tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-571130784466956642024-03-17T20:04:20.468-05:00Indomitable | The online home of Chauncey DeVegaThe official site of political essayist, educator, cultural critic, and ghetto nerd Chauncey DeVega.Lady Zora, Chauncey DeVega, and Gordon Gartrellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09138154899923808806noreply@blogger.comBlogger2939125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-73924453596764818652024-01-30T12:00:00.001-06:002024-01-30T12:00:00.135-06:00Laughing Won't Save You: There is Nothing Funny About Ron DeSantis' Cruelty<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Donald Trump stands astride his Republican Party like a Colossus. With his primary wins in Iowa and New Hampshire – and soon in South Carolina – the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is basically his. On his road to victory, Trump easily vanquished Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a “rival” to Trump’s control over the Republican Party who was elevated to that position by the mainstream news media and so-called traditional conservatives.</span><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But DeSantis’s threat to Trump, which is also true of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, was very much exaggerated and mostly a creation of the news media and DC beltway political consultant class. After all, why would Republican and MAGA voters want pretenders when they can have the real thing?</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">DeSantis can generously be described as having an odd personality, strained interpersonal skills, and in total a lack of charisma. Possessing one of those traits would be difficult for an otherwise gifted politician in the age of TV and 24/7 news media spectacle to overcome. DeSantis was cursed with all three.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When DeSantis announced that he was ending his campaign and then basically bowed before Trump, the news media, commentariot, pundits, and many among the public laughed and mocked him. Such a reaction may feel good in the moment, especially for Democrats and others who are desperate for some type of victory, however fleeting and insignificant, in a time of such great anxiety and worry about Trump’s enduring power and the future of American democracy and society. However, there is nothing funny about Gov. Ron DeSantis and the extreme harm – including lost lives – and misery and other suffering that he has caused, and is continuing to cause, the people of Florida and other Republican-controlled parts of the country that are imitating him.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">DeSantis put in place<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/22/us/politics/ron-desantis-covid.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;"> policies during the COVID pandemic</a> that led to <a href="https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/opinion/2022/11/09/free-state-florida-no-1-covid-deaths-among-elderly/10658295002/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people</a> in Florida.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At DeSantis’ command and encouragement, Florida, like other red states, has implemented a thought crime regime where teaching the real history of Black Americans, and the country’s complex history more generally, has been banned and replaced with right-wing patriotic education that “does not make white children uncomfortable." Florida’s fascist authoritarian thought crime regime includes such measures as banning books, harassing, and firing teachers and other educators who are not in agreement with the goals of the white right and neofascist movement, defunding school programs and departments, and rubbleizing the once respected New College of Florida. DeSantis’ Orwellian thought crime regime is an extension of a decades-long campaign by the American right-wing and “conservative” movement to destroy public education as part of a much larger project to end social democracy.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">DeSantis and his allies have also worked feverishly to roll back the civil and voting rights of Black Americans, by for example <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/desantis-black-ap-african-american-history-poll-tax-gerrymander-voting.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">empowering Jim Crow era “election police”, engaging in racist gerrymandering, and putting in place a de facto poll tax.</a> <a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/danabramslive/ron-desantis-proud-boys-pardons-proud-boys/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">DeSantis has also provided cover</a> for neofascist right-wing street fighting gangs and paramilitaries to use <a href="https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2020/10/03/proud-boys-a-small-incendiary-group-chummy-with-florida-and-its-political-figures/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Florida as a type of main operating base.</a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">DeSantis has taken away women’s reproductive rights and freedoms. He has also de facto engaged in human trafficking and kidnapping by <a href="https://www.salon.com/2023/07/01/ron-desantis-has-no-respect-for-the-rule-of-law/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">transporting many dozens of migrants</a> and refugees from Latin and South America from Florida to New York — in the cold of winter — through trickery and against their will.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">DeSantis knows that “the cruelty is the point.” To that end he and his regime and their agents have targeted the LGBTQ community by attempting, and succeeding, to erase them from public (and private) life through laws and provisions that make their literal personhood a crime. Leaders fulfill a permission function in society: by dehumanizing the LGBTQ community – and in particular transgender people – DeSantis is legitimating mass violence against them.<span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a great human cost of DeSantis’ war on transgender people and other members of the LGBTQ community, which includes individuals and entire families being forced to flee the state of Florida, public humiliation and harassment, loss of jobs and stable employment, and a range of other harrowing and horrible experiences. Journalist Jeff Sharlet has highlighted the human cost of DeSantis’ policies and the emptiness of celebrating his dropping out of the Republican primaries.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> “As a parent of a trans enby kid attending public school in NH, I'm scared of what's coming in this allegedly 'moderate' state," Sharlet wrote on Twitter. "I'm scared of what's coming if Trump returns. This, below, is foreshadowing. It's also real people's lives. DeSantis isn't a joke. He's a sadist.”</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/ron-desantis-florida-ouray-county-plaindealer-trump-press-freedom-20240123.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch weighs in on DeSantis’ bounty of cruelty</a>:</span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m totally here for the DeSantis jokes, and I hope they don’t stop coming. But I also feel compelled to point out that the way that this small man in search of a balcony conducted himself these last couple of years is really no laughing matter. In the end, DeSantis’ presidential aspirations clung to two things: How much money he could raise from the wealthy, and how many points he could score by dunking on the dreams of the poor, the young, the different, or the struggling.<br /><br />The modern political innovation of DeSantis — if it can be called that — was taking the kind of blustery rally-stage bravado that characterizes Trump and using his GOP majority in Tallahassee to turn that into all-too-real laws or initiatives. The New York Times Opinion writer Jane Coaston said it best on X/Twitter Sunday when she wrote that “DeSantis’ campaign was like ‘we’re the most online people alive and we’re going to performatively use the state to hurt people you don’t like, just tell me the group and I’ll go hurt them.’”<br /><br />There are so many examples of folks whose lives have been turned upside down by DeSantis, including a lot of people who decided to leave the state as a new breed of political refugee….<br /><br />DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign will be remembered as nothing more than a punchline. But the American carnage he imposed on everyday people to make himself feel big will stain the red clay of the Florida peninsula for many years to come.</span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mocking and laughing at Ron DeSantis because of his failures in the 2024 Republican primary exemplifies a much larger error made by too many that helped to birth our democracy crisis in the first place. The American right-wing thinks in decades and centuries about power and movement building. By comparison, the American centrists, institutionalists and center-left mostly think in terms of weeks and months and election cycles. The mainstream 24/7 news media and commentariot are even more short-term in thinking and ability to conceptualize and understand politics and power.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">DeSantis is a prototype for Trump’s successor as leader of the American neofascist movement. DeSantis is also relatively young. He will come back stronger and more polished from his losing experience in the 2024 Republican primaries. Ultimately, DeSantis, because of his education and deep understanding of the law and how to exploit the vulnerabilities in America’s institutions is<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/desantis-ditches-presidential-campaign-to-resume-campaign-of-wreckage-in-florida/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"> actually a much greater threat than Donald Trump.</a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">DeSantis is still governor of Florida and the cruel policies he put in place, and which will continue (and get worse) <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/23/florida-desantis-next-vengeance-00137239" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">have not ended.</a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All of those people who are mocking and laughing at DeSantis should remind themselves of Malcolm X’s famous teaching that, "If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made.. And they won't even admit the knife is there."</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Instead of laughing, such voices should instead be working hard to get justice for all of the people whose lives have been lost, hurt, and otherwise negatively impacted and diminished because of DeSantis’ policies and actions in Florida. But laughter and mocking are far easier, and demands much less, than asking those hard questions about justice and what it will require in the long-term to defeat DeSantis, Trumpism, and the larger culture of cruelty that today’s neofascists and the larger right-wing and “conservative” movement have drawn energy from and made much worse here in America and around the world.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-24807799855591314722024-01-30T08:00:00.003-06:002024-01-30T08:00:00.260-06:00Donald Trump is the Big Boss of the Republican Party Crime Organization -- Which Is Why His MAGA Followers Love Him <div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With a decisive victory in this week's New Hampshire primary, Donald Trump further cemented his control as the unchallenged boss of the Republican Party's political crime organization.<br />The mainstream media and political class have long assumed that Trump’s obvious criminality and autocratic behavior, along with his evidently worsening sociopathic behavior, would ultimately be the cause of his certain downfall. Their reasoning or hope was that when the American people grasped the full horror of Trump's actions, as shown in the Jan. 6 committee hearings under the previous Congress, his multiple criminal indictments, civil verdicts that have found him liable for sexual assault and business fraud, and his generally vile behavior, even Republican voters would finally reject him en masse.</span></div><div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That delusion was especially common among “traditional” and “establishment” Republicans and other anti-Trump conservatives, who convinced themselves that their party still had an honorable core, and that its voters would turn against the former president because of their belief in “law and order”” and “family values.”</span></div><div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In reality, the opposite has happened: Trump’s power as the boss of the Republican political crime organization has grown. The loyalty of his MAGA followers has certainly not weakened, and may have increased. Tens of millions of Americans have eagerly embraced Trump's criminal gang, and many millions more are, at the very least, willing to tolerate it and indulge it.<br />A recent article at <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/03/anti-trump-group-ads-backfired-00125087" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">Politico details</a> the failed efforts of a group of anti-Trump Republicans to use the ex-president’s obvious criminality to undercut his support. The group "quietly tested four TV ads that aimed to weaken the former president by focusing on a central issue of the campaign: His myriad legal troubles":</span></div><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">One spot, which was surveyed before an online panel of Republican primary voters, declared that the indictments against Trump had “worn” him “down” and undercut his ability to win the election. Another said the trials presented “too much baggage” and warned that Democrats would “sensationalize” them to hurt the ex-president. The hardest-hitting commercial raised the specter that Trump would be convicted, leading President Joe Biden to “cruise” to reelection.<br /><br />All of the ads shared one thing in common beyond the topic on which they focused. They all failed or backfired.<br /><br />Three of the four actually boosted Trump’s support among the participants. One — a softer-touch spot that features a voter saying Trump’s trials “worries” him — had no measurable impact on Trump’s numbers. The unaired ads, along with nearly 260 pages of accompanying data analysis, were obtained by POLITICO.<br /><br />Strategists with the conservative anti-Trump political action committee, Win It Back PAC decided to shelve the commercials. They remain unaired. …</span><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Those strategists reached the conclusion that "Trump’s legal problems have, if anything, helped — not hurt — his standing in the primary," and that many Republican voters "see Trump as the victim of the legal system, not a violator of it.</span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">As reported by Politico, several survey participants were even "pointedly defending the former president": </span></span><br /></span></p><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“I strongly disagree with this ad. I don’t think people are giving Trump a fair chance because of who he is,” said one.<br /><br />“The thing that bothers me the most is the filthy lying individuals who are extremely corrupt that are trying to crucify Trump, which is obviously 100 percent unfair,” said another.<br /><br />The memo quotes a third respondent saying: “Stop bashing Trump and stand behind him.”</span></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">None of this should seem mysterious or surprising. There is considerable research by social scientists and other experts that explains the lawless ex-president’s enduring power and appeal.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Most obviously,: Trump’s followers are eager to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/01/trump-wants-revengeand-so-does-his-base/677147/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">seek revenge and retribution</a> against the same people and groups that he does. Even more simply, they love Donald Trump and what they believe he represents. This is especially true for white evangelical Christians, who often view Trump as a prophet, savior or messiah.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Furthermore, there is large base of support for authoritarian and fascist politics in the United States. Many Americans are strongly <a href="https://www.salon.com/2022/09/12/scholar-saw-all-this-coming-americans-do-not-really-understand-liberal-democracy/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">attracted to political strongmen autocrats</a> willing to “bend the rules” in order to "get things done” for “people like them.”</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/01/20/polarization-science-evolution-psychology/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; font-family: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Negative and affective partisanship</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> — meaning a situation when a political party or movement becomes someone's primary identity, creating an us-versus-them worldview in which the other side is not just wrong but evil — along with asymmetrical polarization, white identity politics and racism, misogyny, and hostility toward sexual or gender minorities also contribute greatly to Trump’s persistent levels of support.</span><span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Numerous experts have expressed the view that the MAGA movement is effectively a type of cult, with Trump as its leader. That kind of unhealthy leader-follower bond is difficult to break. Trump’s followers also have what psychologists call an “adhesive relationship” with him, meaning that their individual identities have been subsumed by the MAGA movement and its figurehead.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The <a href="https://hbr.org/2021/07/how-susceptible-are-you-to-the-sunk-cost-fallacy" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">"sunk cost effect"</a> may also play a role. MAGA partisans have invested so much time, money, energy and passion in Trump that they literally cannot abandon him, and only attach themselves more strongly when faced with challenges to the movement.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A generalized hostility to expert knowledge, exacerbated by the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/04/02/our-dunning-kruger-president-trumps-arrogance-and-ignorance-are-killing-people/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Dunning-Kruger effect</a>, also influences the MAGA horde's loyalty to Trump. They may see actual experts and other serious people on TV condemning Trump, citing substantive and what should be compelling evidence as to why he should be removed from public life and punished for his obvious crimes. Trump's followers are likely to reject these experts out of hand, believing that they understand more about law, politics and Trump’s behavior than the despised "elites" on TV. They have "done their own research," after all. New information that challenges their existing beliefs, in that context, is likely to <a href="https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/belief-perseverance" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">backfire</a>.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then there are those who "<a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/201608/donald-trump-high-in-the-dark-triad" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">just want to see the world burn</a>." So-called conservative views are highly correlated with what psychologists describe as the <a href="https://qz.com/1462622/republicans-have-more-psychopathic-traits-than-democrats-according-to-a-psychology-survey" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">“dark triad” of personality traits</a>: psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The MAGA movement and American neofascism are the end result of decades of conditioning and socialization by the right-wing echo chamber and propaganda disinformation machine. This is part of a much larger closed episteme and alternate reality that includes right-wing churches, the internet and social media, and neighborhoods, communities and friendship networks, which in total function as <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/09/05/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-united-states-what-research-says-pub-90457" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">political silos</a>. MAGA believers and other hardcore “conservatives” are almost never exposed to contrary information, let alone to the real facts about Trump’s lawlessness, corruption and danger. </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a recent column for the New Republic, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/178256/baltimore-sun-liberal-billionaires-media-failure" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">Michael Tomasky explores</a> the right-wing takeover of local news in America and the evident harm this has done to our democracy, civil society and political culture.</span></p><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?<br /><br />Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today. …</span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What will the result of this right-wing conquest be, Tomasky wonders, a generation from now?