people” who were “coming after kids,” arguing “there is almost nothing that can be done that is over the line to stop this.” Sean Ross Callaghan used the deliberately offensive term “transexuals” in a post in 2021. Another discussed “the evil of children’s transgenderism,” and yet another focused on “the insanity of transgenderism.”

These are the arguments that Buskirk is happy to feed with oxygen. He has the backing of Thiel and other multimillionaires and at least some access to mainstream platforms. Right now, American Greatness barely punches at its weight, much less above, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the effect the Rockbridge Network could have on the country.

:{:{}:

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/global-christian-right/

an 12 21

an investigation by the media outletopenDemocracy revealed Friday that the dark money groups masterminding the far-right assault on reproductive freedoms in the U.S. have also spent at least $28 million in recent years on efforts to roll back the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people worldwide.

The new analysis shows that prominent anti-abortion groups including the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Federalist Society, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family and Heartbeat International have "been involved in recent efforts to limit reproductive rights in Europe and Latin America."

The organizations form what openDemocracydescribes as "the 'dark money' global empire of the U.S. Christian right," which is exporting its legal strategy, army of lawyers, and resources overseas to forestall and reverse international progress on abortion access.

ADF, a far-right Christian legal advocacy group with ties to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has spent years laying the groundwork for the draconian Mississippi abortion ban at the heart of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a Supreme Court case that could imperil reproductive freedoms across the U.S.

But ADF's influence extends well beyond its home country. According to openDemocracy, the organization—whose global arm is called ADF International—spent $15.3 million between 2016 and 2019 on efforts to gut abortion rights overseas.

"The European offices of ACLJ and ADF have intervened in dozens of European court cases against sexual and reproductive rights," the outlet notes. "Last year, Poland's constitutional court voted to ban abortion in cases of fetal defects. [ACLJ] submitted arguments in favor of the new restrictions, condemned by the Council of Europe as a grave 'human rights violation.'"

"The European branch of ACLJ also intervened for the first time at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," openDemocracy observes. "The government of El Salvador, where abortion is illegal in all circumstances, was sued for the imprisonment and death of a woman who had experienced a miscarriage."

As for the Federalist Society—of which all six current right-wing Supreme Court justices are either current or former members—"Europe was the main destination of foreign spending," openDemocracyfinds.

"Europeans are too naive in thinking that achievements in women's rights and sexual and reproductive health are irreversible," said Sophie in 't Veld, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told the outlet. "The anti-choice movement does not only have a lot of money, they also have a plan and the determination. Europe should wake up, and it should wake up fast."

While under U.S. tax law the far-right groups have largely succeeded in keeping their funding sources hidden from the public, openDemocracy examined "financial information disclosed by grantmakers" showing that the National Christian Foundation (NCF) and Fidelity Charitable donated $93 million to the organizations between 2016 and 2020.

Feminist researcher Sonia Corrêa of Sexuality Policy Watch said openDemocracy's report "exposes once again the long-running organic connections between anti-abortion forces in the U.S. and Latin America."

Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, similarly argued that the findings "further demonstrate the growing trend of religious extremists forging cross-border alliances to advance... pseudo-legal arguments and engaging in formal legal processes aiming to unstitch the fabric of human rights protection."

In an op-ed for the New York Times on Thursday, openDemocracy's Mary Fitzgerald argued that if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Mississippi's abortion ban and undercuts Roe v. Wade, the nation will "join of a small cadre of increasingly authoritarian countries that have become more restrictive on abortion in recent years."

Fitzgerald went on to cite specific examples:

Poland's constitutional tribunal ruled on a retrograde abortion ban last year which effectively banned abortion in all cases apart from rape, incest or threat of life or health to the mother, after the ruling Law and Justice party packed the court.

Hungary's Viktor Orban is ramping up its talk on "family values," and a 2016 United Nations report criticized the country for obstructing abortion access.

Vladimir Putin's Russia has just joined the misleadingly titled Geneva Consensus Declaration: a document co-sponsored by the United States under the Trump administration with repressive governments including Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Mr. Orban's Hungary, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's Egypt, and signed by dozens more of the world's most repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Uganda. (President Biden announced in January that the United States would withdraw.) The declaration's authors also claim that there is no international right to abortion.

"Later this month President Biden will host the Summit for Democracy, with a key focus on promoting human rights around the world," Fitzgerald noted. "But as U.S. courts continue to dismantle basic rights enjoyed in countless other modern democracies, the most pressing question must be: How can democracy do its job at home if only half the population is granted full human rights?"

---

When then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, he often described himself as a “compassionate conservative” — which was Bush’s way of trying to win over swing voters, moderates and suburban soccer moms and convince them to vote for him instead of then-Vice President Al Gore. But the MAGA movement has angrily rejected such messaging, opting instead to project a fake machismo. Never Trump conservative David French discusses that “toughness” in an article published by The Atlantic this week, explaining why he finds it so troubling.

French opens his article by citing attorney Josh Hammer as an example of someone who is promoting “toughness” and a “less libertarian American right.” At the recent National Conservatism conference, French notes, Hammer railed against “fusionism” as “inherently effete, limp” as well as “unmasculine.”

On the right, the term “fusionism” refers to President Ronald Reagan’s fragile coalition of the early 1980s, when a variety of right-wingers — including libertarians, fiscal conservatives, evangelical Christian fundamentalist social conservatives and neocons — rallied around Reagan. There was plenty of infighting within that coalition; although Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona and the Moral Majority’s Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. were both Reagan supporters, they couldn’t stand one another. Goldwater, in fact, believed that Falwell and others of his ilk were terrible for the GOP and terrible for the conservative movement. But Goldwater and Falwell were both glad to see Reagan in the White House.

According to Hillsdale College’s David Azerrad, the MAGA right views Trump as “manly” because he forcefully speaks his mind — which French finds peculiar.

READ: The real history of US anti-abortion politics began in 1662 — and is bound to the legacy of slavery]

“This is a curious definition of manliness,” French writes. “Saying what you think or what others seem afraid to say isn’t inherently ‘manly.’ Speaking your mind isn’t even inherently virtuous, much less inherently masculine. Trump has said many false and harmful things, and the fact that other people might whisper them does not mean that they should be shouted from the presidential bully pulpit.”