</span></p><blockquote style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Will we be raising a generation of children in two-thirds of the country who believe that fossil fuels are great and trees cause pollution, that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War, that tax cuts always raise revenue, and that the “Democrat” Party stole the 2020 election? Yes, we will. And it will happen because too many people on the liberal side refused to grasp what [Rupert] Murdoch, [Phil] Anschutz, [David] Smith, and Viktor Orbán see so clearly. Have your own media.</span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whatever may happen to Donald Trump in the courtroom(s) and over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, one thing is almost certain: Trumpism and American neofascism will remain powerful forces in American society for a long time. Trump's followers aren't going to disappear; their movement is much larger than one person or leader. Lawlessness and criminality as a method for Republicans to get and keep unchecked power are here to stay, and are obvious symptoms of a profoundly sick political culture. Unless this underlying sickness in America’s political culture can be healed, Trump’s supporters will keep on fighting for their overlord — until the day comes when they transfer their love and loyalty to his chosen successor.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-57859585092757304062024-01-30T01:35:00.002-06:002024-01-30T01:35:22.221-06:00Aspiring Dictator Donald Trump Continues to Escalate His Threats of Violence....And As Usual the Mainstream News Media Looks Away<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Donald Tru<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">mp is continuing his campaign of public threats to injure, imprison or kill his perceived personal enemies, and other foes of the MAGA movement, if and when he takes power a year from now. The most recent example came in a series of posts on Truth Social last Thursday morning. Although certain aspects of these posts made headlines with respect to Trump's preposterous claims of immunity, the full context is important.</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">In his trademark all-caps prose, Trump proposed that any U.S president "MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION." It's unusually generous, by Trump's standards, even to consider other actual or hypothetical presidents. Then he continued:</span></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT “CROSS THE LINE” MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY. EXAMPLE: <i><b>YOU CAN’T STOP POLICE FROM DOING THE JOB OF STRONG & EFFECTIVE CRIME PREVENTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE OCCASIONAL “ROGUE COP” OR “BAD APPLE.” SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH “GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.”</b></i> ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT! [Emphasis added.]</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For Trump to claim that police must be allowed free rein to commit acts of violence with impunity was not a random "example." Its implications should be obvious. This from the same man whose attorney recently argued in federal court that Trump, as president, could have ordered political rivals executed and accepted bribes without being held accountable before the law. (Under this ludicrous theory, impeachment is the only recourse against a criminal or corrupt president.) </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This also from the same man who publicly <a href="https://www.salon.com/2023/09/27/the-real-reason-why-donald-wants-gen-milley-to-be/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">threatened the life</a> of Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for alleged disloyalty because Milley refused to support a coup attempt against American democracy and the Constitution. And from the same man who has repeatedly threatened to have President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, the judges and prosecutors in his various trials and virtually anyone else (<a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/175737/trump-deranged-milley-media-treason" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">including journalists</a>) who attempts to hold him responsible for his crimes prosecuted for “treason.” As Trump is well aware, the traditional punishment for treason is execution.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Trump no longer bothers to conceal his desire to rule as dictator of a virtual police state, and to claim the right and power to imprison, torture and execute any and all who oppose him.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading expert on fascism, discussed Trump’s murderous intent in a Thursday social media post:</span></span><br /></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Trump is telling Americans very clearly that he will be jailing and killing Americans. Anyone who votes for him is complicit with these future crimes because of this transparency & these threats. Americans cannot say they did not know ahead of time.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">Journalist Luke Zaleski echoed that warning:</span></span><br /></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Trump is telling you he’s gonna send his hessians to abuse you without due process. He’s a dictator emerging to take revenge on US citizens. Trump wants revenge. He’s a sick puppy, folks — and he’ll sic his dogs on anyone who fights to save America from him.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This “right” of the leader and ruling party to kill or abuse members of the public with impunity, and to reshape the law to their purposes, is a defining feature of dictatorships and autocracies.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Trump’s most recent threats against the American people (and, by implication, against democracy and civil society) attracted some mainstream news coverage for a day or so before disappearing down the memory hole. (<a href="https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-immunity-2024-rcna134501" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">Zeeshan Aleem’s essay</a> at MSNBC was a notable exception).</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Even so, there was little discussion of Trump’s specific threat or his self-comparison to a violent "rogue cop," licensed to beat, torture, abduct or murder citizens with "total immunity" from prosecution. At this point, some of the most stalwart and reliable voices in the mainstream media have fallen into the trap of normalizing Trump’s deviant behavior. One prominent commentator, for example, wrote about Trump’s most recent threats while entirely ignoring his "bad apple" analogy. That commentator also never offered any clear statement or interpretation of what Trump's promises of violent revenge will mean for the American people in practice. Instead, this journalist relied on quoting someone else, in rather too oblique a fashion, to get nearer the point. </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That kind of political ventriloquism is utterly inadequate to the task of defeating Trumpism and the larger neofascist movement. Those people with a public platform who claim to defend democracy have a responsibility to be direct, bold and consistent in their truth-telling.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Why do we still face this problem? Why has the mainstream news media as an institution so consistently failed to focus on the MAGA movement’s promises, threats and acts of political violence and thuggery?<span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are many reasons. Even after almost nine years of Trump's central role in our political life, many in the mainstream media still believe that "normal" politics and the supposed institutions of democracy will be enough stop Trump and today’s Republican fascists. What follows from that is the naive hope or belief that continuing to cover Trump as a normal candidate, according to obsolete horserace standards of “fairness” and “balance,” will somehow cause our democracy crisis to go away. Coverage of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, as Trump's rivals have fallen away, represented a brief return to familiar and comfortable terrain for the mainstream news media. But there is nothing familiar or comfortable about the Trumpocene era, and that security blanket will shortly be ripped away.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course there's also the ad revenue, along with the clicks, shares and "traffic" — the material incentives, in other words — that may flow from normalizing Trump and his behavior. This is motivated, not unreasonably, by a fear that telling the American people what they <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">need</em> to hear about this worsening crisis, instead of what they <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">want</em> to hear, will result in backlash and buzzkill, meaning lower revenues. The attention economy, like other aspects of consumer capitalism, is demand-driven. As I have repeatedly warned in this space and elsewhere, hope-peddling, happy-pill selling and catering to the emotional immaturity of the American public can be a lucrative business. </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Let's not overlook that the “news media” consists of real people and human organizations: Trump's threats against his supposed enemies, which surely include journalists, are frightening and upsetting. Ignoring or downplaying the seriousness of those threats is an understandable reaction to stress that makes it easier to go to work every day. Responding appropriately to this crisis is, without question, damaging to one’s emotional, spiritual and physical health.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Realpolitik and self-interest may also be at play. Some reporters, editors and producers in mainstream media are positioning themselves with the expectation that Trump will win the election. They want access to his regime; the first Trump presidency was a media feeding frenzy. </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Furthermore, many leading voices in the media, especially the professional centrists and institutionalists, have been conditioned by privilege to believe they are immune from any possible danger or threat, even from a dictatorial regime. Because of their skin color, their gender and sexual orientation, their class backgrounds and their lives rich with social and cultural capital, they cannot imagine they ever could become targets of state-sponsored violence. They may well learn otherwise.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As historian Heather Cox Richardson told me recently:</span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">A lot of privileged white men simply do not believe that there's a different way to look at the world than theirs. And they also don't believe that anything could happen to them. ... [M]any of them, in my experience, seem to believe that everybody ideally lives in a world in which they make all their own decisions, and they have no demands on them. … Now, I don't know a woman who approaches the world that way. Because there are always family demands and friends’ demands and children and work demands. There's a web of demands on you. You start from a position in which you can't imagine that you can do whatever you want under any circumstances. And then if you take a step beyond that and you actually add into it, people who wish you ill ... the world feels much more like a web than a world in which you can do anything you want. I can imagine a world in which I am not either allowed to do what I want, but also in which my very life is at stake. I sometimes think that that's much easier for somebody like me to imagine, who's worked as a waitress ... than for somebody who came from a middle class suburb and went to a good school and has a good solid job.</span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a <a href="https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-17-metaphors-journalists-live-by-part-i/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(228, 42, 29) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">series of essays</a> at The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein shared a conversation he had with journalist Jeff Sharlet about the New York Times and its failings. Sharlet told him that on many previous occasions he had resisted others' use of the word "fascist," until he finally concluded that, in the Trump era, "This is the real deal. There’s a real fascist movement. And I don’t think we have on the table all the storytelling tools we need to counter it."</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The result was Sharlet's book "The Undertow," based on holding "hundreds of conversations, witnessing dozens of political and church services, and logging thousands of miles on the road." But in a public discussion with Sharlet, an unnamed New York Times journalist — who evidently had not read Sharlet's book — rejected the word "fascism": </span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">He was especially smug in the first utterance he offered to the audience: “Yeah, I don’t know if I would use that word” — his eyebrows arched disapprovingly — “it’s not a word we use in The New York Times.”<br /><br />Then he practically giggled.<br /><br />Sharlet then directed a question to him — “with love and affection for The New York Times and the dilemma that you’re in: What is the argument against calling that ‘fascism’?” ...<br /><br />“For the same reason we don’t call Trump ‘racist.’ It’s more powerful to say what something is than to offer a label on it that is going to be debated, you know, and distract from the reporting that goes into it."<br /><br />Sharlet: “Who is debating Trump’s racism right now?”<br /><br />Mr. Times: “You can say something is ‘racist.’ You can say something is a racist thing. But putting a label on someone is distorting from the reporting that we do. And the reporting is much harder. And much more powerful than the writing” — what he implied was the only thing Sharlet did, perhaps in an armchair in a book-lined study, smoking a pipe, mongering labels. “And people are welcome to label things however they want, but there’s frankly nobody else doing the reporting that we do. ... That’s what ten million people are subscribing to The New York Times for … And not to like sound too high and mighty, but the market has spoken, and they like what we’re doing.”</span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Privilege is the ability to avoid discomfort, and to bend subjective reality to fit your whims and desires. Black and brown people, Muslims, Jews, women, the LGBTQ community and members of other marginalized and targeted groups lack such a luxury. The mainstream media’s willful blindness to the threat of Trump and his movement, and what it will mean if he takes power in 2025, is creating the conditions for an American dictatorship and its reign of terror.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-79080300714564034522023-04-07T08:00:00.002-05:002023-04-07T08:00:00.258-05:00It is Not a "Culture War": The Republicans and "Conservatives" are Actually Waging a Fascist War on Multiracial DemocracyAmerica is not mired in a culture war. In reality, today's Republican Party and larger "conservative" movement are waging a fascist war against multiracial pluralist democracy and human freedom. Ultimately, to not understand how the so-called culture war is actually a fascist war against American democracy is to almost ensure being rolled over by those evil forces.<br /><br />Many political observers point to Pat Buchanan's infamous 1992 speech at the GOP national convention as the beginning of the so-called culture war in America. However, the roots of this fascist and authoritarian campaign are much older: Jim and Jane Crow and white-on-black chattel slavery, genocide against First Nations peoples and white settler colonialism are America's native forms of fascism. When located in the proper historical context, neofascism and the Age of Trump are properly understood as being but the most current manifestation of much older birth defects in American democracy and society.<br /><br />In a very important recent essay in the Guardian, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/african-american-studies-republican-ban-florida">Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley highlights how the Republican fascist thought crime laws in Florida and other parts of the country</a> targeting the teaching of African-American history (and the country's real history more generally) are examples of a much larger Orwellian project:<br /><br />These laws have been represented by many as a "culture war". This framing is a dangerous falsification of reality. A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators' speech are no such thing – unlike a culture war, the GOP's recent turn has no place in a democracy. To understand why, consider their consequences. <br /><br />Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis and the other Republican-fascists are using the myth of American Exceptionalism and what sociologists describe as "the white racial frame" to erase the country's real history and its challenges and complexities to advance an anti-democracy project that eliminates critical thinking and free speech.<br /><br />Stanley continues:<br /><blockquote>It is frequently claimed by proponents of such laws that banning discussion of structural racism and intersectionality is freeing schools of indoctrination. And yet indoctrination rarely takes place by allowing the free flow of ideas. Indoctrination instead rather takes places by banning ideas. Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as "freedom from indoctrination" is as Orwellian as politics gets.….<br /><br />Most frighteningly, these laws are meant to intimidate educators, to punish them for speaking freely by threatening their jobs, their teaching licenses, and more. The passing of these laws signals the dawn of a new authoritarian age in the United States, where the state uses laws restricting speech to intimidate, bully and punish educators, forcing them to submit to the ideology of the dominant majority or lose their livelihoods, and even their freedom.</blockquote>So why have the mainstream news media and political class been so wrong in their understanding of this true nature of the "culture war"?<br /><br />The American political class and mainstream news media — even seven years into the Age of Trump and a coup attempt on Jan. 6 — still have a normalcy bias. As institutions and individuals, they have convinced themselves that American neofascism is a blip on the radar, an aberration, that will inevitably be replaced by a return to "normal" and "the good old days." The American news media and political class are psychologically, emotionally, and financially committed to that narrative even if the facts do not support it.<br /><br />Moreover, the idea that America is experiencing a culture war instead of a fascist war on democracy and freedom fits neatly into a narrative framework of momentary troubles that will soon pass and not an existential crisis that will fundamentally change the order of things in the country.<br /><br />The American political class and mainstream news media are self-limiting: they enforce their own formal and informal rules and norms about how they conceptualize and work through political questions and what are considered "realistic" and "reasonable" answers. Admitting that the Republican Party and "conservative" movement are neofascists who reject multiracial democracy would involve a type of paradigm shift that the news media and political class would a priori reject. Careerists and others who are successful in those spheres of influence know what the rules are and adhere to them closely lest they be punished or perhaps even exiled.<br /><br />In total, the American mainstream news media and political class are possessed by a type of inertia, intellectual laziness and incurious behavior where it is easier to go along with the herd and hive mind about America's democratic institutions and culture as being enduring and permanent than to confront the epistemic crisis that ascendant neofascism represents.<br /><br />The American mainstream news media and political class are also limited in their ability to properly respond to the country's democracy crisis because of a failure of imagination. It is a type of common sense among the Democrats and mainstream centrist liberals and progressives that "real politics" (economic and other material concerns about the country's "institutions" and society more broadly) are somehow separate and distinct from "culture war" issues.<br /><br />By comparison, and like other more sophisticated thinkers on the left, the Republican fascists and other members of the global right correctly understand that culture, emotions, material concerns and "serious politics" are all part of a larger struggle to win and keep political power across society. In this framework, culture, emotions and material realities are all interconnected. While too many Democrats and mainstream liberals and progressives (and others committed to the liberal democratic project in America) tend to silo off questions of politics and culture, the neofascists are engaged in a revolutionary project that does not make that error in thinking.