The MAGA cult of “toughness,” according to French, manifests itself in the form of “the increased prevalence of open-carried AR-15s at public protests, the increased number of unlawful threats hurled at political opponents, and outbreaks of actual political violence, including the large-scale violence of January 6.”

French writes, “The author and academic Freddie deBoer has compiled a depressing list of articles, essays and interviews in prominent publications excusing and justifying violent civil unrest. The right-wing cult of toughness, in its distinctly Trumpist version, is no exception to this trend. When it is drained of limiting principles and tied to a man who would rather seek to upend our nation’s constitutional order than relinquish power, then the threat to the republic is plain.That threat will remain until the supposedly weak classical liberals on the left and the right do what they’ve always done at their best: rally in defense of liberty, the rule of law, and the American order itself.”

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-conservative-establishments-nightmare-is-only-just-beginning/

no lnx

The conservative establishment’s nightmare is only just beginning

Written by Matthew Sheffield / Washington Monthly November 22, 2019

Richard Viguerie, the conservative activist who invented direct-mail marketing, once said that “fear and anger are much stronger motivations than support for a cause.”

The Republican Party is now finding that out first-hand as it’s battling a white supremacist insurgency for the hearts and minds of Generation Z.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

The ranks of the “alternative right” political movement were decimated in the aftermath of the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Many of its top leaders faced arrest, lawsuits, or were banned from online fundraising and social media platforms.

But after two years in the political wilderness, white nationalist activists have managed to regroup thanks to a new effort to attack on the highly lucrative right-wing infotainment industry that has sprung up around conservative think tanks, Fox News, and talk radio.

Unlike the original alt-right, which was mostly driven by lone trolls collaborating ad hoc on social networks, the far-right resurgence is being led by a single figure:Nick Fuentes, a 21-year-old YouTube pundit who originally made a name for himself as a host on the Right Side Broadcasting Network. He was fired from that post in 2017 for saying it was “time to kill the globalists” at CNN for allegedly being unfair to President Donald Trump.

Since starting his own YouTube program (called “America First” after Trump’s slogan) shortly after his sacking, Fuentes has amassed a following that is just as dedicated and belligerent as the original alt-right via a re-calibrated message. Rather than using Hitler memes, Germanic sculptures, and mocking religion, Fuentes serves up a steady diet of Christian nationalism and hatred of immigrants, secular people, and Muslims.

Over the past several weeks, Fuentes and his fans—who call themselves “Nickers” and “Groypers” after a cartoon toad that serves as their mascot instead of Pepe the Frog—have been tapping into conservative Christian anxieties and melding them with concerns that President Donald Trump has failed to deliver on his campaign promises of mass deportations and a “big beautiful wall” on the Mexican border. Their preferred mechanism of attack has been to overwhelm question-and-answer sessions following the speeches of mainstream conservative figures.

These appearances are typically organized by groups like Turning Point USA, Young Americans for Freedom, and the College Republicans. Their purpose is to recruit young adults into the conservative movement. It’s not an easy task, however, as surveys increasingly indicate that socialism and pluralism have more appeal to students than unregulated capitalism and Christian nationalism.

Taking advantage of the fact that conservative college events are often sparsely attended, Groypers have easily mobbed the events—especially those of 25-year-old Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk—to ask questions designed to embarrass the speakers and question their fealty to the conservative cause. In addition to invoking biblical injunctions against homosexuality, the hecklers have questioned whether the Republican Party can have a long-term future absent a complete stop to legal immigration and some sort of deportation of existing immigrant citizens.

Their crowd manipulation tactics—which are very similar to practices taught for decades at the conservative Leadership Institute—have succeeded over the past several weeks at embarrassing Kirk, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas, and Christian nationalist commentator Matt Walsh. In response, event organizers have often curtailed audience participation.

For the most part, the national press ignored the protests and the burgeoning insurgency until the Groypers employed the same tactics at a Nov. 10 event where Donald Trump Jr. was touting his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.

Reports from the scene in Los Angeles indicated that the Groypers comprised about a third of the audience for the event and utterly dominated the proceedings. Even before the presidential son took the stage, Nickers began booing and jeering as an event staffer announced that Don Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, would not be taking any questions after their remarks.

The taunts, which also included audience members laughing at inappropriate times in a manner similar to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker character and chants of “America First,” grew so loud that Don Jr. stopped speaking as he tried to figure out what was going on. Guilfoyle lashed out at the audience, claiming they were not making their parents proud and that they probably couldn’t get dates. Eventually, the couple and a silent Kirk exited the stage as the Fuentes fans kept booing.

Since then, the scene has repeated itself at several other events, particularly those of Kirk. He and many other conservative figures have been forced to answer inconvenient questions about various topics including past criticisms of President Trump, transgender rights, and immigration. More often than not, Kirk has faced overwhelming audience jeers and has struggled to respond.

It remains to be seen what the commander-in-chief, who is reportedly extremely sensitive to embarrassment, will think of all this but one thing is clear: the conservative establishment’s nightmare is just beginning.

Long before Trump came along, conservatives have had a complicated relationship with extremism, both encouraging and shunning it.

William F. Buckley, founder of National Review and the most prominent early conservative figure, began his political career denouncing Dwight Eisenhower and atheist professors at Yale. His magazine published several pieces defending Jim Crow and South African apartheid.

Over the years, he often told supporters that they should always support the “furthest right” candidate that they believed to be electable, setting up a perpetual cycle of GOP candidates who constantly assert that they, alone, are the “true conservatives” out to save the nation from Republicans in Name Only (RINOs).

In fairness, Buckley strenuously opposed the John Birch Society, a conspiracy group funded by Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch, which was highly popular among the conservative grassroots. And National Revieweventually relented and came out against segregation and apartheid.

Former president Ronald Reagan also had a decidedly mixed record on racial matters, spending decades opposing sanctions on South Africa for apartheid and the creation of a national holiday to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. but eventually taking liberals’ positions on the two matters. He was also recently revealed to have privately referred to African United Nations delegates as “monkeys” who were uncomfortable wearing shoes.

Conservatives were also more than willing to welcome Strom Thurmond, the one-time segregationist senator who broke from the Democratic Party as it began supporting civil rights for African-Americans. Young Americans for Freedom, the group that preceded today’s Young America’s Foundation, hailed Thurmond as a “Man of Courage” in 1964 before he broke with his racist positions.

Many conservatives also had no problem with George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who ran for president on segregationist platforms. Richard Viguerie—who still is raking in the GOP direct-mail money today—handled Wallace’s fund-raising in 1976.

In light of the many ways in which conservative leaders were willing to side with them on particular issues, white nationalists have sought to openly enter Republican politics for decades. Jared Taylor and his American Renaissance magazine were big promoters of Ron Paul’s presidential runs. As I’ve written previously, many alt-right activists were also strong Paul supporters before branching off to start their own movement. Former Klansman David Duke has repeatedly run as a GOP candidate in his native Louisiana but been rejected by party leaders.

Progressives have long accused Republican strategists of trying to communicate indirect messages of support to white racists through the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” which succeeded at turning the South away from its decades of loyalty to the Democratic Party. Few GOP strategists have ever been transparent about these efforts, but one who discussed them honestly was Lee Atwater, the widely successful consultant who passed away in 1991.

Ten years before his death, while firmly ensconced within the Reagan White House, Atwater gave an anonymous interview (the audio recording was published posthumously) in which he stated definitively that Republicans used race to appeal to Southerners but did so in an effort to gradually wean them from bigotry in favor of small-government appeals.

According to Atwater, the idea only worked because whites favorable to segregation understood that cutting the government would disproportionately harm African-Americans.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****,’ he told interviewer Alexander Lamis, a Case Western Reserve political scientist. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*****, n*****.’”

More recently, numerous reports have exposed the role of the late Thomas Hofeller, a redistricting expert who worked for many Republican organizations over the years, in masterminding GOP state legislatures’ successful attempts to use race as the primary factor in congressional redistricting. Journalists have also exposed Hofeller’s covert advocacy for a new Census question about citizenship which he believed would suppress Hispanic responses and thereby harm Democrats.

The ascension of Donald Trump from wrestling sideshow to the heights of Republicanism has greatly increased the prominence and power of racists within the party. The 2015 launch of his presidential campaign with portrayals of most Mexicans as rapists and murderers electrified the white nationalists who had formerly supported Ron Paul’s quixotic efforts and they began flocking to the billionaire, producing hundreds of thousands of memes and trolling comments in his favor.

“White nationalists have always sought to inject their ideas into conservative politics, Fuentes is just the latest person to be doing it,” Howard Graves, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center told me. “What’s different now is that is that they feel emboldened by our commander-in-chief.”

Steve Bannon, who eventually became Trump’s campaign chairman, very carefully nurtured the online fascists. Referring to them as his “killing machine,” he threatened to use them as a force against any faction hoping to deny Trump the presidential nomination at a brokered convention. Bannon also boasted that he was fashioning Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right” as his editorial protégé Milo Yiannopoulos allowed racist activists to line-edit articles.

Once in office, Trump pandered to extremist supporters in numerous ways including his efforts to ban all Muslims from immigrating to the United States, break up families of unauthorized immigrants, and enact legislation exempting far-right Christians from any law they felt restricted their freedom to discriminate. Most infamously, Trump, acting on Bannon’s advice, repeatedly claimed that “very fine people” had attended the fascist-organized Unite the Right rally in support of Confederate memorials.

Recently, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration was revealed to have regularly promoted white nationalist talking points to a Breitbart News reporter. He is one of a number of Trump staffers who have been revealed to have ties to racist groups.

The growing closeness between the extremist right and Republican elites during the Trump era and the recrudescence of white supremacism has prompted several prominent conservative figures to try to take active measures to block the incursion.

Fuentes himself became a target of Turning Point USA after students at Iowa State University invited him to give a speech under the TPUSA banner in March.The event attracted controversy and put Fuentes on the group’s radar permanently. Kirk’s organization further aroused the anger of Nickers in September after it cut ties with one of its social media advocates after she appeared at a private event with Fuentes.

Egged on by Fuentes’s insults and a pre-existing infiltration campaign of a small alt-right group called the American Identity Movement, far-right young men began crashing TPUSA head Charlie Kirk’s lavishly funded “Culture War” college tour events in early October and the Groyper rebellion was born.

As the campaign has gathered steam, Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump national security adviser who now hosts a daily radio program also called “America First” became the first prominent conservative outside of TPUSA to attack Fuentes as racist. Ben Shapiro, a talk radio host and co-founder of the conservative website Daily Wire, condemned Fuentes as a “garbage human being” during a lengthy speech to Stanford University students earlier this month.

But the denunciations have done little to curb the insurrection, in part because Republicans have spent 50 years building their entire political edifice around implicit appeals to white Christian identity, granting at least some built-in support to anyone claiming to stand up for far-right Christians.

This lesson was made crystal clear during the 2016 Republican presidential nomination contest when Donald Trump kept amassing support among conservative fundamentalists despite his utterly irreligious demeanor and the many denouncements he faced from religious activists who supported Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). None of that mattered, however, because Trump promised that if he became president, “Christianity will have power.”

“The Christian right has been remarkably effective at maintaining a market and culture of people who are fed hateful messages and that makes it almost inevitable that white nationalists would tap into that, especially during a time when many of those people feel like they are an embattled minority,” Graves, the researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center told me.

Fuentes, who identifies as a traditional Catholic and is partially of Hispanic descent, is perfectly able to wrap his arguments in the Christian supremacist argot that has become central to almost all Republican rhetoric. He’s also been careful to disclaim the label white nationalist even as he has conceded that it could accurately describe his views.

While many in the “Nicker Nation” are obviously racist, it’s unclear what percentage of the people who’ve been disrupting conservative speeches are fully onboard with a white supremacist agenda. In fact, several of the questioners who have challenged establishment Republicans appear to be black or Hispanic.

The idea that minority Republicans would want to support a white nationalist makes little sense until one realizes that Fuentes isfond of using coded language to hide messages intended only for racists, a practice frequently referred to within the alt-right as “hiding your power level.” (He has slipped up a several times, however, including going on a profane and anti-Semitic rant in August and once joking about racial segregation.)

As might be expected, Fuentes’s dog whistles are based on more up-to-date references than Atwater’s. Several of his fans were confused by them during the Nov. 5 broadcast of his “America First” show, when he used a coded reference to praise Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the racist Daily Stormer blog, a key figure in the original alt-right who has tried to re-brand himself from a neo-Nazi into a soldier for Christ.

But the sly reference, couched as a shout-out to Daily Wire podcast host Andrew Klavan, confused some of Fuentes’s viewers.