<br /><br />The fascist project is fundamentally a cultural project. As a first step in adapting to the reality that the culture war is actually a fascist war on democracy and freedom, the news media and political class need to change their language and political grammar. As commonly used, "culture war" is empty language. It is vague and imprecise.<br /><br />A war is waged by one group of people against another. In the context of "the culture wars," this means war by the Republican fascists and their forces against Black and brown people, women, the LGBTQ community, and other disadvantaged and marginalized groups. What are the lived consequences of this fascist "culture war"? People's lives are literally being imperiled, be it from direct violence such as hate crimes or taking away civil and human rights and bodily autonomy. In the example of how gun rights are now treated as a culture war issue, this translates into how gun violence is a public health crisis that needlessly kills tens of thousands of people each year in the United States.<br /><br />Channeling the literary theorist and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the American mainstream news media and political class cannot understand the true nature and scope of the country's democracy crisis because "culture war" is language that limits their capacity to fully understand political reality.<br /><br />On this, Stanley concludes and warns in his Guardian essay that:<br /><blockquote>It is clear that the chief agenda of the GOP is to advance a set of speech laws that criminalize discussion in schools of anything but the white heterosexual majority's perspective. The media's portrayal of these laws as moves in the "culture wars" is an unconscionable misrepresentation of fascism.</blockquote>The American mainstream news media and political class must recalibrate and rethink their approach to conceptualizing, theorizing, communicating, and responding to the country's democracy crisis and its deep origins. The crisis is widespread and cultural, as opposed to something temporary and caused by one person or a party that has temporarily lost its way.<br /><br />But that will take hard work and require jettisoning obsolete norms and beliefs about American politics and society. There are few material incentives in terms of one's career or prestige for doing that type of difficult and risky work. Confronting a democracy crisis (or other such serious troubles) demands boldness but the institutions, almost by definition, are created and maintained by professional centrists and wish-casters who cling to "the normal" and a lost past when the latter are mostly poisonous lies — and even more so — in the Age of Trump and ascendant neofascism.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-3663726366851393622023-04-06T12:00:00.024-05:002023-04-06T12:00:00.282-05:00Donald Trump and His Neofascist MAGA Movement Are Our National Malady -- Indicting and Imprisoning Trump For His Many Crimes Will Not Cure the Deep SicknessLast Thursday, Donald Trump, the twice impeached president and coup leader, a man who has engaged in a decades-long crime spree, was indicted in Manhattan for alleged crimes connected to hush money payments and other offenses during his 2016 presidential campaign. Of his many historic "distinctions," Trump is now the first former president to ever be indicted in criminal court. <div><br /></div>On Monday, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-indictment-stormy-daniels-news-04-03-23/index.html">Trump was arraigned in Manhattan</a> on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump was then released. <div><br /></div><div>He would travel to his Mar-a-Lago redoubt and headquarters where that night he attempted to recharge himself with narcissistic energy he sucked from his cult members during a rage-filled yet quite flaccid speech where he listed his grievances and threatened "justice". <div><br />I was half asleep and somewhat medicated when Trump's indictment was announced on the television news. When I heard the voices on the television talking about "Trump" and "New York" and "indictment," I opened my eyes, allowed myself a small smile, and went soundly back to sleep on the couch.<br /><br />Why didn't I rush to my computer to write a too-fast immediate response to the "breaking news" as so many of the other people with a public platform and voice did? Well, late Wednesday night I did something quite careless and stupid. I was working on a project at home and let my mind wander for a second. In that briefest of moments, I cut myself with a very sharp knife. I heard myself say aloud, "You big dummy! You are going to the hospital. That is lots of blood. And yes, that is a bone. And no, you most certainly cannot use crazy glue to fix it."<br /><br />For the next four hours, I sat in the emergency room with my hand wrapped in gauze and bleeding inside a plastic ziplock bag. I watched all of the other people piled inside the emergency room. They sat on chairs. Others were laying on the ground. Some were slumped over in wheelchairs. There were a few people who found a way to sleep while standing up against a wall. <div><br /></div><div>There were dozens of homeless people in the emergency room as well. It was cold outside, and the hospital was a type of temporary safe harbor. I counted at least three people who were visibly covered in their own filth. One man was laid out on the ground, rolling around in his own waste. Was he high? Drunk? Exhausted? Mentally ill? All or none of these things? I do not know. The nurses and security guards knew that poor soul by name. They were frustrated with him because he was "noncompliant." The police were called and they carried the poor man outside and dumped him on the sidewalk. </div><div><br /></div><div>A team of janitors swooped in. They quickly cleaned up the carpet and floor while not uttering a grumble or any other audible sound of disgust. They didn't even make an obvious gesture of frustration or annoyance. The three janitors were stoic and dutiful. When those men finally get home, they will take off all their clothes and put them all in a garbage bag outside the front door. I watched my father do that same thing many times.<br /><br />There were other people in the emergency room too, most of them like the woman who would be my "neighbor" in the examination room. She used the emergency room as her regular physician. I counted ten problems in need of care. The doctors would give her prescriptions for eight different medicines.<br /><br />Too many Americans want a miracle cure for Trumpism.<br /><br />"Do you have a regular physician?" the doctor asked her. "No." <br /><br />"How long have you had these symptoms?" She replied: "More than a month."<br /><br />"When was the last time you had a physical?"<br /><br />"Years."<br /><br />"What do you do for a living?" She said, "I am outside most of the time, I deliver food."<br /><br />My "neighbor" carried an insulated cube-shaped bag with her to the emergency room. She clung to it. She told the doctor that she was going right back to work after she leaves the emergency room and fills the prescriptions. The company she works for pays her less than the minimum wage, which translates into a few dollars an hour.<br /><br />In its own perverse way, the emergency room is a radically "democratic" space. Of course, here in America wealth and income determine both access to and the quality of healthcare. Race even more so. How gender and sexuality and citizenship status and all the other markers that deem some more privileged and advantaged in American society, and others less so, most certainly matter in terms of health care. Public health and other experts have shown that, by many measures, black women (regardless of income and wealth) suffer the most from America's health inequities.<br /><br />America's healthcare system is most certainly not "the best in the world". In reality, it is very sick and broken. All of the people in the emergency room need help; acute need is a type of immediate social leveler.<br /><br />There is a strange intimacy that comes with sickness and emergency rooms as well, where people are pretending to ignore each another while simultaneously being keenly aware of each other. After waiting for several hours, I was tempted to use the tiny amount of social capital I had accrued over these years to cut ahead in line. I ultimately decided not to. I am a Black working-class person who does not possess the arrogance and class entitlement and racial privilege to do such a thing unnecessarily for reasons of mere convenience.<br /><br />As I sat in the emergency room I tried to stay calm. I meditated. I made up stories about the people around me based on the shoes they were wearing (or not). My mind wandered back to Donald Trump. Would he be indicted? What happens next? What if he wins back the White House? Do the American people realize how much trouble they are already in? Do they have any idea of how much more trouble and pain awaits them?<br /><br />"This indictment will not succeed in repairing our democracy. But not indicting him would make it that much harder to ever repair our democracy."<br /><br />Then I thought to myself, "You are in the hospital emergency room bleeding into a ziplock bag, waiting to get a bunch of stitches, trying to not get COVID, and you can't get that man out of your head. You are not well."<br /><br />I rebutted my own inner dialogue.<br /><br />"We are not well. None of us are anymore. It is better and more healthy to acknowledge that reality than to pretend otherwise. Any reasonably honest and observant person who has lived in America can tell you that this country is sick and has gone somewhat mad. Hell, almost every week there are Americans who sacrifice children to the <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/online/2012/12/15/our-moloch/">Gun God Moloch</a> in the name of 'freedom' and 'rights'. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel told us that 'In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty - all are responsible'. He is, of course, correct."<br /><br />Several years ago, one of Donald Trump's biographers warned me that spending so much time thinking about Trump (or even worse being in his company) is not healthy; Trump has a dark energy about him that can get inside of your head if you are not careful. Trump's biographer, too, was correct.<br /><br />Trump and his neofascist movement are our national malady. We, the Americans, need serious help and healing.<br /><br />Yet because of, and not despite, all the harm Trump and his neofascist movement and their allies have caused to the country, its democracy, its people, and future, there are many tens of millions of Americans who want him back in the White House. In total, this is all much more than a severe political malady. It is a type of moral and ethical sickness.<br /><br />Here is an even more frightening reality about Trump, neofascism, and our other national maladies: there are tens of millions of Americans who want to be sick. Or alternatively, they have lost the ability to discern what is healthy from what is unhealthy and see Trumpism as a cure instead of poison. And among both groups, a type of collective sociopathy and sadism has taken hold in the form of the many Americans who don't care how sick they are as long as they can make other people sicker than them. In his very personal and intimate book Our Malady, historian Timothy Snyder explains:<br /><blockquote>Everyone is drawn into a politics of pain that leads to mass death. Opposing health care because you suspect it helps the underserving is like pushing someone off a cliff and then jumping yourself, thinking that your fall with be cushioned by the corpse of the person you murdered. It is like playing a round of Russian roulette in which you load one bullet in the cylinder of your revolver and two in the other fellow's. But how about not jumping off cliffs; how about not playing Russian roulette? How about we live and let live, and all live longer and better?</blockquote>At its core, Trump and our nation's many maladies are a painful reminder of the inherent connection between the health of a democracy and the health of its members. On this, Snyder also writes:<br /><blockquote>America is supposed to be about freedom, but illness and fear render us less free. To be free is to become ourselves, to move through the world following our values and desires. Each of us has a right to pursue happiness and to leave a trace. Freedom is impossible when we are too ill to conceive of happiness and too weak to pursue it. It is unattainable when we lack the knowledge we need to make meaningful choice, especially about health.</blockquote>Whatever the verdict is in the Stormy Daniels case, Donald Trump will, in almost all likelihood, not go to jail. There is one system of justice rich white men; there is another one for everybody else.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the historic indictment and trial of Trump is an important step towards some type of national healing. Moreover, District Attorney Bragg's case against Trump may be part of a larger coordination game where other indictments will quickly follow now that the supposed taboo against indicting a former president has been broken.<br /><br />I remain deeply concerned that too many Americans want a miracle cure for Trumpism and American neofascism. To that end, they have convinced themselves that putting Donald Trump on trial for his many obvious crimes, and then convicting him, will heal the nation. Such an outcome will do no such thing by itself.<br /><br />In a recent essay,<a href="https://america.substack.com/p/donald-trump-is-indicted-finally"> journalist and author Steven Beschloss echoes my concerns</a>:<br /><blockquote>1. Donald Trump was a known criminal long before nearly 63 million Americans voted for him to control the levers of power. As much as he is responsible for his criminal exploitation of that power, we must understand and fix the sickness in the body politic that enabled him to take office.<br /><br />2. This indictment will not succeed in repairing our democracy. But not indicting him would make it that much harder to ever repair our democracy.</blockquote>A permanent cure for America's many national maladies will require much hard work. The malady is far greater than one man. As I have warned before, Trumpism and American neofascism are a sickness that is down in the bones, and which has had years to spread to the brain and other major organs. The maladies are spiritual as well.<br /><br />Do the American people want to be well, or do they want to be sick? And do they even know the difference anymore?<br /><br />I ended up in the emergency room because of a stupid mistake that I will do my best to never repeat. My hand and fingers hurt as I write this because of that same stupid mistake. Tens of millions of Americans are waiting to put Trump back in the White House. That is no stupid mistake. It's an act of self-inflicted harm — and wholly preventable.</div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-56158194446174551902023-04-06T02:01:00.002-05:002023-04-06T02:04:00.128-05:00When Prophecy Truly Fails: Donald Trump is Now the MAGA Fascist Jesus<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span face="Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white;">T</span><span face="Helvetica, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">he book "When Prophecy Fails" is a classic work of social psychology that examines a UFO doomsday cult waiting for the end of the world. Of course, the special day arrives, and the world does not end. How do the cult members respond to this failure? By becoming more convinced that the prophecy is correct.</span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">Donald Trump is at the center of a similar pseudo-religious cult prophecy as well. His most loyal followers truly believe him to be a type of divine, messianic, and all-powerful leader. In reality, there is nothing divine or messianic about Donald Trump. He is a mere mortal who has been credibly accused of many serious crimes. Nevertheless, right-wing Christian evangelicals and Christofascists (to the degree those two groups are distinct and separate from one another) have <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/3/5/16796892/trump-cyrus-christian-right-bible-cbn-evangelical-propaganda" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e42a1d; text-decoration-line: none;">rationalized their support of Donald Trump (and Trumpism) through the biblical myth of Cyrus</a>. The belief is that God uses a wicked man as a tool of divine destiny and will.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">Donald Trump is not a practicing Christian; moreover, he looks very uncomfortable in church and at other religious gatherings. In reality, Donald Trump is a pathological malignant narcissist and compulsive liar who is the God of his own personal religion and self-contained universe. Trump views right-wing Christians in a transactional way. They are a tool to help him get and keep more power.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">Still, white right-wing Christian evangelicals' faith in Trump the prophetic figure was rewarded grandly. While president, Trump enacted a range of policies that furthered the creation of a white Christofascist theocracy in America. The white right views him as a revolutionary leader, a force of destiny and history, a Destructor who will force a new age where diversity, pluralism and globalism are destroyed and replaced by a White Christian empire where white men rule unopposed over all things. The QAnon conspiracy cult with its apocalyptic obsession over Trump's retributive act of destruction known as "the Storm" is one example. </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The inherent nature of cults, prophecies and divine (paranormal) predictions is that they do not obey the rules of rationality, empiricism, or reason. As such, these prophecies and other such acts of magical thinking can be twisted to fit any scenario or desired outcome.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">To that point, at his recent 2024 presidential campaign rally in Waco (which was attended by more than 10,000 followers), Trump spoke of being a victim of a conspiracy, and a man who is being persecuted as part of a witch hunt</span>. Trump of course, channeling Hitler or some other great tyrant, promised to be a force of retribution and revenge who will engage in a "final battle" against his and the MAGA movement's so-called enemies. </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65078418" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e42a1d; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">The BBC described Trump's Waco rally in the following way</a>: "Thousands of the former president's supporters wandered through Trump merchandise tents, where they bought t-shirts emblazoned with "God, guns and Trump" and "Trump won." </span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">Through this logic, any attempt to hold Trump accountable under the rule of law is translated into being an attack on the members of his MAGA movement and personality cult.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">The timing and choice of Waco to hold Trump's first major 2024 presidential campaign rally was not a mistake or coincidence: that city is a type of holy ground for the white right and larger American antigovernment movement because of its connection to the tragic 1993 raid by law enforcement on the Branch Davidian compound that resulted in the deaths of more than 80 people. By hosting his rally in Waco, Trump presented himself as a type of cult leader and martyr figure who is willing to die and kill for his followers.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11900325/Branch-Davidians-thrilled-Gods-battering-ram-Trump-coming-Waco-David-Koresh-30th-anniversary.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e42a1d; text-decoration-line: none;">In a story at the Daily Mail, members of the Branch Davidian cult, including its current pastor, explained how they view Trump as a type of prophet and "God's battering ram"</a> for their cause:</span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Branch Davidians are said to consider the former president as 'the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.'<br /><br />The FBI's raid on the group's compound, Mount Carmel, which the Branch Davidians view as a government overstep, is similar to what they claim happened to Trump.<br /><br />The former president, 76, is set to hold a rally in Waco this afternoon, coinciding with 30th anniversary of the FBI raid on Branch Davidians formerly led by David Koresh.<br /><br />Trump's holding of a rally in Waco is 'a statement — that he was sieged by the F.B.I. at Mar-a-Lago and that they were accusing him of different things that aren't really true, just like David Koresh was accused by the F.B.I. when they sieged him,' Koresh's successor, Pastor Charles Pace, told the New York Times.</span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">On Tuesday, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2023/04/04/the-case-against-trump-a-porn-star-a-conspiracy-a-payoff-a-cover-up/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e42a1d; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Donald Trump peacefully surrendered to law enforcement authorities and was arraigned in a Manhattan courthouse for alleged crimes</a> connected to hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is now the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges in the country's history.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">Trump's followers – at his encouragement – have taken his indictment (and now arrest) as "proof" that he is being "persecuted" like Jesus Christ or some other type of divine mythological figure.