“I know that Andrew Klavan from Daily Wire has been very supportive,” Fuentes said in response to a viewer question. “And I appreciate that … I really do appreciate his support, I think he’s very funny, I love what he writes. He’s very funny, very talented writer, Andrew Klavan of Daily Wire. And I appreciate his support, I think it’s been very helpful. I think Andrew Klavan has been right about this country from the beginning. I think he’s been right about this—the things he’s been saying for the past two years, particularly about the right wing has been so true and we are vindicated together, Andrew Klavan from Daily Wire and me.”

Not everyone watching the show could hear the dog whistle, however.

“Why are you CRINGE shilling for Andrew fake Christian Klavan,” a commenter on Fuentes’s live stream wrote.

“Daily Wire? Isn’t that Ben S?” another wrote, referring to Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro.

Many of the viewers understood the reference, however, correctly pointing out that Fuentes was not actually praising Klavan.

“Are you people stupid? He’s obviously talking about Anglin but framing it as Klavan,” a third fan replied.

“People are soo dumb who actually thinks [sic] he’s talking about Andrew Klavan,” said another.

For his part, Anglin seems to have understood the reference. He responded to the praise on the Daily Stormer by posting a meme of two men bowing to each other.

Fuentes’s habit of mostly sticking to standard-issue conservative talking points and masking his more extreme messages—including one in which he joked about the Holocaust through a Cookie Monster metaphor—has also led several prominent conservative figures to lend him their support.Michelle Malkin, the Asian-American columnist and former Fox News commentator, has repeatedly praised Groypers and Fuentes specifically for advocating against immigration, arguing that endorsing some of their views does not mean endorsing all of them.

“Here’s my message to the new generation of America Firsters exposing the big lies of the anti-American open borders establishment and its controlled opposition operatives: If I was your mom, I’d be proud as hell,” she said during a Nov. 14 speech at UCLA. In her remarks, she also condemned Shapiro as “creepy” and “cringe” for calling Groypers losers just days earlier.

Alex Jones, the dietary supplement kingpin and radio host, has also expressed support for Fuentes, inviting him twice onto his InfoWars platform to attack Charlie Kirk. Cassandra Fairbanks, a popular social media personality and writer at the right-wing conspiracy site Gateway Pundit, has also tweeted in support of Malkin’s position that conservatives should stand up for Fuentes’s ability to speak, even if they don’t like some of his statements. Ali Alexander and Wayne Dupreee, black conservatives who have built a following among Trump fans, have agreed with this sentiment.

The conservative establishment’s attempts to fight back against the growth of white nationalism have also been weakened by the fact that many of its voters have come to realize that American conservatism as presently constituted is heading for electoral extinction. Exit poll data from 2018 indicates that white Americans were the only racial group in which a majority voted for Republicans, but only by a slim margin. Fifty-four percent of people of European descent said they voted for a GOP House candidate while 44 percent picked a Democratic one. Among Hispanics, 69 percent went Democratic as did 90 percent of African-Americans.

Numeric analysis suggests that it is Republicans’ anti-government views and practice of white Christian identity politics that are driving voters away. African-American were formerly a Republican voting bloc but that changed after conservatives took over the GOP in the 1960s and forced the party to oppose civil rights and back massive spending cuts. A similar process, much less remarked upon, has happened among Asian-Americans, most of whom consistently voted for Republicans until the 2000 election and George W. Bush’s decision to re-brand the GOP as the party for Christians.

As a demographicgroup, it is difficult to speak generally about Asian-Americans since they come from so many dissimilar countries. But the one generalization that can be made about the fastest-growing racial group is that today’s Asian-American population is significantly less Christian than in prior decades. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 66 percent of Asian-Americans were Christians in 1990. By 2008, this number had declined to just 38 percent.

The decline of Christianity among Asian-Americans has had an impact on their voting habits. In the 2018 election, 77 percent voted for Democratic House candidates.

But even younger whites are turning away from the GOP. In the 2018 election, only 43 percent of European-Americans between 18 and 29 voted for a Republican House candidate. That’s a decline from the 47 percent who voted for Trump in 2016, and the 51 percent who voted Republican in 2012.

Instead of facing the uncomfortable reality that Americans don’t like their policies and presentation, most conservatives have simply ignored the party’s demographic dilemma, offering insulting platitudes to racial minorities while utterly ignoring the concerns of secular young whites.

“Here’s how we look into the future,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw replied when asked about the GOP’s long-term future by a Fuentes supporter at a Nov. 4 event. “We don’t lie to minorities and tell them that we’re going to solve all of their problems. We tell them that they are included in this country and that the only colors that matter in this country are the red, white, and blue—that identity politics has no place in this nation.”

While the Republican party itself issued an “autopsy report” after the 2012 election that indicated the party needed to do more to appeal to people who were not white, the document’s recommendations were utterly ignored by Trump in his 2016 campaign and ever since then.

With conservative elites unwilling to talk about modifying some of their unpopular policy positions, the resulting vacuum in the conservative discourse has been mostly filled by immigration opponents who have been arguing that the GOP must stop legal and illegal immigration or risk electoral apocalypse. It’s a partisan-oriented, proto-white supremacist argument that some of the right’s biggest stars have repeated many times.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham has been one of its biggest boosters. During her Nov. 6 program she blamed “foreign-born” people for enabling Democrats to take control of Virginia’s state government. Last August, she said that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist any more” thanks to “demographic changes” brought on by legal and illegal immigration.

Her colleague Tucker Carlson has also repeatedly pushed the same line. In December 2017, he claimed that Democrats were using a “flood of illegals” to force a “demographic replacement” which would bring them new voters. In July 2018, he asserted that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” This past April, Carlson warned Democrats were trying to “change this country completely and forever” through immigration.

The two Fox News stars’ repeated statements about immigration and the GOP’s future are eerily similar to ones made by Fuentes. During his November 17 show, he called legal immigration a “critical threat to the Republican party” that will “make us unable to win a national election ever again.” This past August, Fuentes argued that both parties were seeking a “systematic replacement of the people that constitute the country.”

Besides sounding like two of Fox News’s most popular prime-time hosts, Fuentes also has similarities to some of his most vociferous critics in the conservative establishment.

Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump aide and current radio host who first condemned Fuentes, has his own history of accusations of fascist sympathies. Like Fuentes, Gorka has also called for executing people he believes have betrayed America.

Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, another one of Fuentes’s critics, has also made comments very similar to the embattled YouTube star.

While he currently argues that Republicans should not care about increasing non-white immigration levels and slams Fuentes supporters for saying otherwise, Shapiro had a very different stance in a 2014 video in which he argued that granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants was “absolute lunacy” that would doom the GOP because Hispanics “lean left on big government.” Three years later, he argued that Stephen Miller, the Trump aide who spread white nationalist material at Breitbart while Shapiro worked there, “knows what he’s talking about on immigration.”

In some cases, Shapiro’s statements appear to be even more radical than Fuentes’s expressions.

In 2014, he did an interview with a white nationalist podcast in which he argued that Jewish media executives were trying to wage a “war on Christianity.” During the conversation—which was bundled alongside a promotion for a separate interview with white nationalist academic Kevin MacDonald—Shapiro repeated several anti-Semitic tropes but directed them only at secular or “leftist” Jewish people.

“There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood who feel the obligation—they have a perverse leftist view of history pushed by the Soviet Union that what really destroyed Europe was Christianity. It was not fascism, it was not communism, it was not leftism, it was Christianity,” he told host Lana Lokteff. “And therefore, the cure for intolerance is to bash the hell out of Christianity.”

“There certainly is a war on Christianity, it’s coming from some people who are secular Jews, it’s coming from a lot of leftists,” he continued. “Most Jews in America don’t care about Judaism.”

Ironically, Red Ice Creations, company which produced the show, is the former employer of Patrick Casey, the leader of the American Identity Movement which has been the boots-on-the-ground in the Groyper insurgency.

In the same broadcast, Shapiro also warned that entertainment studios seeking to condemn racism and sexism and include positive minority characters in their products are actually engaging in an insidious plot to “pervert” Americans’ minds as part of a “very subtle war on white males in our society.”

“What they want is they want to destroy the foundations of American society,” Shapiro said, speaking of media executives. “There’s no question that this is what they want. I mean this has been the case for the left since the 1960s.”

Shapiro has also endorsed ethnic cleansing in Israel of Muslims and Christians, writing in 2003 that forcibly removing Palestinians elsewhere is “an ugly solution, but it is the only solution” in the Middle East. Fuentes does not seem to have ever called for non-violent removal of Americans who are not white but Richard Spencer, one of the alt-right’s first figureheads, has. In the years since, however, Shapiro seems to have turned against the idea of ethnic cleansing.

The Daily Wire did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this piece

While most conservative pundits and activists appear blissfully unaware that their beliefs are generally unpopular, right-wing election consultants have long struggled to overcome this problem in their efforts to obtain winning electoral coalitions. Yet, rather than moderating their positions to appeal to centrists who disagree with conservative ideas on economics, religion, and social policy, they have opted instead to appeal to white religious fundamentalists who are anxious about a country that’s become more educated, secular, and tolerant since the 1960s.

Murray Rothbard, one of the most influential figures in early libertarianism who was also heavily involved in GOP politics, described the concept in a shocking and prescient 1992 essay that touted David Duke and Joe McCarthy as the exemplars of an “outreach to the rednecks” strategy that would build a coalition of racist fundamentalists, business leaders, and anti-government ideologues under a platform of “America First.” Donald Trump, who employed McCarthy’s lawyer and repeatedly refused to disavow Duke, only slightly updated the playbook for 2016.

Expanding the Republican political tent to protect and include extremists was profitable for the GOP in the short-term. Among other things, conservatives’ effective use of religion and race as distractions from unpopular economic policies has enabled them to keep the United States as the only wealthy country in the world without universal health-care for decades.

But the conservative coalition’s days are numbered. In the last five presidential elections, the GOP has won the presidential popular vote only once. The white Christian identity politics which Republicans have long offered as an emotional inducement to voters is of no value to the majority of Americans who now want religion out of politics. Young people, meanwhile, are more interested in voting for democratic socialism than worshiping capitalists with Ayn Rand.

Despite its advocates’ claims of believing in “timeless principles,” American conservatism is actually a historical anomaly, one made possible by its host country’s geopolitical struggle with the atheistic and communistic Soviet Union. As that struggle fades into the mists of time, so do Republicans’ electoral victories.

The prudent, and indeed the conservative, approach would be to refashion American conservatism into something decent—a Republican Party that would promote efficiency while expanding the social safety net to support families, protect workers from exploitation, reduce immigration by improving life in other countries, and reject religious and racial bigotry while also making some space for people with traditionalist religious views.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that Americans want something different than what they’ve been offering, however, the powers-that-be on the right have resorted to gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement to forestall the inevitable.

But now, in addition to facing pressure from the center and the left, conservative elites are now feeling the heat from angry white Christians who have been promised everything for 50 years while receiving very little in return. Nick Fuentes and the Groypers may seem like a social media sideshow now, but in truth, they are only the beginning of a series of troubles that will destroy the Republican Party from within even as it’s caught within a demographic death spiral.

While the president’s consistent verbal appeals to Christian and white racial grievances was enough to get him the far-right’s loyalty in 2016, the serial humiliations of Donald Trump Jr., TPUSA, and their allies demonstrate that the resurgent alt-right wants more and that conservatives’ disingenuous attempts to portray themselves as free speech absolutists can easily be used against them. David French, a conservative writer and activist who has often been targeted by the alt-right, almost exactly described a year ago what the Groypers are doing today:

“Hatred for political correctness has yielded an unhealthy fascination with and admiration for pure defiance. Young voices pride themselves on fearlessness and place attitude over thought in their words and deeds. They troll online and at school to ‘trigger the libs,’ and nothing triggers the libs more than defiance on matters of race. … If the ethos of the defiant Right is never, ever to accede to either a leftist or (what is, arguably, more hated) an ‘establishment’ or ‘elite’ conservative critique, then it’s easy to see how bigots can flourish.”

Fuentes has echoed this sentiment in his own way repeatedly, including during the same November 5 episode in which he endorsed a neo-Nazi. In the segment, he vowed to continue embarrassing the conservative establishment, regardless of the impact on Republicans’ 2020 chances.

“We’re not asking for anything that is not just and owed to us,” he said. “Unless and until Charlie Kirk and these others are willing to give us what we deserve, which is a seat at the table in Conservative Inc. or the conservative movement or whatever, they allow us to spread our message in the same marketplace of ideas that they do, then this will continue. And if it’s a liability then so be it.”