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222;">In a recent feature at <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/contributor/tess-owen" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e42a1d; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Vice</a>, reporter Tess Owen provides these details:</span><br /></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The former president has long played a key role in the imaginations of Christian nationalists, who believe America is an inherently Christian nation, should have Christian laws, and that Trump is their savior. Christian nationalist language has seeped into MAGA-world rhetoric, but Trump's imminent arrest has taken it to new heights. <br /><br />Lawyer Joseph McBride, who is representing a handful of Jan. 6 defendants, thinks that the timing of Trump's likely arrest is notable.<br /><br />"President Trump will be arrested during lent—a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ," McBride wrote on Twitter. "As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the 3rd day, so too will @realdonaldtrump."<br /><br />When he faced some pushback on comparing Trump's plight to Jesus Christ's hours-long torture, McBride doubled down. "JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP," McBride tweeted. "DEAL WITH IT."<br /><br />Other Trump supporters see eerie similarities between the Manhattan DA and the Romans who crucified Jesus.<br /><br />"Rome tried to silence a peaceful leader via political persecution, and ended up creating the most pervasive & permanent religious figure in all of world history," MAGA-world influencer Reanna Dilley wrote on Twitter. "Good fucking luck, New York."<br /><br />Owen continues, "On Monday night, a Christian nationalist group called Pastors for Trump held a National Prayer Call on his behalf. Trump allies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn joined the call, hosted by Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer.<br /><br />"Father, right now, I thank you for President Donald J. Trump and God I thank you for all that you've done to him and through him and for him over the last eight years," Lahmeyer said. "We ask that every single person that refuses to submit to your will in Washington D.C., you would uproot them and you would remove them and replace them with men and women who will submit to the will of God.""</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">On Tuesday afternoon, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene held a poorly attended rally in support of Trump outside of the Manhattan courthouse where the disgraced former president was being arraigned. During an interview before the event – <a href="https://www.salon.com/2023/04/04/marjorie-taylor-greene-flees-her-own-indictment-rally-after-being-drowned-out-by-hecklers/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e42a1d; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">which Greene retreated from after being heckled by a much larger group of counter-protesters</a> – she also elevated Trump to the level of Jesus Christ.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">"Trump is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested today. Nelson Mandela was arrested, served time in prison. Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government."</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.salon.com/2023/04/04/its-kind-of-a-jesus-christ-thing-rejected-plan-for-quiet-arraignment--demanded-spectacle/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e42a1d; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Rolling Stone reports how the disgraced former president wanted a high-profile surrender for purposes of propaganda and political theater</a>, during which he would show the world how he is a "Jesus Christ"-like figure:</span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Secret Service had argued in favor of holding the proceedings outside of court business hours, at night with minimal cameras and less risk. But Trump, a source close to his legal team says, wants to create the type of scene that he believes will galvanize his supporters.<br /><br />"It's kind of a Jesus Christ thing. He is saying, 'I'm absorbing all this pain from all around from everywhere so you don't have to,' " says the source. Describing the message Trump hopes to send his supporters, the source says: " 'If they can do this to me they can do this to you,' and that's a powerful message."</span></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">The elevation of Donald Trump to the level of god or prophet or some other tool of destiny by his followers and enablers represents a much larger trend among the American right-wing, "conservative movement" and other neofascists and malign actors. Today's Republican Party and "conservative" movement have abandoned any pretense of normal politics and instead have fully committed themselves to anti-rationality, anti-intellectualism, a rejection of learned real expertise, religious fundamentalism, conspiracism, "alternative facts" and the "Big Lie." This is a type of religious politics that is antithetical to real democracy.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Trump's indictment and arrest may not result in massive and immediate violence by his followers, b</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">ut the danger should not be minimized.</span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; margin: 20px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit;">Public opinion and other research show that millions of Trump followers are radicalized and support (and a not insignificant number of which are willing to participate in) acts of violence on Donald Trump's behalf in the name of a MAGA holy war if he were to issue such a declaration. As seen on Jan. 6 and beyond, such people are capable of doing anything to get and keep corrupt power. Why? Because they are engaged in a holy war by their "God."</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-12776012287718435762021-10-01T23:02:00.001-05:002021-10-05T00:31:39.213-05:00New Public Opinion Research Shows That Tens of Millions of (White) Americans Are Prepared to Use Violence to Put Donald Trump Back in OfficeTwo weekends ago, Trump loyalists gathered in Washington for the "Justice for J6" rally, a supposed show of solidarity with the "political prisoners" arrested for their alleged (or confessed) participation in <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/08/04/trumps-coup-same-so-close-to-working--do-the-american-people-even-care/">the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.</a><br /><br />Trump's Republican-fascists and their propagandists have elevated these <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/09/07/black-cop-shoots-white-woman/">hooligans, vandals and (in many cases) terrorists to the status of martyrs and patriots as a way of legitimizing their anti-democratic movement</a>, creating sympathy among Trump's faithful that can be exploited for fundraising and, of course, recruiting and encouraging more extremists to the cause. <br /><br />Despite warnings from the Capitol Police, DHS and other authorities that more violence was possible, the rally on Sept. 18 was a tame and peaceful affair. <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/september-18-rally-false-flag/">No more than a few hundred Trump cultists attended</a>, greatly outnumbered by law enforcement and the news media. This low turnout was widely mocked among the chattering class, liberals and progressives of the "resistance" and others who oppose Trump and his movement.<br /><br />As I have argued before, such reactions are shortsighted and ill-advised — another example among many of the way America's political class, news media and the public at large still does not understand the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/21/politics/extremist-groups-violence-post-january-6-criminal-charges/index.html">nature of the threat</a> they face from <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/09/24/fascism-is-a-mind-killer--and-version-is-destroying-americans-grasp-of-reality/">the Republican-fascist movement and the larger white right.</a><br /><br />Experts on domestic terrorism have repeatedly warned that <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9154623/General-McChrystal-compares-MAGA-riot-evolution-Al-Qaeda.html">in the aftermath of Jan. 6 many militant Trumpists and other neofascists</a> are operating more covertly, perhaps by breaking up into small cells that are difficult for law enforcement to track and apprehend. Right-wing militants and terrorists are more likely to attack "soft targets" as opposed to widely publicized events and locations where law enforcement is sure to be present.<br /><br />As seen in Michigan and elsewhere, right-wing militants are likely to focus their attention at the state and local level where law enforcement assets are more porous and likely targets are, in general, more vulnerable to attack.<br /><br />But in fact <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/12/historian-annette-gordon-reed-jan-6-was-a-turning-point-in-american-history/">the real power of Jan. 6 and its aftermath</a> is difficult to measure by such standards. Those events, and Republican efforts to rewrite the history of that day, have increasingly <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/09/10/what-year-is-it-in-america-anyway-how-complacency-and-naivet-brought-us-to-this-crisis/">normalized right-wing political violence</a> — if not in fact made it a preferred and desired way of obtaining and keeping political power.<br /><br />In keeping with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' "Big Lie" strategy, a large majority of Republican and Trump voters actually believe that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" from Donald Trump — and, in effect, from them as well. Public opinion polls also show that <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/08/03/republicans-are-increasingly-ready-for-violence-we-look-away-at-our-peril/">a significant percentage of Republicans believe that the violence and coup attempt on Jan. 6 was a "patriotic" or at least understandable action that was necessary</a> to "defend" democracy and Trump's presidency.<br /><br />On a daily basis, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/06/30/tucker-carlson-prepares-white-nationalists-for-war-dont-ignore-the-power-of-his-rhetoric/">neofascist white supremacist opinion leaders and other propagandists on Fox News and across the right-wing propaganda echo chamber</a> are radicalizing millions of white Americans. Most will not personally commit acts of violence against nonwhites, Muslims, "radical socialist Democrats" and others designated to be the enemy. But they are ever more likely to tolerate or condone such crimes.<br /><br />Ultimately, fascism is a type of political and social poison which manifests as violence and other antisocial and anti-human behavior. New research by Robert Pape and the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats demonstrates how far that poison has spread among the American people.<br /><br /><a href="https://theconversation.com/21-million-americans-say-biden-is-illegitimate-and-trump-should-be-restored-by-violence-survey-finds-168359">In a new essay at The Conversation</a>, Pape summarizes these findings, beginning with the most startling result:<br /><blockquote>We have found that 47 million American adults – nearly 1 in 5 – agree with the statement that "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president." Of those, 21 million also agree that "use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency."<br /><br />Our survey found that many of these 21 million people with insurrectionist sentiments have the capacity for violent mobilization. At least 7 million of them already own a gun, and at least 3 million have served in the U.S. military and so have lethal skills. Of those 21 million, 6 million said they supported right-wing militias and extremist groups, and 1 million said they are themselves or personally know a member of such a group, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.<br /><br />Only a small percentage of people who hold extremist views ever actually commit acts of violence, but our findings reveal how many Americans hold views that could turn them toward insurrection.<br /><br />Pape's polling found that 9% of American adults agreed that "Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency, while 25% agreed that "The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president."<br /><br />Pape reports a margin of error of 4 percentage points, meaning that the proportion of American adults who hold both those views is somewhere between 4% and 12%. "The best single figure," he writes, "is the middle of that range, 21 million."</blockquote>He continues:<br /><blockquote>People who said force is justified to restore Trump were consistent in their insurrectionist sentiments: Of them, 90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America's traditional way of life.</blockquote>In an interview with the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/insurrectionist-movement-u-s-robert-pape-intelligence-matters/">CBS News podcast "Intelligence Matters,"</a> Pape further explained what this new research reveals about the relationship between the white supremacist "great replacement" theory, the QAnon cult and right-wing violence:<br /><blockquote>Sixty-three percent of the 21 million adamant insurrectionists in the country believe in the "Great Replacement," the idea that the rights of whites will be overtaken by the rights of Blacks and Hispanics. The second most important driver was a QAnon belief, where 53 percent of the 21 million believed that our government is run and controlled by a satanic cult of pedophiles. Those are the two radical beliefs that are really ... the key drivers of the insurrectionist sentiments in the country today.</blockquote>Pape also sounded the alarm about the prospects for right-wing political violence and terrorism in the months leading up to the 2022 midterm elections:<br /><blockquote>This is about, what are the prospects for other instances of collective violence, especially related to elections going forward? ... I think that we need to be aware that we are moving into already a politically tumultuous 2022 election season just in the last month with the events in Afghanistan, which has created tremendous amount of anger in many of our military circles, military communities; with the new mandates for COVID, which President Biden has just announced, which are already generating tremendous pushback against the federal government. ... We need to understand the risks that that could break out into violence.</blockquote>For all of these escalating warnings about the potential for serious right-wing political violence, America's political class remains largely unwilling to properly respond to the clear and present danger. Such an outcome is in part explained by the very language that is most often used in these discussions.<br /><br />For example, "right-wing terrorism" or "right-wing extremism" is often presented in a race-neutral fashion.<br /><br />A more accurate description would be to say "white right-wing terrorism" or "white supremacist violence." Similarly, the events of Jan. 6 could be described as a "white insurrection" or "white riot," which more clearly captures the role of race and racism in the violence of both that day and the Age of Trump as a whole.<br /><br />To be clear, there are Black and brown people who belong to Trump's cult. Some are among his most militant supporters. Regardless of their skin color, such people are loyal to Whiteness as a social and political force. As such, Black and brown Trumpists and other neofascists want to access white power and white privilege for themselves. For them, the end goal is to somehow "earn" a type of transactional honorary whiteness.<br /><br />Trumpism and other forms of American neofascism and racial authoritarianism are an extreme personal and existential problem for nonwhite people and others who are marginalized as the Other. They are also a problem spawned by and of White America.<br /><br />Until that distinction is internalized by America's elites, and widely accepted as common sense by the American people, neofascism will continue to gain momentum and the country's democracy crisis will continue to escalate toward full-on disaster, from which no return to "normal" will be possible. America's past and America's present (again) runs along and through the color line.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-62059654385226745242021-09-20T03:20:00.000-05:002021-09-20T03:20:06.617-05:00Fact Checking, Laughter, and Liberal Schadenfreude Will Not Save You From Donald Trump and His Neofascist MovementRecently, a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/robert-e-lee-statue-virginia-removed-92955a351d9fda6319f379ddc28df8a0">statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee was finally removed</a> from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the old Confederacy. The statue was erected in 1890, as Jim and Jane Crow tightened their hands, often literally, around the throat of Black America. The AP reported the big moment:<br /><br />Hundreds of onlookers erupted in cheers and song as the 21-foot-tall bronze figure was lifted off a pedestal and lowered to the ground. The removal marked a major victory for civil rights activists, whose previous calls to dismantle the statues had been steadfastly rebuked by city and state officials alike.<br /><br />"It's very difficult to imagine, certainly, even two years ago that the statues on Monument Avenue would actually be removed," said Ana Edwards, a community activist and founding member of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom Justice & Equality. "It's representative of the fact that we're sort of peeling back the layers of injustice that Black people and people of color have experienced when governed by white supremacist policies for so long."<br /><br />Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had ordered the statue's removal last summer amid the nationwide wave of protest that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But it took more than a year for lawsuits aimed at saving the statue to work their way through the courts. Northam called it "hopefully a new day, a new era in Virginia," adding: "Any remnant like this that glorifies the lost cause of the Civil War, it needs to come down."<br /><br /><a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/09/10/why-donald-trump-is-now-using-robert-e-lee-to-rehab-his-own-reputation/">Lee's statue</a>, like those "honoring" other Confederates, was the physical embodiment of centuries of <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/08/20/to-trumpers-critical-race-theory-is-as-bad-as-the-taliban--and-theyre-not-kidding/">racial intimidation, racial violence and threats against Black Americans</a> and other people of color. Such statues and monuments were — and in many places still are — an attempt to create a usable past that reinforces and legitimates <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/30/birth-of-a-nation-jim-crow-cbs-news/">white supremacy</a>, with the goal of <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/12/historian-annette-gordon-reed-jan-6-was-a-turning-point-in-american-history/">defeating the civil rights movement and the long Black Freedom Struggle</a>. In effect, they communicate that <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/23/americas-history-wars-get-serious-texas-gop-wants-to-dump-mlk-whitewash-kkk/">Black people are supposed to forever remain second-class citizens</a> in their own country.<br /><br />In addition, Confederate statues and monuments are symbolic acts of <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/23/americas-history-wars-get-serious-texas-gop-wants-to-dump-mlk-whitewash-kkk/">psychic and emotional violence against Black people</a>. Many Black people — especially those who survived the era of Jim and Jane Crow — experience anger, pain, humiliation and other forms of trauma when they are forced to confront these statues and other symbols of racist hatred and white supremacy. Confederate statues and monuments are meant to make a claim on public space, one that creates boundaries of civic belonging and community. In that way, some public spaces are declared to be "whites only," even long after the end of legal segregation.<br /> <br />In a 2017 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-was-there-the-civil-war-heres-your-answer/2017/05/02/1445c796-2f76-11e7-8674-437ddb6e813e_story.html">op-ed for the Washington Post</a>, noted historian James Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and "Sundown Towns," offered this intervention against the distortions and lies about the Civil War offered by Donald Trump and other neo-Confederates, including the ludicrous notion that the war didn't need to happen:<br /><blockquote>Trump's conclusion about [Stonewall] Jackson places him in a camp of 1930s historians who called it a "needless war," in the words of James G. Randall, brought about by a "blundering generation." That view is a product of its time, and that time is now known as the Nadir of Race Relations. The Nadir began at the end of 1890 and began to ease around 1940. It was marked by lynchings, the eugenics movement and the spread of sundown towns across the North. Neo-Confederates put up triumphant Confederate monuments from Helena, Montana, to Key West, Florida, obfuscating why the Southern states seceded. They claimed it was about tariffs or states' rights — anything but slavery. …<br /><br />Today, when slavery has no state sanction anywhere, it seems obvious that the institution could not have survived to the 21st century. But if the South had prevailed, cotton would have resumed its role as "the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth," to quote Mississippi's secession document.