Perhaps links can serve to substantiate this. Who faced arrest, who was banned from online fundraising, and who was booted off social media platforms?

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/building-the-idiocracy-conservative-david-french-details-the-strategy-trump-defenders-use-to-confuse-gop-voters/

no lnx

‘Building the idiocracy’: Conservative David French details the strategy Trump defenders use to confuse GOP voters

Written byAlex Henderson November 15, 2019 2x , a fan?

David French — a conservative critic of President Donald Trump — argued this week in a newsletter for The Dispatch that Republicans are “building the idiocracy, one word salad at a time” in their attacks on impeachment.

“Idiocracy” is the title of a 2006 comedy which, French notes, is “set in the fictional, dumbed-down America of the future — where President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho rules over a drought-stricken, miserably stupid nation.” And in real life, French asserts, Trump’s defenders “are actively trying to build the idiocracy” for “the sake of defending” him.

French explained how this pattern unfurls as bad news for the president emerges:

If you follow social media in the age of Trump, you’ve likely noticed a pattern. When there’s a report of an alleged Trump scandal, there’s often a brief pause on MAGA Twitter and in MAGA Facebook. One set of defenders waits patiently for the media overreaction, ready to pounce on the first blue checkmark who goes too far or misstates the alleged facts. Another set waits for a credentialed or credible person to toss a word salad for Trump — granting them a ‘well akshually’ fig leaf that they can trot out as a talking point online.

Examples of such pro-Trump talking points, according to French, include claims that he has “a constitutional right to confront the whistleblower” in the Ukraine scandal and is the victim of an attempted “coup” by Democrats who are seeking to overturn the 2016 election results. French observes that while the “overturn the election results” talking point is common among pro-Trump Republicans, that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.

“If Trump is impeached and convicted — highly unlikely — it doesn’t ‘overturn’ the 2016 election,” French writes. “Hillary Clinton won’t be president. Every one of the laws, judicial confirmations and regulations enacted during the entirety of Trump’s term would remain in place.”

Trump supporters throwing the term “coup” around, French emphasizes, aren’t even using it correctly.

“A coup is an unlawful, often violent seizure of power,” French explains. “Impeachment is a constitutional process that can’t succeed without the affirmative votes of, first, a majority of the House, and then, a supermajority of the Senate — and every person voting is a person who won an election, also according to constitutional process. Impeachment isn’t the dissipation of constitutional government, it’s the exercise of constitutional authority.”

Another talking point on the “Trumpist right,” French points out, is the claim that under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Trump has the right to confront the whistleblower — a claim that is ludicrous, he says, because the Sixth Amendment deals with criminal prosecutions, not an impeachment in Congress. And French laments that even Steven Calabresi, a conservative legal scholar who teaches law at Northwestern University, has referenced the Sixth Amendment to defend Trump.

“The scope and reach of the Sixth Amendment has been extensively litigated, and it most assuredly does not apply to the House’s impeachment inquiry,” French emphasizes. “One can certainly make a good-faith argument that maintaining the whistleblower’s anonymity is unfair, but to argue that it violates the Sixth Amendment is simply and plainly wrong.”

French stresses that when even respected legal scholars and historians are using ridiculous talking points in Trump’s defense, an “idiocracy” is being established.

“I know that there’s a longstanding tradition of hyperbole in American political rhetoric, but there’s a difference between exaggerations and plainly false constitutional assertions,” French explains. “Moreover, while people expect hyperbole from Sean Hannity or any other screaming Trump defender on talk radio, the same ideas from the pen of a respected historian sends a message that ‘this really is a coup.’ It’s not. It’s not even close.”

3 mass shoot shift pov?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/right-wing-writer-calls-for-all-out-war-on-white-nationalist-terrorism-in-stunning-op-ed-on-conservative-website/

The party line among many people in the right-wing media, from Fox News to AM talk radio, has been that white nationalist violence is nowhere near as serious a threat as Islamist terrorism. Media Matters has repeatedly demonstrated that Fox News has had a much more alarmist tone when reporting on Islamist violence than it has had when acts of terrorism were committed by white supremacists or white nationalists. But following an act of racist terrorism that left 20 people dead in El Paso, Texas, a leading conservative writer,the National Review’s David French, vehemently stresses that white nationalist terrorism is every bit as dire a threat as ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria).

“The United States is now facing a deadly challenge from a connected, radical, online-organizing community of vicious white-nationalist terrorists,” French warns in a National Review article. “They are every bit as evil as jihadists, and they radicalize in much the same way. And just like the ISIS terrorists our nation and our allies have confronted in the great cities of the West, they use the most modern of tools to advance the oldest of hatreds.”

...

---

covington kty

...“Personal responsibility” does not apply to white conservatives. Contra Martin Luther King Jr., the long arc of history does not necessarily bend towards justice. In the age of Trump it is stuck on white victimology. For example: the white teen MAGA mob is somehow held to be not responsible for their foul behavior toward Native American elder Nathan Phillips because a small group of “Black Israelites” (essentially racial chauvinist black Power Ranger cosplay clowns) said mean things to them.

This is the very definition of racism and white supremacy: the white teenage mob decided that black and Native American people are somehow interchangeable; anger at the Black Israelites can then be reasonably transferred to Nathan Phillips; racist taunts and harassment against Nathan Phillips are therefore justified.

In an essay published Tuesday in the National Review, David French signals to another very old and important rule of race that still operates in today’s America: Empathy and sympathy are demarcated by White America (especially white conservatives) along and against the color line:

In the [Brett] Kavanaugh case, conservative men and women looked at decades-old, uncorroborated allegations, the unquestioning acceptance of those claims, and the furious effort to destroy a man’s reputation and career – even by passing along the wildest and most implausible claims – and thought, “That could be me’ or ‘that could be my husband.’

Now, these same people look at the reaction to the Covington Catholic kids and think, “That could be my son.”

You can hold that fear in your heart without excusing or condoning sexual assault in any way. You can hold that fear in your heart without excusing or condoning racism or even thoughtless taunts. Because you’ll know that for all too many people, the truth doesn’t really matter. You’re a symbol, not a person. When angry people cook that social-justice omelet, they break eggs not with regret but with angry glee. …

That’s the message that sent a shudder up the spine of husbands and wives during the Kavanaugh hearings. That’s the message that sends a shudder up the spine of moms and dads as we watch men and women try to ruin the Covington Catholic kids. This isn’t just a media scandal. When we see the hate, some of us see our sons, and we know that in America today, their futures, their reputations, and – given the prevalence of death threats – perhaps even their very lives are in the hands of an angry mob.