<br /><br />There is one more layer on this onion: The South did not quite secede for slavery, but for slavery as the mechanism to ensure white supremacy. On many occasions, its leaders made this clear. In 1863, William Thompson, founder of the Savannah Morning News, proposed a new, mostly white national flag for the Confederacy: "As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause." The government agreed and adopted his flag.<br /><br />Some Trump partisans are clearly still fighting for that idea. Unfortunately, the Civil War settled only the issue of slavery — not white supremacy.</blockquote>There is a powerful historical symmetry at work in the reality of the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036387339/robert-e-lee-statue-comes-down-in-richmond">Lee statue's final removal</a> from Monument Avenue. It was taken down and carted away by Team Henry Enterprises, a company whose CEO and president, Devon Henry, is a Black man.<br /><br />Hundreds of thousands of Black men joined the Union Army during the Civil War. They were integral to turning the tide of battle and finally defeating Lee's forces and the Confederate slaveholding oligarchy.<br /><br />I personally believe that Lee's statues and other monuments "honoring" the Confederacy should be shattered and otherwise destroyed, melted down and turned into chamber pots or other types of toilets. Those objects should then be auctioned off with the money going to civil rights organizations. I would be among the first people to bid on such a prize.<br /><br />After Lee's statue was removed in Richmond last Wednesday, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/06/30/tucker-carlson-prepares-white-nationalists-for-war-dont-ignore-the-power-of-his-rhetoric/">Donald Trump, de facto leader of the white right and larger American neofascist movement</a>, issued this statement:<br /><blockquote>Just watched as a massive crane took down the magnificent and very famous statue of "Robert E. Lee On His Horse" in Richmond, Virginia. It has long been recognized as a beautiful piece of bronze sculpture. To add insult to injury, those who support this "taking" now plan to cut it into three pieces, and throw this work of art into storage prior to its complete desecration.<br /><br />Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all. President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been over in one day. Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love of Virginia, and except for Gettysburg, would have won the war. He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country.<br /><br />Our culture is being destroyed and our history and heritage, both good and bad, are being extinguished by the Radical Left, and we can't let that happen! If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago. What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don't have the genius of a Robert E. Lee!</blockquote>On cue, the mainstream news media, many liberals and progressives and other members of the chattering class and commentariat began mocking Trump once again. There were numerous essays, op-eds and commentaries proclaiming Trump to be ignorant of history because of his lack of knowledge about Robert E. Lee, himself a slave-owner and leader of an evil and defeated cause. <br /><br />Laughing at Donald Trump may provide comfort for his detractors and opponents. But that <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/06/10/laughing-at-trumps-backward-pants-wont-save-us-from-the-21st-century-gulag/">laughter is actually rooted in helplessness, impotence and overall despair in response to Trump and his movement's</a> escalating assault on American society. In a recent conversation at Salon, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/06/dr-justin-frank-laughing-at-trump-is-unhealthy-and-it-wont-protect-us-from-reality/">psychiatrist Justin Frank explained this</a> to me:<br /><blockquote>It is unhealthy humor. The humor you are describing is defensive in nature. It's defending against anxiety and fear. Specifically, it is a defensive use of contempt. Through it, people can demean and insult Donald Trump, which in turn means they don't have to be afraid of him. One of the ways a person can express contempt is through laughter. Thus it is a denial of one's vulnerability, because contempt means the other person is harmless, therefore he or she cannot hurt you. In that way, Trump is made into a pathetic fool. "If I laugh, it's not going to hurt me."<br /><br />Ultimately, defensive contempt is a way of dismissing Trump's dangerousness. However, that type of contempt toward Trump is really an attack on reality. It is also an attack on one's own perception because you have actually undermined your own ability to understand just how dangerous Donald Trump is.</blockquote>Historians and other experts eviscerated Donald Trump's public display of his severely limited historical understanding of Lee and the Civil War. That is well and good: <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/05/26/historian-of-fascism-wonders-is-joe-biden-a-speed-bump-on-the-fascists-march-to-power/">Truth is an important weapon against the lies that sustain fascism</a>. But one should make those interventions with the understanding that truth and facts alone is not sufficient to defeat Trumpism.<br /><br />Instead of self-satisfied mockery, a more effective counter to <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/21/trump-civil-war-reconstruction-biden-lost-cause-461161">Trump's lies about Robert E. Lee</a> (and other matters) is to ask oneself the following question: What is the meaning of this latest controversy? How should we locate Trump's lies, distortions and propaganda relative to the larger context of America's democracy crisis?<br /><br />Some examples may help. Trump and his supplicants have repeatedly described the campaign to remove Confederate statues and monuments as part of a "politically correct" assault by "Radical Leftists", "Black Lives Matter" activists, proponents of "critical race theory" and other perceived enemies of the "real" America.<br /><br />Trump and his propagandists have repeatedly used white supremacist language and code — "our culture," "our heritage," "our history" — when defending Confederate statues and monuments. The worldview here is one fixated on white grievances and fake victimhood. Those claims and feelings are cornerstones for larger white supremacist fantasies of violence and revenge against Black and brown people (and their supposed white allies) who are engaged in a fantastical global campaign of "white genocide."<br /><br />The controversy over a different statue of Robert E. Lee was also the pretext for the "Unite the Right" rally and its ensuing white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville in August 2017. Donald Trump infamously defended those white supremacist thugs and their allies as "very fine people."<br /><br /><a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/us/poll-southern-republicans-secede-union-b1884912.html">Today's Republican Party has largely embraced the neo-Confederate movement</a> and its white supremacist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/opinion/trump-confederacy-lost-cause.html">"Lost Cause"</a> narrative. These <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2016/02/donald_trumps_supporters_wish.html">white supremacist fantasies</a> about the Confederacy's valor and heroism as <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/269510-poll-38-percent-of-sc-trump-supporters-wish-south-had-won-the-civil-war">defenders of "White Southern Civilization"</a> are foundational to Trumpism and its racial authoritarian political and social project.<br /><br />White Christian evangelicals (especially the Southern Baptists) are among Trump's most loyal supporters. Those denominations can trace their origins back to the Southern slaveocracy and the white supremacist terror regime of Jim and Jane Crow. White Christian evangelicals remain deeply committed to the political and social project of creating a Christian nationalist theocracy.<br /><br />The Confederate battle flag — which is a white supremacist hate symbol that threatens violence against nonwhites — is a fixture at Trump's rallies and other events as well as those of the Republican Party and "conservative" movement more generally. Flags, hats and other MAGA regalia often prominently feature the Confederate flag.<br /><br />Public opinion and other research have repeatedly shown that today's Republican Party and its followers, especially Trump supporters, believe in the Lost Cause mythology and other white supremacist lies about America's past and present. While the United States may have defeated the Confederacy and forced its surrender in 1865, as historian Heather Cox Richardson persuasively argues, today's Republican Party and "conservative" movement are in many ways the Confederate States of America reborn in the 21st century.<br /><br />On Jan. 6, Donald Trump's assault force carried Confederate flags and at least one white Christian nationalist cross. Those thousands of Trump terrorists included Nazis, Klan members, and other white supremacists. Their goal was to overturn America's multiracial democracy by nullifying the results of the 2020 presidential election and keeping Trump (and in their minds, white people) in power indefinitely. History echoes: The treasonous Confederates believed themselves to be "patriots" and the true heirs to the tradition of George Washington and the American founding. Donald Trump's followers have deluded themselves in much the same way.<br /><br />The Jim Crow Republican Party's coup against democracy did not end on Jan. 6. Instead, it Is escalating, and scoring victories across the country. The dangers represented by Trump and the Republican Party's threats against democracy are so great that George W. Bush recently declared that Trump's terrorists and others of their ilk are of the same poisoned tree as the terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11.<br /><br />Laughter may make you feel good. Fact-checking may give you a feeling of intellectual superiority. Liberal schadenfreude may provide momentary happiness. But none of that will save American democracy from Donald Trump, the Jim Crow Republican Party and their fascist movement. Only the hard work of mobilizing and engaging in corporeal politics can possibly do that.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-26273146855090104182021-09-17T12:36:00.000-05:002021-09-17T12:36:01.229-05:00A Death Cult: Donald Trump Could Destroy the World and Today's Republican Party Would Still Support HimIs it life imitating art imitating life, or something even more complicated than that? At this point in <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/08/27/trumpists-live-in-an-alternate-reality--but-they-believe-in-it-and-thats-terrifying/">America's state of malignant normality and unreality</a> I am no longer sure. <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/09/10/what-year-is-it-in-america-anyway-how-complacency-and-naivet-brought-us-to-this-crisis/">America in the Age of Trump lost the plot some time ago</a>.<br /><br />Consider this narrative: <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/19/dr-john-gartner-on-america-after-trump-dystopian-science-fiction--is-actually-happening/">A crazed and out of control president</a>, viewed by political rivals and military leaders as so unstable he might start a war — even a nuclear conflict — to gratify his ego and hold onto political power. <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/29/that-wrenching-jan-6-testimony--and-why-the-forces-of-fascism-must-deny-it/">He has launched a coup attempt</a>, which remains unresolved. But a few brave and patriotic souls are willing <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/06/17/stop-the-steal-means-start-the-coup-experts-on-trumps-jan-6-coup-plot-and-the-power-of-denial/">to stop this president in order to save the country</a> and the world from catastrophe and potential annihilation.<br /><br />That comes rather too close to the plot of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/30/night-of-camp-david-1965-book-president-fletcher-knebel">1965 thriller novel "Night of Camp David."</a> Unfortunately, these events are not fictional. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior military and civilian leaders felt it necessary <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/08/04/trumps-coup-same-so-close-to-working--do-the-american-people-even-care/">to prevent Donald Trump from acting out his most destructive impulses after losing the 2020 election</a>, fearing the risks of a new world war. <br /><br />These details come from <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/14/politics/woodward-book-trump-nuclear/index.html">CNN's report</a> on "Peril," the new book on the presidential transition period by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post:<br /><blockquote>Two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, President Donald Trump's top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, single-handedly took secret action to limit Trump from potentially ordering a dangerous military strike or launching nuclear weapons. …<br /><br />Woodward and Costa write that Milley, deeply shaken by the assault, "was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies."<br /><br />Milley worried that Trump could "go rogue," the authors write.<br /><br />"You never know what a president's trigger point is," Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.<br /><br />In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon's war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.<br /><br />"No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I'm part of that procedure," Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.</blockquote>In a conversation with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Woodward and Costa report, Milley agreed with her characterization that Trump was "crazy" and had been so "for a long time." The authors write that after <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/07/12/historian-annette-gordon-reed-jan-6-was-a-turning-point-in-american-history/">the Jan. 6 Capitol attack</a>, Milley "felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump and believed it was his job as the senior military officer to think the unthinkable and take any and all necessary precautions," calling it the "absolute darkest moment of theoretical possibility."<br /><br />According to Woodward and Costa, national security officials appointed by Trump agreed. Then-CIA director Gina Haspel told Milley, "We are on the way to a right-wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He is acting out like a six-year-old with a tantrum." Even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had refused to acknowledge in public that Biden had won the election, told Milley that Trump was "in a very dark place right now."<br /><br />Trump's supporters in the Republican Party are predictably focused on a single detail: CNN's report that Milley had "two back-channel phone calls with China's top general, who was on high alert over the chaos in the U.S.," in an effort to prevent a military incident between the two nuclear-armed nations. The right-wing disinformation machine is not interested in any form of accountability for Donald Trump, of course. Instead, leading Republicans and conservative pundits are demanding that <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/09/15/trump-rubio-accuse-general-milley-treason-over-woodward-expose/8346958002/">Milley resign and be punished for alleged "treason." Trump himself has publicly declared Milley to be a traitor.</a><br /><br />That response offers more evidence — if any was needed — of how <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/16/prri-poll-fox-news-jan-6-trump/">t</a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/16/prri-poll-fox-news-jan-6-trump/">oday's Republican Party has become a fascist cult</a> and <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/05/25/todays-republican-party-is-a-political-crime-family--and-we-know-who-the-godfather-is/">a political crime syndicate</a>, where loyalty to the leader matters more than anything else, including the survival of the nation or the entire world. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/12/politics/cnn-poll-donald-trump-republicans/index.html">Public opinion polls indicate that Republican voters</a> largely feel the same way.<br /><br />This is part of a larger right-wing impulse towards death and destruction, as seen with Republicans' collective response to the pandemic, the global climate crisis, mass shootings, police violence, economic inequality and other forms of injustice, and societal harm and human suffering more generally. In total, the "revelations" in Woodward and Costa's book are further proof that today's Republican Party is a massive danger to the world. <br /><br />What happened? In 2015, the Republican Party made a devil's bargain with Donald Trump. He would provide the destructive energy and cult of personality that would give Republicans and the white right an opportunity to undermine, if not destroy, the country's democratic norms and institution. The proximate political goal was clear: Find a way to keep the Republican Party in power indefinitely, even in the face of demographic changes that threaten to render it obsolete.<br /><br />As seen in Texas and many other states, the Republican Party's new campaign against democracy is scoring important victories and gaining momentum. Whether Trump himself believes in the cause is irrelevant: He is an instinctive fascist and demagogue, with no discernible ideology. For him, the presidency was a means to an end, an unlimited source of narcissistic fuel and a way to enrich himself (and his inner circle) and accumulate more power and attention.<br /><br />As he revealed on numerous occasions, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/06/29/how-close-did-trump-come-to-attempting-a-military-coup-much-too-close/">Trump's impulse was to seek out ways he could remain president into the indefinite future</a>.<br /><br />Per the account in "Peril", Vice President Mike Pence told Trump he had no power to reverse the results of the presidential election. Trump then asked him, "But wouldn't it be almost cool to have that power?" <br /><br />Ultimately, Trump understood the Republican Party's voters and their darkest and most malevolent desires better than did nearly all Republican pollsters, pundits, opinion leaders and political strategists. <br /><br />Donald Trump instinctively understood that his followers — the "deplorables" that Hillary Clinton warned the American people about — did not care about being "respected." They wanted permission to unleash their worst fantasies and desires, unrestrained by "political correctness" and other societal expectations that they respect the humanity of other people. Such a concept of "freedom" is central to Trumpism and other forms of fascism. Trump's followers see in him a projection of their ideal selves. This is why they are willing to kill and die for him and the movement. <br /><br />In response to these new "revelations" about the latter days of the Trump regime, the mainstream news media is back on its hamster wheel of shock and surprise and outrage. This is largely political theater, not the kind of rigorous pro-democracy journalism that America's battle against neofascism demands. In a few days, the hope peddlers and professional "smart people" will move on to the next controversy.<br /><br />To protest that the Republican Party is hypocritical or lacks principles, as some commentators invariably do, is a pitiful example of missing the point.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/radicalism-post-trump-gop/619891/">Peter Wehner expounds on this in a recent essay for the Atlantic</a>, observing that the "MAGA brain" has been "rewired":<br /><blockquote>Republicans who assumed that the party would return to sanity after Trump left office never understood how deforming the effects of his presidency would be. For many, Trump's behaviors were initially a bug; eventually, they became a feature. Republicans ignored his corruptions and reveled in his cruelty. They entered Trump's hall of mirrors, and they rather enjoyed it.<br /><br />To better understand what's happening in the GOP, think of a person with addiction who over time develops a tolerance; as a result, they need more potent and more frequent doses of the drug to get their desired high. And sometimes even that isn't enough. They might turn to a more potent drug, which offers a more intense experience and a longer-lasting high, but at the price of considerably more danger.</blockquote>In the final analysis, today's Republican Party and the right-wing neofascist movement have no principles beyond winning at all costs. To deny that fact is to deny reality. Unfortunately, too many Americans, including everyday people as well as members of the political class, have convinced themselves that the Age of Trump and beyond is like a Hollywood movie, sure to arrive at a requisite happy ending in which good triumphs over evil. As most Black and brown Americans already know, such an outcome is not guaranteed in the real world. Such fantasies are not exclusive to white people, but they are definitely an artifact of white privilege.<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-48806648844727002212020-04-02T14:58:00.001-05:002020-04-02T14:58:58.771-05:00Our Dunning-Kruger president: Trump's arrogance and ignorance are killing peopleThe Dunning-Kruger effect is a term that describes a psychological phenomenon in which <a href="https://www.salon.com/2016/09/30/idiocracy-now-donald-trump-and-the-dunning-kruger-effect-when-stupid-people-dont-know-they-are-stupid/">stupid people do not know that they are in fact stupid</a>.<br /><br /><a href="https://psmag.com/we-are-all-confident-idiots-56a60eb7febc#.m6pxgw6fq">Writing at Pacific Standard, psychologist David Dunning</a> — one of the social psychologists who first documented this type of cognitive bias — describes it in more detail:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