Donald Trump’s mouthpiece, Sarah Sanders, channeled this rule of race even more directly on Fox News:

The idea anybody could take joy in the destruction of young kids is absolutely outrageous to me. That’s exactly what we saw members of the media and other leaders do. These are kids ― let’s not forget ― these are 15- and 16-year-old kids who were put in a very tough position and actually handled it very well.

....

---

From the moment the world learned that there were serious accusations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, countless conservatives have done their best to mock, downplay, and disregard the very serious allegations.

Now that the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has come forward, they haven't slowed their attempt to discredit, demean and dismiss her at all. If anything, their attacks have only ramped up as the allegations became more serious and credible.

Fox News commentator Stephen Miller (no relation to the White House staffer) offered up some of the worst takes in the aftermath of Ford's revelations. Ford said that Kavanaugh and a friend of his, Mark Judge, held her down in a bedroom at a party in high school while Kavanaugh groped her and tried to remove her clothes. She says they covered her mouth, turned up music to muffle her screams, and says she feared they'd inadvertently kill her.

David French Posts Archive

Right Wing Leftovers - 1/28/13

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Monday 01/28/2013, 5:37pm

It is easy to understand why David French is buddies with David Barton based on pieces like this about how God wants you to own guns. Maybe the media doesn't give more coverage to the March for Life because the same thing happens every year! Kevin McCullough says that allowing women to serve in combat is just the latest step in the "pansi-fication and weakening of our nation." And Terri Stovall, dean of women's programs and associate professor of women's ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, says that letting women serve in... MORE >

Religious Right Groups Laud Paul Ryan, Highlight Anti-Choice and Anti-Gay Voting Record

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Monday 08/13/2012, 10:25am

Conservative leaders hailed Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan, the far-right congressman, to be his running mate, emphasizing his opposition to LGBT and reproductive rights. Concerned Women for America’s Penny Nance said that besides his one-time vote for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, she is excited “to pull back out my t-shirt from 2008 that says ‘Our VP is hotter than your VP!’” Paul Ryan is a great choice. He has one little blip in that he voted for ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) a long time ago but voted right on the marriage... MORE >

Apparently, Criticizing David Barton is now Proof that he Speaks the Truth

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Thursday 06/14/2012, 1:20pm

Historians across the board, including evangelicals, have roundly criticized and debunked the work of Religious Right pseudo-historian and WallBuilders president David Barton, whose shoddy history has been repeatedly documented on this blog. However, Barton’s influence among social conservatives and leading Republicans, including presidential candidates, continues to grow. As exhibited today in a WallBuilders Live interview with David French of the American Center for Law and Justice, it appears that Barton’s clout has increased not despite the overwhelming criticism he has... MORE >

David French: Evangelicals Should not Support an Arrogant, Bullying Serial Adulterer

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Tuesday 01/31/2012, 2:12pm

David French is a Senior Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, home of both Jay and Jordan Sekulow, two of Mitt Romney's most high-profile Religious Right supporters. French too is also a Romney supporter, having launched Evangelicals for Mitt with his wife Nancy. Today, French penned an op-ed for CNN calling on his fellow evangelicals to drop their support for Newt Gingrich and, in making his case, he certainly didn't pull any punches, calling Gingrich an arrogant, bullying serial adulterer: If character counts, then so do values like fidelity, honesty, humility... MORE >

David Barton, Who Sues His Critics, Says Like The Prophet Jeremiah He Doesn't Care About Criticism

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Monday 01/23/2012, 2:20pm

Today on WallBuilders Live, Barton reflected on the alleged persecution of same-sex marriage opponents like himself. Barton compared himself to Jeremiah, which is actually modest for Barton who previously likened himself to Jesus Christ. He claimed that like Jeremiah, he doesn’t care what people have to say about him and doesn’t listen to his critics “as long as I’m speaking the right thing that God told me to say.” Of course, this is the same David Barton who is currently suing three of his critics for libel and defamation and whose cohost Rick Green is suing... MORE >

Why The Religious Right Opposes Government Assistance For The Poor

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Monday 09/19/2011, 3:12pm

Recently we have been seeing more and more Religious Right activists like David Barton asserting that the government should play no role in assisting those in poverty. We had been chalking that idea up to the general right-wing hatred of the government and desire to drastically reduce its size and influence. But on today's broadcast of "Wallbuilders Live,"the American Center for Law and Justice's David French explained that the primary reason the Religious Right opposes government assistance to the poor is that it means those in poverty do not need to rely on churches for... MORE >

Perkins: Gays And Lesbians Are Ruining The Military, Media

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Monday 08/22/2011, 3:10pm

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been ratcheting up his anti-gay rhetoric recently, and finding new ways to blame gays and lesbians for what he sees as society’s problems. Last month, for instance, the Air Force suspended a class on “Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare training,” after it was revealed that the class relied heavily on Christian teachings. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation objected to the class and solicited complaints from Air Force officers, who the group says were mostly “practicing Protestants and Roman Catholics.” While... MORE >

ADF, Keeton Reject KKK Support

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Wednesday 10/06/2010, 1:41pm

This summer, Jennifer Keeton made news when she sued Augusta State University after the school threatened to expel her from its Counselor Education Program if she could not comply with the American Counseling Association's Code of Ethics, which prohibits counselors from discriminating based on a number of factors, including gender identity and sexual orientation. Keeton claimed that this was a violation of her religious freedom to oppose gays and so, with the help of the Alliance Defense Fund, she sued the university. Yesterday, it was reported that the Ku Klux Klan was going to hold a rally... MORE >

---

A Victory for Academic Freedom

By David French12 months ago

In 2012, my colleagues and I at the ACLJ filed suit against multiple officials at UCLA on behalf of Dr. James Enstrom, a researcher fired after he blew the whistle on the junk science used to justify draconian new emissions regulations in California. The facts of the case were astounding. As the...