In many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers — and we are all poor performers at some things — fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack. What's curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.</blockquote>
The Dunning-Kruger effect manifests in the form of the drunk at the bar who weighs in on every conversation with unwanted advice, the online troll who monopolizes comment sections, or the person who reads one book (or perhaps the introduction) and then acts like an authority on the subject.<br /><br />Visionary science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov signaled to the Dunning-Kruger effect with his famous observation in 1980: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" <br /><br />Donald Trump is the Dunning-Kruger president of the United States.<br /><br />But he is also something much worse than that. Donald Trump is an almost perfect living, breathing example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: a president in a time of plague whose ignorance and stupidity are amplified through apparent and obvious mental illness as well as cruelty, <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/frank-rich-trump-lies-his-way-through-a-pandemic.html">compulsive lying</a>, grand immorality, corruption and evil.<br /><br /><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/state-governments-step-in-as-trump-makes-lethal-mistakes-in-covid-19-response/">Americans have already died because of Trump's false claims about the novel coronavirus pandemic</a>. Many more will die in the weeks and months ahead.<a name='more'></a><br />At Tuesday's coronavirus White House "briefing" (another version of Trump's ego-stroking carnival political rallies) he made another "expert" suggestion about how to defeat the novel coronavirus pandemic: <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/live-blog/live-coronavirus-updates-u-s-death-toll-passes-3-000-n1172706/ncrd1173531#liveBlogHeader">Wear scarves instead of masks for protection</a>.<br /><br />In fact, <a href="https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/">scarves offer no protection against the coronavirus</a>.<br /><br />Several weeks ago, Donald Trump visited the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control where he made this astonishing claim: <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this? ' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.</blockquote>
Apparently, <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-thinks-he-may-have-natural-ability-address-viral-outbreaks-n1153061">Trump believes he knows more</a> than some of the best trained and experienced doctors and medical researchers in the world.<br /><br />Trump also believes himself to be an expert on the types of medical equipment needed to fight the novel coronavirus. He has suggested that governors in New York, New Jersey, Michigan and elsewhere are <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/trump-claims-us-states-dont-need-amount-ventilators-theyre-asking-i-dont-believe-you-need-1494599">intentionally exaggerating the number of ventilators needed in hospitals to care for victims of the pandemic</a>.<br /><br />On multiple occasions, Donald Trump has claimed that there is no ventilator shortage in New York. According to him, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-29/trump-suggests-a-new-york-hospital-losing-masks-because-of-crime">ventilators and other medical equipment being stolen</a> by doctors, nurses and other medical staff who are selling them, bringing them home for personal use or perhaps even hoarding the equipment in private.<br /><br />Donald Trump claims to have magical powers. He has repeatedly said that the novel coronavirus will disappear at some future date which only he can predict.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/us/politics/trump-coronavirus.html">Trump has said he was the first person to label the novel coronavirus a "pandemic."</a> And because he believes himself to be an expert on all things, Trump can pivot without pause, apprehension or doubt from claiming that the novel coronavirus was a "hoax" to embracing the view that it is a dire threat that could kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans.<br /><br />Trump is also an epidemiologist or virologist, at least in his mind. Last week he said, "You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus, you know you can call it many different names. I'm not sure anybody even knows what it is."<br /><br />Medical professionals know what the novel coronavirus is and have been warning the Trump administration about the threat for months.<br /><br />Most likely for partisan reasons and also because of racism (Trump's immense disdain for Barack Obama), Trump's administration <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-national-security-council-149285">also ignored the step-by-step suggestions for fighting a pandemic outlined by the National Security Council in 2016</a>.<br /><br />Donald Trump has evidently made decisions about which Americans should live and which should die <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/governors-plead-for-medical-equipment-from-federal-stockpile-plagued-by-shortages-and-confusion/2020/03/31/18aadda0-728d-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html">based on their perceived partisan loyalty</a>.<br /><br />The Dunning-Kruger president is an expert in so many things that it is difficult to keep track of them all. <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-thinks-he-may-have-natural-ability-address-viral-outbreaks-n1153061">Writing at MSNBC, Steven Benen made a valiant effort</a> at cataloguing Trump's claims to preternatural expertise:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
About a year ago, for example, Trump was reflecting on technology measures that have been deployed along the U.S./Mexico border, and he assured the public, "I'm a professional at technology." </blockquote>
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What kind of technology? He didn't say, but we can probably assume he meant every possible kind. </blockquote>
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As we discussed at the time, Trump has also claimed to be the world's foremost authority on everything from terrorism to campaign finance, the judicial system to infrastructure, trade to renewable energy. NowThis prepared a video montage on the subject a while back, and it was amazing to see the many subjects on which the president considers himself a world-class expert.</blockquote>
A belief in their inherent intelligence and great skill in all things is a common trait among authoritarians and other demagogues such as Donald Trump. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/28/kim-jong-un-north-korea-great-successor-biographer">North Korean leader Kim Jong-un</a>, according to national legend, could shoot guns better than a trained sniper at age three. At age eight, he was a daredevil truck driver. Adolf Hitler and his acolytes also made claims to greatness and superhuman abilities.<br /><br />Trump's embrace of stupidity and ignorance reflects much deeper problems in the United States generally, and the Republican Party and the conservative movement in particular. <br /><br />Today's Republican Party and conservative movement possess a deep disdain and hostility towards true experts and qualified, proven professionals. Such people are slurred as being "elitists" or not "real Americans," and are suspected of being liberal Democrats who belong to a "deep state" cabal working against Donald Trump and his army of real Americans, with the goal of enslaving them to "political correctness."<br /><br />Many of Trump's strongest supporters are Christian nationalists who aim to overturn the Constitution and destroy secular, science-based, empirical reality and society. Such people believe in magic, and are the most stalwart, influential and loyal members of Trump's political death cult.<br /><br />Historian and political scientist Richard Hofstadter famously warned that Republicans and other conservatives had succumbed to the allure and power of anti-intellectualism. Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" was written in 1963.<br /><br />Writing in 1947, Albert Camus reflected on Nazism and authoritarianism through the metaphor of misery and suffering caused by a plague:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.</blockquote>
Some 70 years later, Camus' warnings resonate in the age of Donald Trump.<br /><br />People such as Donald Trump are all too common among humanity. Unfortunately, some of them rise to great prominence during the most dangerous and troubled times — times when their ignorance and hubris has the power to kill hundreds, thousands or even millions of people. Such a time is now.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-10800023369053491402020-03-18T12:38:00.000-05:002020-03-18T12:39:15.520-05:00 Donald Trump, the coronavirus and the power of white male privilege<br />
Racism hurts black and brown people. But it hurts white people too. In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, this is true on a very literal level.<br />
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To this point, Donald Trump's regime and its propaganda machine have turned the coronavirus pandemic into a debacle that will likely kill Americans in large numbers. <br />
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<a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/03/17/historian-david-perry-after-trump-well-need-a-truth-and-reconciliation-commission/">Trump and his sycophants have systematically lied</a> about the threat to public health, safety and order posed by the coronavirus. Trump himself called the epidemic — or at least the media's coverage — a hoax.<br />
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<a href="https://www.gq.com/story/trump-oval-office-address-amid-coronavirus-pandemic">The Trump regime has purged scientists and other experts who were deemed insufficiently loyal</a>. These are the very same experts and career government officials who are essential to protecting America from the coronavirus pandemic and other threats.<br />
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Fox News and other parts of the right-wing echo chamber <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/03/17/right-wing-pundits-shameless-pivot-it-was-a-hoax-but-now-its-an-emergency/">have circulated lies to their public about the coronavirus, </a>downplaying its threat and encouraging behavior that will actually spread the lethal disease. Why? Because in the twisted reality of TrumpWorld, showing loyalty to the Great Leader is more important than public safety.<br />
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Trump and his cabal have repeatedly shown that they possess no belief in public service or the common good, and have no genuine feeling of care and concern for the American people. <br />
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Trump is being advised by Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, a slumlord plutocrat and a white supremacist, respectively. Neither are scientists. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/politics/kushner-trump-coronavirus.html">Neither have any experience managing a public health crisis</a>.<br />
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Vice President <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/26/trump-puts-pence-in-charge-of-coronavirus-response-117790">Mike Pence is leading Trump's coronavirus task force</a>. Pence is a right-wing Christian fundamentalist. He does not believe in science. He believes that a person can somehow "pray the gay away." As governor of Indiana, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mike-pence-is-still-to-blame-for-an-hiv-outbreak-in-indiana-but-for-new-reasons/">Pence failed to respond when the HIV epidemic hit his state in 2015</a>. In the normal world of facts and reason, faith does not supersede empirical reality and science. One cannot pray away the coronavirus or other fact-based challenges and problems. To believe such a thing is to believe in magic.<br />
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Forced by the circumstances, the Trump regime has now — several months too late — accepted that the coronavirus is real and that it poses a great threat to the American people. But instead of mobilizing properly against the threat, Trump and his followers have instead chosen to attack the Democrats as somehow responsible for a public health crisis.<br />
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None of this would be happening if Donald Trump were not president of the United States. The virus might be here, of course, but what we face now would not be nearly as bad.<br />
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<b>And how did Donald Trump become president of the United States? Racist white voters. </b><br />
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Political scientists and other researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxiety-study">Donald Trump's voters were motivated both by racial resentment and more overt "old-fashioned racism."</a> Those are also key factors in Donald Trump's enduring support.<br />
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Public opinion and other research has shown that many of Donald Trump's white followers are driven by fear of the "browning of America" and a perception that the country's changing racial demographics will somehow take away the disproportionate power and unearned advantages enjoyed by white Americans. There is no empirical evidence to support such a conclusion.<br />
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Other research has shown that Trump's voters and supporters are motivated by what is known as "social dominance behavior" and a fear of losing their superior group status in America. Other work has demonstrated that many white Americans – especially <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-effect-new-study-connects-white-american-intolerance-support-authoritarianism-ncna877886">Trump voters – support authoritarianism over democracy</a> if their racial group is no longer dominant in America.<br />
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Nativism and racial resentment have been shown to heavily influence the white right-wing Christians who remain almost uniform in their support of Donald Trump.<br />
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Ultimately, Donald Trump leads a political cult tied together in a knot of collective narcissism, strengthened by the twin beasts of white supremacy and white identity politics.<br />
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Donald Trump is obsessed by a racist vendetta against Barack Obama, the United States' first black president. This obsession drove Trump and his agents to end disease prevention and other programs put in place by the Obama administration. These programs, which included pandemic prevention efforts, would have helped to prevent the coronavirus from spreading around the world and potentially killing millions of people.<br />
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Predictably, <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/487404-trump-blames-obama-for-coronavirus-testing-issues-says-changes-have">Donald Trump is now blaming the coronavirus on Obama</a> and the Democrats.<br />
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<b>Donald Trump and his agents are using xenophobia, nativism, bigotry, and racism to distract the American people from his administration's failure to respond to the coronavirus crisis.</b> For example, the Trump regime has called the novel coronavirus "the Chinese virus" and the "foreign flu." <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/reporter-says-trump-official-called-coronavirus-the-kung-flu-2020-3">CBS News' Weijia Jiang reported on Tuesday that White House officials described the coronavirus as the "kung-flu"</a> in her presence. In reality, the novel coronavirus has no nationality. It is a global pandemic that has impacted at least 145 countries.<br />
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Trump's use of racial resentment, fear-mongering and bigotry keeps his base of angry white voters tethered to him because they share the same values and beliefs.<br />
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<b>White racism has been used as a weapon to further the destruction of the federal government, and therefore to cripple its ability to respond to disasters and other crises.</b><br />
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From Reconstruction to the post-civil rights era and now to the Age of Trump, the very idea of government has been slurred by conservatives because it is viewed as primarily helping nonwhite people — especially African-Americans — to the disadvantage of white people. Stereotypes about "big government" or the "nanny state" are allied to stereotypes about "welfare queens" and other "lazy" or "shiftless" black people who are "living off" the taxpayers, understood to be white people.<br />
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Historian, philosopher and activist W.E.B. Du Bois incisively described such a phenomenon almost a hundred years ago in his seminal 1935 work "Black Reconstruction in America":<br />
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It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.</blockquote>
At present white people in red state America benefit disproportionately from government benefits (historically this has long been true of white Americans as a group). At present, white people are also the largest single group of Americans living in poverty. <br />
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Writing at the Washington Post, Tracy Jan explains <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/16/the-biggest-beneficiaries-of-the-government-safety-net-working-class-whites/">how the "white working class" benefits from government assistance</a>:<br />
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Working-class whites are the biggest beneficiaries of federal poverty-reduction programs, even though blacks and Hispanics have substantially higher rates of poverty, according to a <a href="http://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/poverty-reduction-programs-help-adults-lacking-college-degrees-the">new study</a> to be released Thursday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. </blockquote>
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Government assistance and tax credits lifted 6.2 million working-class whites out of poverty in 2014, more than any other racial or ethnic demographic. Half of all working-age adults without college degrees lifted out of poverty by safety-net programs are white; nearly a quarter are black and a fifth are Hispanic. </blockquote>
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The result does not simply reflect the fact that there are more white people in the country. The percentage of otherwise poor whites lifted from poverty by government safety-net programs is higher, at 44 percent, compared to 35 percent of otherwise poor minorities, the study concluded…. </blockquote>
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"There is a perception out there that the safety net is only for minorities. While it's very important to minorities because they have higher poverty rates and face barriers that lead to lower earnings, it's also quite important to whites, particularly the white working class," said Isaac Shapiro, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and one of the report's authors.</blockquote>
<b>Social scientists and public health experts have repeatedly shown that racism negatively impacts America's health care system as a whole.</b><br />
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Such outcomes are a function of interpersonal racism as well as institutional and systemic racism. In his book "Dying of Whiteness", Dr. Jonathan Metzl demonstrates <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/04/11/scholar-jonathan-metzl-white-supremacy-is-literally-killing-white-people/">how white Americans consistently reject government policies that would improve their collective well-being</a>, including access to Medicare via the Affordable Care Act, reductions in gun violence, treatment of chronic illness and substance abuse, and increased funding for public schools. <br />
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This self-harm is driven by racial animosity towards black and brown people (e.g. the idea that "undeserving" poor people are receiving assistance), hatred of Barack Obama and a love of Donald Trump. In the most extreme cases, Metzl encountered poor and working-class white people who said they would rather die than accept help from "Obamacare" and other programs they deride as "government help."<br />
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<b>White male privilege sustains Donald Trump.</b> He was elected because of it. Trump has repeatedly shown that he is not remotely competent to be president. His catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic, his obvious corruption and criminality, his disdain for the rule of law and the Constitution, his authoritarian tendencies, his dalliances with hostile foreign nations and, of course, his racism are all reasons for Trump to be removed from office. Yet he remains in power, and may well be re-elected, because all too often being white and male comes with unearned assumptions of inherent authority, competence and expertise.<br />
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<b>As seen with the coronavirus epidemic and many other examples, white male privilege is literally making America sick.</b> A simple thought experiment: if Donald Trump was not a white man (and a Republican) he would have been impeached several years ago. No woman would have been allowed to be so incompetent and to remain president. A black or brown woman certainly would not have been allowed to stay in office if she displayed even one-tenth of Trump's incompetence and malfeasance.<br />
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These dynamics were clearly present in the 2016 presidential election: Political scientists and other researchers have demonstrated that <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201801/the-dark-connection-between-hostile-sexism-and-politics">"hostile sexism"</a> and racism, combined with foreign interference, enabled Donald Trump's unlikely victory over Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College.<br />
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<b>The coronavirus and the Trump regime are just one among many examples of the ways racism hurts white Americans, as well as black and brown Americans.</b><br />
Racism is one key reason why America has such a paltry social safety net and lacks a robust sense of community and a sense of shared responsibility for common problems, relative to other developed nations. <br />
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America's broken health care system, our failing public schools, our rotting infrastructure and our massive wealth and income inequalities are in many ways a function of white racial animus. Such outcomes reveal how easy it is for white elites to distract poor and working-class white people (and many in the middle class) from recognizing that it would be in their best interests to cooperate with black and brown Americans to solve common problems.<br />
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Mass incarceration and the surveillance state have been justified and expanded because of white America's easily manipulated, fantastical and hysterical fears of "black crime" and other threats from nonwhite people. After the coronavirus pandemic and other systemic shocks, the surveillance state and its related technologies of control will inevitably become focused on poor and working-class white people as well.<br />
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The racialization of crime is not new: This has been a feature of American society from the era of white on black chattel slavery through to the present. The system of mass incarceration that resulted has siphoned off many hundreds of billions of dollars in resources that could have been spent improving the country by making higher education more affordable, increasing access to health care, protecting the environment, fixing the country's infrastructure and cutting taxes for working- and middle-class Americans.<br />
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To this point, the coronavirus has been an opportunity for the worst of America's character to assert itself. But it also offers an opportunity to reevaluate the state of the country and in doing so demand the types of robust social, economic, political and cultural changes that will strengthen our democracy, reinforce and expand the social safety net, rebuild our infrastructure and make America more free and prosperous.<br />
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Racism and white supremacy are roadblocks to creating that better America. That was true before the nation's founding. It remains true in the Age of Trump and the pandemic he has made possible.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-66614976353848012952019-10-26T19:43:00.001-05:002019-10-26T19:43:40.974-05:00White Victimology: Trump’s "Lynching" Comments Are a Reminder of the Relationship Between His Lawlessness and White SupremacyHistorian Ibram X. Kendi believes Donald Trump is the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/10/11/ibram-x-kendi-on-how-to-be-an-antiracist-racism-and-capitalism-will-ultimately-die-together/">second most racist president in American history</a>, ranking only behind Andrew Jackson. Based on Trump’s ongoing behavior, Kendi may need to re-evaluate that assessment.<br /><br />On Tuesday, America’s racist in chief managed to combine his lawlessness and white supremacy in a single tweet:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!</blockquote>
In the worst of ways, Donald Trump has shown himself once again to be a deft multitasker of ignorance, hate and authoritarianism.<br /><br />Lawlessness: Donald Trump does not believe in the rule of law or the U.S. Constitution. He has said as much, <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/21/trump-emoluments-clause-053289">describing the Constitution as “phony.”</a><br /><br />Impeachment is also one of the most important elements of the Constitution because it is the ultimate protection against a tyrant. Trump and his regime, of course, do not believe that any substantive restrictions on the president’s behavior exist — as long as the president is Donald Trump or another Republican.<br /><br />White supremacy: At least 4,000 black Americans were killed by white mobs and individuals in the extrajudicial killings known as lynchings across the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. This political terrorism was not confined to the South. Black people were also lynched in states such as Indiana. The goal of white-on-black racial terrorism was to intimidate and control black people who desired, struggled for and demanded their full human rights as citizens of the United States. Racial pogroms and lynchings — especially what are known as “spectacular lynchings,” attended by hundreds or even thousands of white people — were a for of terrorism used by whites to intimidate and control black Americans.<br /><br />Trump’s comments on Tuesday are also a reminder that lawlessness and white supremacy are not discrete and separate from one another. They have a complex and contradictory relationship.<br /><br />White supremacy is maintained through the law: Racists ignore the law when they need to, and invoke the law when it serves their purposes.<br /><br />White-on-black lynchings were not vile acts perpetrated by outliers in white society, people who were exceptionally barbarous compared to the “ordinary” white person. Lynchings were part of a regime of racial terrorism with the goal of maintaining white control over black people in all areas of American life. This culture of racial terrorism that Trump references so casually was central to American society. That ethos of racism as violence against black people specifically, and against nonwhite people (including Latinos and Muslims) more generally, continues through to the Age of Trump. This violence has “evolved” to fit the sensibilities of the post-civil rights era.<br /><br />In his book "Trouble in Mind," historian Leon Litwack writes about America’s culture of lynching:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
Neither crazed fiends not the dregs of white society, the bulk of the lynchers tended to be ordinary and respectable people, animated by a self-righteousness that justified their atrocities in the name of maintaining the social and racial order and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. The mobs who meted out "summary justice” were pronounced by one Georgian as "composed of our best citizens, who are foremost in all works of public and private good”…. Drawn from all classes in southern white society, from the "red-necks” to the best people,” lynchers came together in an impressive show of racial and community solidarity …. </blockquote>
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But white solidarity almost always prevailed. Townspeople closed ranks to protect their own kind, thereby becoming partners in the crimes committed. Eyewitnesses refused to testify, and grand juries refused to bring indictments against easily identifiable mob participants; even if they had, juries would have refused to convict, whatever the evidence.</blockquote>
Trump defenders, as they always do, have summoned ridiculous defenses. They note that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said, some decades ago, that he was a victim of a “high-tech lynching.” They claim people are too "sensitive" because of "political correctness.” They claim that lynchings don’t necessarily have anything to do with race. of course, they insist that Trump is not a racist; he is misunderstood or being persecuted by Democrats and the "liberal media.”<br /><br />Like almost all defenses of Trump’s behavior, such claims are easily dismissed by honest and ethical human beings.<br /><br />The racism of Trump’s comments about lynching is easily exposed through several basic questions.<a name='more'></a><br />Who is Donald Trump? He is a white supremacist who rose to public prominence through the racist “birtherism” campaign against Barack Obama. Trump believes that Hispanics and Latinos are a race of “rapists” and “murderers.” Trump has said that nonwhite Americans who criticize him are “traitors” who “should go back to where they came from.” In 1989, Trump <a href="https://newsone.com/playlist/trump-lynching-tweet-central-park-5-ad/">took out full-page ads in New York newspapers</a> calling for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers who were falsely accused of raping a white woman in Central Park. As shown by a federal lawsuit in the 1970s, Donald Trump and his father <a href="https://www.npr.org/2016/09/29/495955920/donald-trump-plagued-by-decades-old-housing-discrimination-case">refused to rent property to blacks or Latinos</a>.<br /><br />Despite an escalating pattern of white supremacist violence, Donald Trump has not forcefully condemned such people, nor has he marshaled the federal government’s resources against them. Trump infamously described the white supremacists and neo-Nazis of the “New Right” who engaged in a violent rampage in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.”<br /><br />It was not Trump’s ancestors who were the “strange fruit” of Billie Holiday’s song of the same name, thousands of black human beings whose bodies were shot full of holes, burned alive, harvested for souvenirs, and left “swinging in the southern breeze; strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” as a warning to other black people who dared not to know "their place” in American society.<br /><br />Trump has neither the capacity for empathy and sympathy or the carefulness, intelligence, grace and human dignity required to speak in an intelligent way about the thousands of black human sacrifices that were made to America’s cult of white supremacy.<br /><br />What do we know about Donald Trump’s policies as president? Trump’s overall public policy is <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/09/05/cruelty-is-trumps-guiding-principle-but-democrats-can-use-it-to-defeat-him/">centered upon cruelty</a> toward nonwhite people and doing everything possible under the law (and often in violation of it) <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/">to ensure that white people remain the country’s most powerful group</a>. Trumpism is a white rage backlash against the civil rights movement and American multiracial democracy. Donald Trump is the human distillation of white racial resentment and white rage.<br /><br />Who are Donald Trump’s public? Racists are more likely to be Republicans. Conservatism and racism are fully now one and the same thing in post-civil rights America. Social scientists and other analysts have repeatedly shown that overt racism, racial resentment, nativism and racial authoritarianism motivate Trump’s voters.<br /><br />Trump is looked at as a hero and role-model by individual white supremacists as well as white racist terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan formally endorsed Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016.<br /><br />On Twitter, Princeton historian professor <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/princeton-historian-delivers-the-definitive-smackdown-of-trumps-insulting-lynching-tweet/">Kevin Kruse deftly summarized Trump’s abuse of black people’s history and humanity </a>through his false analogy between impeachment and lynching:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is NO reason to liken the Constitution’s formal remedy for removing a president to an illegal mob action that seeks to subvert the rule of law with the kidnapping, murder and mutilation of a suspect…. Comparing impeachment proceedings to a lynching is even more insulting when you’ve cozied up to the very forces of white supremacy that historically have used lynching as a tool to terrorize racial minorities…. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[L]ynching is essentially the subversion of the rule of law. Impeachment, in sharp contrast, is the rule of law. It's the constitutional provision for handling a president who has disgraced his office, as designed by the founding fathers. YOU are seeking to subvert that…. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[Y]ou are seeking to subvert the rule of law here by spreading fear, confusion and hatred. Again, I think it’s insulting to bring lynching into this, but if anything here even remotely resembles the dynamics of a lynch mob, it’s not your critics.</blockquote>
Trump should again be condemned for his racism and white supremacy. But one should also understand that Trump’s racism and white supremacy are a means to an end, that being the overthrow of America’s multiracial society. Trump’s racism and white supremacy are also a tool used to distract the public from other critical issues.<br /><br />It is no coincidence that on Tuesday the acting ambassador to Ukraine, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/10/12/were-going-to-impeach-trumps-sorry-ass-thanks-to-a-few-brave-citizens/">Bill Taylor</a>, told members of Congress that the Trump administration did in fact make military aid to Ukraine contingent on that country’s president publicly announcing that he would investigate Joe Biden and his son. Taylor’s testimony is more proof that <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/10/22/trumps-ukraine-envoy-gives-congress-most-damning-evidence-yet-in-impeachment-probe/">Donald Trump should be impeached, convicted and removed from office for abuse of power and other apparent crimes</a>, including bribery and extortion as well as encouraging foreign interference in the 2020 election on his behalf.<br /><br />As the impeachment process against Trump moves forward, he will dig deeper and deeper into his bucket of racist political scatology, throwing it about in an effort to blind and distract those Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, and democracy. Donald Trump's political cult members and other supporters will rally around him, and will be further stained and soiled by Trump’s foul antics.<br /><br />Of course, Trump and his supporters should be condemned for their racism and white supremacy. But decent Americans who are fighting to protect American democracy from the onslaught of Trumpism should always ask toward what end the president and his movement are using racism, white supremacy and other abominable behavior.<br /><br />Resistance against Trump need not be binary. It must be multi-spectrum. But to defeat Trumpism, the resistance must first grasp Donald Trump’s strategic goals. Of course his tactics matter. But the big picture should always be in focus.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-25504148678147189962019-10-22T14:35:00.002-05:002019-10-22T14:35:51.905-05:00Mind Control and Cult Expert Steven Hassan Warns That Donald Trump's Movement is a Dangerous Cult -- And Even If Trump is Removed From Office His Followers Will Remain a Threat to American Society<div>
A <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/16/politics/impeachment-poll-gallup-donald-trump/index.html">new Gallup poll</a> finds that at least 50 percent of the American people want Donald Trump to be impeached and removed from office. That's three times higher than the percentage of Americans who supported impeaching Richard Nixon during the early stages of the impeachment process. Trump could become the first American president to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/15/politics/impeachment-voters-2020-race-trump/index.html">run for re-election after being impeached</a> in the House of Representatives.</div>
<br />On the surface, at least, it would seem that Donald Trump’s continual torrent of lawbreaking, his disrespect for the Constitution and democracy, his corruption, racism, nativism, misogyny and overall debasement of human morality and human decency have finally reached a point where he will be held accountable by the Democrats in Congress and then at the polls in 2020.<br /><br />But what of the 39 percent (or so) of Americans who continue to support Donald Trump? His popularity among Republican voters continues to be remarkably high and stable (87 percent per Gallup’s most recent poll) given his many failures of policy, including policy decisions that directly hurt his most enthusiastic “white working class” supporters. Indeed, Trump’s base of stable support remains<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/01/trumps-approval-ratings-so-far-are-unusually-stable-and-deeply-partisan/"> the highest among American presidents</a> in the history of modern polling.<br /><br />Despite — or because of — Trump’s apparent criminal behavior and obvious inclinations toward fascism he has a cement-like hold on his supporters. Trumpism can be understood as right-wing political extremism transformed into a cult. This is not just a metaphor. Trump’s lies, his assault on reality, his threats of violence, his cruelty, his demand of absolute loyalty, his manipulation of willing subjects who choose to escape empirical reality, and his shared state of collective narcissism with his followers all fit the definition of a cult. From that realization follows another: <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/07/30/still-believe-trumps-racism-wont-get-him-re-elected-thats-what-you-thought-the-last-time-too/">Trump’s removal from the White House, by electoral defeat or any other means, remains unlikely</a> — unless his opponents can fully mobilize to overwhelm and defeat Trump’s zealots.<br /><br />Is it possible to deprogram Trump’s political cult members and return them to normal society? Should good Americans isolate Trump supporters and refuse to interact with them? In what ways does Trump fit the profile of a cult leader? How is his apparent and lengthy history of sexually predatory behavior typical of a cult leader? If Trump is removed from office, will his supporters respond with violence?<br /><br />In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Steven Hassan, one of the world's foremost experts on mind control and cults. Hassan is the author of several bestselling books, including "Combating Cult Mind Control" and "Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs." His new book is “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control.”<br /><br /><a href="https://thetruthreportwithchaunceydevega.libsyn.com/ep-26-steven-hassan-explains-is-it-possible-to-deprogram-donald-trumps-political-cult-members" target="_blank">Steven Hassan is the guest on this week's episode of my podcast <i>The Truth Report</i></a>.<div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-52994292482223851212019-09-06T17:38:00.000-05:002019-09-06T17:38:26.271-05:00Cruelty is Trump's Guiding Principle — But Democrats Can Use It to Defeat HimIt is possible to hurt a person without ever meeting them. Donald Trump and his regime have done that millions of times in the almost three years he has been president of the United States.<br /><br />Cruelty, especially against nonwhite people, is one of the Trump regime’s guiding principles. Trump, his supporters, and enablers take great pleasure in hurting the weak, the sick and any other people they deem vulnerable. This is a function of "social dominance behavior," a trait that is common to conservative-authoritarian personalities.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/05/04/the-pro-life-party-has-become-the-party-of-death-new-research-on-why-republicans-hate-poor-and-sick-people/">As I explained in an 2017 essay at Salon</a>, Republicans and conservatives widely believe:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