Earlier this week, I posted about Dr. James Enstrom’s successful settlement of his lawsuit against UCLA. Long a dissenter against environmentalist scare-mongering, Dr. Enstrom sued UCLA officials (full disclosure: my colleagues and I at ACLJ represented him) after they fired him shortly after Dr. Enstrom discovered that new California regulations of diesel emissions were based on junk science advanced by a scientist with a fraudulent degree — a doctorate purchased from the fictional “Thornhill University.” Dr. Enstrom also discovered that the scientific review panel tasked with reviewing this science was stocked with ideologues who’d long overstayed mandatory term limits.

The case was hard-fought, with the university filing two motions to dismiss, followed by lengthy and grueling discovery. While the issues were largely constitutional (did the university fire Dr. Enstrom because of his constitutionally protected speech?), the constitutional dispute was motivated by a sharp “scientific” disagreement over the health danger of diesel particulate. I use the scare quotes because UCLA’s actions hardly reflected scientific ideals. Here’s an interesting excerpt from a deposition with Dr. Enstrom’s dean at the time of his termination (the questioner is an ACLJ lawyer):

Q: Okay. Do you have a general knowledge with regard to Dr. Enstrom’s research regarding diesel particulate matter?

A: Very general.

Q: Okay. What is your understanding with regard to his research . . . ?

A: My understanding is that Dr. Enstrom does not believe that diesel particulate is as injurious to the public health as does the mainstream scientific opinion.

Q: Okay. Do you understand that that’s based on his research?

A: I don’t know what his opinion is based on.

Q: And are you one who holds the mainstream opinion in that regard?

A: Yes.

Q: And what is your conclusion based on in that regard?

A: My conclusion is that diesel particulate does cause injury to human health.

Q: I’m sorry. I asked what is it based on? What is that opinion based on?

A: My opinion is based on science.

Note what happened here. The Dean of the UCLA School of Public Health admits that she only had “very general” knowledge of a dissenting scientist’s research — so general that she doesn’t know what his conclusions were based on, but still confidently declares her allegiance to the mainstream. Her opinion, you see, is based on “science,” while she has no idea how Dr. Enstrom — a researcher in her own school — came up with his conclusions.

This is exactly why the public should be suspicious of arguments based largely on appeal to “consensus” or the “mainstream.” Consensus is all-too-often created through censorship, suppression, greed, and opportunism.

Willful blindness to dissent is common in the academy, and scientists can be just as susceptible as the most ideological professors in the humanities. To take another example, in my trial last year on behalf of Professor Mike Adams, one of the most damaging moments for the university came when his department chair was forced to admit that she had negatively evaluated one of Dr. Adams’s books without bothering to read it. The jury visibly reacted both to the revelation and her persistent efforts to evade the truth.

Yet these professors can also influence public policy and public opinion largely by appealing to their own authority and the accumulated institutional goodwill of a major research university. Ultimately, however, they will destroy not just their reputations, but also the good work of previous generations of academics as once-respected universities sacrifice integrity for ideology.

After all, science that doesn’t consider dissenting views — that doesn’t even bother to familiarize itself with contrary research — isn’t science. It’s groupthink.

This article is crossposted on National Review.

The P.C. Police Aren’t Fragile

By David French11 months ago

We are at the cusp of a rare moment in modern American cultural debate — a moment when reasonable, thoughtful members of the Left and Right agree. Political correctness is spiraling out of control. Last week I shared an essay by a former radical describing her own migration out of the movement, but...

“In God We Trust” – Our National Motto – is under attack again. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been defeating atheist Michael Newdow’s attempts to banish “under God” and “In God We Trust” in federal court for over a decade. This time his new federal lawsuit is full of the same failed arguments: outlandishly claiming that our National Motto is “extremely offensive,” “bigotry,” and...

---

David French** | American Center for Law and Justice

http://aclj.org/Writers/david-french

David French | American Center for Law and Justice ACLJ

David is a Senior Counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a former Senior Counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund ...

https://old.aclj.org/writers/david-french

David French** | American Center for Law and Justice | ZoomInfo.com

View David French's business profile as Senior Counsel at American Center for Law and Justice and see work history, affiliations and more.

zoominfo.com/p/David-French/9846583

David French of ACLJ: The** Virtue of Biblical Arguments ...

David French of ACLJ: The Virtue of Biblical Arguments By David French (AMERICAN CENTER FOR LAW AND JUSTICE) On December 7, 2013

crossmap.com/news/david-french-of-aclj-the-virtue-of-b...

Welcome Aboard David French | American Center for Law and Justice

I'm pleased to announce that we've added a very talented and skilled attorney to our senior staff. David French is joining us as Senior Counsel. I have known David ...

http://aclj.org/aclj/welcome-aboard-david-french

David French - Senior Counsel, ACLJ** | Faith and Liberty Talk Show

David is a Senior Counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a former Senior Counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund ...

faithandliberty.org/content/david-french-–-senior-counsel-aclj

DAVID FRENCH/ACLJ** - charismanews.com

Articles written by your search phrase Finally, Someone's Willing to Tell the Truth About Islam written by David French/ACLJ Over at The Atlantic, Graeme Wood has ...

charismanews.com/component/search/?searchword=David...

David French of the ACLJ discusses the Dr. James Enstrom case against UCLA, how the science stacks up, corruption in the peer review and what the fallout ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=David%20French%20of%20the%20ACLJ+site:www.youtube.com&t=ffsb "Search domain www.youtube.com"

David French of ACLJ: The** Virtue of Biblical Arguments ...

I distinctly remember my deep anxiety about leaving my southern, Christian college and traveling north to a law school that was, well, slightly less hospitable to my ...

crossmap.com/news/david-french-of-aclj-the-virtue-of-b...

David French** Archive - National Review Online

David French. Suscribe to Author ... He has served as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom. David is a ...

nationalreview.com/author/1048/bio

Welcome Aboard David French | ACLJ, American Center for Law ...

I'm pleased to announce that we've added a very talented and skilled attorney to our senior staff. David French is joining us as Senior Counsel.

http://old.aclj.org/aclj/welcome-aboard-david-french

David French** Archive - National Review Online

David French. Suscribe to Author ... He has served as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance ... David Brooks's Hypocritical ...

nationalreview.com/author/david-french

March 11, 2013 TJN Live TV show from Rainbow West. Host Dave Adams talks with David French of the American Center for Law and Justice with tips on how ...

[](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=David%20French%20of%20the%20ACLJ+site:www.youtube.com&t=ffsb "Search domain www.youtube.com"

---