... that those who seek assistance from society have no right to receive it. If people do not have the resources to provide adequate health for themselves and their families, that's their own fault. Most important, the sick deserve their illnesses; the healthy and strong have earned their advantages. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Once again, the repeated efforts by the Republican Party to repeal the minimal protections offered by the Affordable Care Act serve to remind us that <a href="http://www.sulloway.org/PoliticalConservatism(2003).pdf">conservatism is a type of socially-motivated cognition</a> that minimizes any sense of human obligation and connection to other people, outside a narrowly defined kin or other peer group. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Today's version of American conservatism is also a celebration of selfishness — and a belief that true freedom and liberty are based on a perverse individualism with little sense of common decency or linked fate with someone's fellow citizens. Today's American conservatism also embraces an extreme form of neoliberalism whereby human worth and dignity are determined by profit-and-loss statements, and capitalism and democracy are confused with one another. Ultimately, American conservatism is a value system that is antisocial, anti-democratic and anti-freedom.</blockquote>
In keeping with those values, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/27/death-sentence-trump-reportedly-moving-deport-kids-cancer-hiv-and-other-deadly">the Trump administration recently proposed deporting critically ill immigrants</a> who are receiving medical care in the United States.<br /><br />Earlier this week the New York Times reported that on Aug. 7:<br /><div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
... the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, without public notice, eliminated a 'deferred action' program that had allowed immigrants to avoid deportation while they or their relatives were undergoing lifesaving medical treatment. The agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, had sent letters informing those who had asked for a renewal, which the immigrants must make every two years, that it was no longer entertaining such requests. The letters said that the immigrants must leave the country within 33 days, or face deportation.</blockquote>
Because of public outrage at the wanton cruelty of sending sick people — including many children — back to their home countries to die, USCIS announced a temporary pause in the deportations:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
On Monday, the agency said in a statement that while limiting the program was “appropriate,” officials would “complete the caseload that was pending on August 7.” The statement said that deportation proceedings had not been initiated against anyone who had received the letter. However, it did not say whether it would continue to grant immigrants extensions to stay in the country or whether the program would be continued after current applications are processed. When asked for clarification, an agency official said the agency “is taking immediate corrective action to reopen previously pending cases for consideration.”</blockquote>
This should be no comfort for the people who are in the United States under the "deferred action" program. Moreover, the safe and reasonable assumption should be that the Trump regime will resume its efforts to deport immigrants receiving lifesaving medical care once the controversy and resulting public and media attention subsides. This is part of the Trump regime's fascist strategy of creating controversy through its "shocking" and "surprising" assaults on democracy, the rule of law and human decency. Predictably, the public and news media react to the outrage of the day, week or month. In response, the administration then appears to back down.<br /><br />Testing the limits of societal norms is one of the primary ways through which fascists and other authoritarians break a democracy and in so doing train the public into a state of constant distraction, exhaustion and learned helplessness.<a name='more'></a><br />As with banning Muslims from entering the United States, building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and intentionally breaking up the families of migrants, refugees and immigrants before interning them in concentration camps, the Trump administration will likely find another way to advance its original goals at a later date.<br /><br />The Trump regime's efforts to punish the sick and the dying because they happen to be immigrants reflects a broader problem: Donald Trump and his policies are literally making the American people sick. Mental health professionals and other researchers have shown that the Age of Trump is a public health crisis characterized by high rates of anxiety, sleep disorders, stress and a generalized sense of fear and worry, as well as the other negative health outcomes (heart attacks and strokes; an increase in interpersonal violence such as mass shootings) that accompany such a diminished state of well-being.<br /><br />These effects are most pronounced among those groups such as Hispanics and Latinos (and nonwhite people in general) who have been specifically targeted by Donald Trump and his campaign of cruelty and other vile behavior.<br /><br />In total, the Trump regime has taken the pain and other harms caused by institutional racism and racial battle fatigue in America and — instead of working to heal such problems — has actively made them worse, weaponizing the suffering of nonwhite people as fuel for a racist political project.<br /><br /><a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/demoralizing-reality-of-life-under-trump.html">The Trump regime's sadism has also impacted the American people as a whole.</a> In July of this year <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/154818/trumps-tax-national-psyche">the Washington Post reported</a> that "a Gallup poll recently documented <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/249098/americans-stress-worry-anger-intensified-2018.aspx">an increase of stress, anger and worry</a> among all Americans, which match or top the highest levels since it began tracking these negative feelings in 2006. Those who disapprove of Trump’s performance were significantly more likely to experience each of those negative emotions, the survey found."<br /><br />Donald Trump’s cruelty is a political opportunity that the Democrats would be wise to exploit in the 2020 presidential contest. Public opinion polls indicate that many Americans — including key demographics such as suburban white women — are becoming increasingly tired of Trump's nativism and racism. Contrary to what <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/09/02/new-york-times-warns-democrats-go-soft-on-race-avoid-progressive-economics/">the New York Times' Thomas Edsall and others have suggested, </a>the Democrats should emphasize Donald Trump and his regime’s cruelty by making the 2020 election a litmus test for both the character of the nation and the American people.<br /><br />To most effectively turn Trump's cruelty into a tool for defeating him, the Democrats should run campaign ads featuring the families and children who are being hurt by the government's efforts to take medical care away from immigrants with life-threatening illnesses. They should also feature personal stories and profiles of Americans who will likely die if Trump and the Republicans finally succeed in killing the Affordable Care Act. Democrats and their allies should also show the children of migrants and refugees in Trump's concentration camps, along with testimonials from civil rights attorneys (and former ICE and Border Patrol enforcers) about the inhumane conditions in those facilities.<br /><br />Donald Trump's image should be superimposed over the images of the horrors he and his minions are creating in America and around the world. Trump's words should be used as a soundtrack for that suffering.<br /><br />As shown in a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/stephen-miller-trump-immigration/">much-discussed Washington Post profile,</a> Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser — an apparent white supremacist — wants the world to see images of nonwhite babies and children being torn away from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border and then put in concentration camps. Miller believes such images would serve as a "deterrent" for migrants and refugees from Latin and South America, scaring them into not coming to the United States. Democrats should grant Miller's wish by featuring him and other members of Trump's inner circle in campaign ads that explain direct personal physical and emotional harm they are causing real human beings.<br /><br />Of course, Trump’s supporters will not be shamed by seeing the human cost of their Great Leader’s actions. In fact, Trump's supporters likely enjoy seeing black and brown people suffer. For that and many other reasons the Democrats cannot base their 2020 presidential campaign strategy on winning back Donald Trump's "white working-class" voters. Many of the latter are now lost to Trump's political cult, fully addicted to what anti-racism activist and author <a href="https://www.salon.com/2017/06/19/anti-racist-author-tim-wise-white-america-desperately-wants-to-be-numb-and-donald-trump-is-a-walking-talking-opioid/">Tim Wise accurately describes</a> as the president's political opioid of white rage and white supremacy.<br /><br />By highlighting in a direct and personal way how Donald Trump’s policies are hurting real people the Democrats can rally their own voters. They must make the 2020 election not just an exercise in the practical politics of deposing a fascist authoritarian, but also a great moral crusade.This narrative will also force undecided voters, swing voters and others who are souring on Trump to make a decision about their personal values and about what kind of human beings they want to be. Do they support Trump and his regime's evil, and by implication share in that guilt and moral rot? Or do these people want to take a moral stand at last against the Trump regime and in doing so validate their own deeply held belief that they, unlike Trump and his supporters, are inherently good people?<br /><br />Whoever the Democrats nominate to run in 2020, the party faces a great task. It must force a moral reckoning in America in order to defeat Donald Trump.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-12219857647633665092019-09-03T17:18:00.001-05:002019-09-03T17:18:53.772-05:00Patriotism, truth and fascism: Donald Trump is creating a subjective reality where dissent is not allowedAt some point in high school, Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary and communications director Stephanie Grisham must have read George Orwell’s "1984." Instead of understanding Orwell’s book as a warning about totalitarianism, however, Grisham took it as a "how to" guide.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/stephanie-grisham-is-trumps-communications-czar-only-most-people-wouldnt-know-it/2019/08/27/b79656ba-c44b-11e9-b5e4-54aa56d5b7ce_story.html?noredirect=on">This is from a profile of Grisham, published last week in the Washington Post</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
Does Grisham think <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/12/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/">Trump ever lies</a>? After all, as of Aug. 5, The Washington Post Fact Checker had documented 12,019 false or misleading claims made by Trump during his presidency. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“No,” she responds without hesitation. “I don’t think they’re lies. . . . I think the president communicates in a way that some people, especially the media, aren’t necessarily comfortable with. A lot of times they take him so literally. I know people will roll their eyes if I say he was just kidding or was speaking in hypotheticals, but sometimes he is. What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country.”</blockquote>
Despite the thousands of documented lies Trump has told since becoming president, his media sycophants at Fox News and elsewhere continue to claim that he is an honest and truthful person. <a href="https://psmag.com/news/why-so-many-trump-supporters-are-ok-with-the-presidents-lies">Because they are authoritarians who are comfortable with their leaders lying to them, Trump’s voters and other Republicans also believe that he is honest.</a><br /><br />Grisham’s recent comments to the Post are also another example of a very dangerous overlap between Donald Trump’s subjective reality, politics and truth. When Grisham says, "What I’ve learned about him is that he loves this country and he’s not going to lie to this country,” she is asserting that patriotism — always a subjective and normative quality — is a litmus test for the truth. Given his egomania and narcissism, Trump certainly agrees with her. <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/08/16/psychoanalyst-justin-frank-on-why-trump-hates-reality-and-must-be-quarantined/">Objective reality is to be made secondary, if not wholly replaced and usurped by, the whims of a mercurial, unstable authoritarian.</a><br /><br />The real world is swallowed up by TrumpWorld; Trump’s critics and other detractors are then excluded from reality itself — which in turn legitimates their silencing by any means available.<br /><br />In total, Trump's lies, and the media and political machine that disseminates and sustains them, are antithetical to democracy. This is not a precondition for fascism. It is fascism in action.<br /><br />Moreover, those people and organizations who aid, abet and enforce his lies are also enemies of a good and humane society. Philosopher Hannah Arendt warned of this in her 1971 essay “Lying in Politics”:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
[T]he historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life …. [I]t is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.</blockquote>
The Washington Post’s profile of Stephanie Grisham also reveals the worldview and collective character of the Trump regime and those people willing to serve it. In Grisham’s comments about her job as press secretary and communications director there is no mention of a commitment to public service, the common good or the well-being of the American people. Loyalty to Donald Trump is all that matters. The framers of the United States Constitution rejected the divine right of kings and queens and the idea of a hereditary nobility in America. Donald Trump is the human exemplar of why the framers put safeguards in the Constitution to remove such an authoritarian.<br /><br />Donald Trump’s lies are a tool. They help him to assault the rule of law, cut away at democracy, profit from corruption and greed, normalize his illegitimate regime, and stay in power by distracting the American people and the news media from his political agenda, which presents a dire threat to the existence of America’s multiracial democracy.<br /><br />Donald Trump’s lies represent another type of threat as well. Philosopher Henry Giroux demonstrates in his new book “American Nightmare” how Trump and his movement imperil the American people’s relationship to history and reality:<a name='more'></a><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
History not only grounds us in the past by showing how democratic institutions rise and fall, it is also replete with memories and narratives of resistance that pose a dangerous threat for any fascist system. This is particularly true today given the deep ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply worn into Trumpism’s rhetoric of retribution, intolerance, and demonization; its mix of schlock pageantry, coercion, violence, and impunity; and the constant stoking of ultra-nationalism and racial agitation. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Keeping historical memory alive is a form of resistance because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to power, oneself, others, and the large community. It also functions “to give witness to the truth of the past so that the politics of today is vibrantly democratic.” Historical memory matters because it offers a form of moral witnessing, and serves as a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized. The conditions leading to fascism do not exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises. Historical memory is a prerequisite to the political and moral awakening necessary to successfully counter authoritarianism in the United States today.</blockquote>
What can good Americans and other people of conscience do to survive and eventually triumph over Donald Trump and his movement’s full-spectrum assault on democracy and empirical reality?<br /><br />First, they must vote in overwhelming numbers for the Democratic candidate for president — whoever that may be — in 2020. Democratic voters (and liberals and progressives more generally) must reject purity tests and unite behind their party’s presidential nominee. Supporting the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump and the Republican Party must be the overriding principle in 2020. Already imperiled, the future of the United States is at literal risk if Donald Trump is re-elected.<br /><br />Good Americans and other people of conscience must also make a personal moral accounting. They need to ask themselves, “What am I doing in my day-to-day life to resist Donald Trump’s fascist movement?” Yes, sustained collective action is critical if the American people are to beat back this national and global crisis. But individuals must also stop waiting for other people to save them. Personal inaction is not a viable option. Passivity is complicity.<br /><br />As others have suggested, all Americans — and all people around the world who are living through this global right-wing authoritarian moment — should maintain a journal or use some other means to document how the world around them is changing. Trumpism and similar movements are assaulting the very nature of reality itself. The Age of Trump is both a moral and political crisis that gains momentum and wins final power by shattering norms and creating a type of malignant reality and state of moral inversion. By documenting these changes, individuals can stay grounded and not be swept away by the lies and corrupting influence of Trump and his movement.<br /><br />The personal must be the political, if Donald Trump and his version of American fascism are to be defeated. People of conscience should cease all communications with their relatives, friends, and other people in their lives who support Donald Trump and his movement. If that is not an option they should not discuss politics with anyone who supports Donald Trump. These people are willing members of a political cult. Trumpists cannot be freed until they choose to free themselves. Good Americans and other people of conscience should instead spend their energy supporting candidates and causes who are working to remove Donald Trump from office, blunting the harm he and his movement are doing in the present, and preparing to rehabilitate American democracy once Trump and other Republicans are removed from office.<br /><br /><b><i>You are not crazy.</i></b> Trump’s defenders and other enablers accuse his critics of suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Such accusations are acts of projection. In reality, it is Trump and his supporters and enablers who are politically deranged, wallowing in a state of moral inversion, lost to malignant reality and mass political psychosis. They are waging a war on reality and truth, here in America and around the world.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-79279776445867810102019-08-11T15:00:00.000-05:002019-08-11T15:00:01.858-05:00The Chauncey DeVega Show: A Conversation with Dr. Justin Frank About How Donald Trump's Mental Pathologies are Encouraging A Plague of Right-wing Violence and Hatred Across America<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dr. Justin Frank is a former clinical professor of
psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center and a physician
with more than 40 years of experience in psychoanalysis. He is the author of the
bestselling books Bush on the Couch and Obama on the Couch. His
newest book is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://amzn.to/2NW8cmH" target="_blank">Trump on the Couch</a></i>. Dr.
Frank's work has appeared in Time magazine and the Daily Beast and
he has appeared as an expert commentator and guest on MSNBC, CNN, PBS and other
outlets.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Dr. Frank explains how Donald Trump's many mental
pathologies give permission for the violence, hatred and terrorism of his
supporters and why the massacres in El Paso and Dayton -- and his reactions to
them -- reveal Trump's lack of empathy for other human beings and how the
president is likely a sociopath. Dr. Frank also warns that Donald Trump hates to
see happy families and this is why he does not care about seeing nonwhite
children and their families suffering in his concentration camps. Dr. Frank
also sounds the alarm about how the right-wing terrorism and other political
violence that Trump has encouraged and commanded through stochastic terrorism
and scripted violence will spread across the country like an epidemic. </div>
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Chauncey DeVega is angry that after only three years of
so-called "resistance" that too many people have already surrendered
to Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their fascist regime. Why? Because
they are "tired" and "frustrated". This is because of a
lack of historical perspective and understanding about what true struggle looks
like in America and around the world. Chauncey also shares several news stories
and commentaries about Donald Trump's post El Paso and Dayton "victory"
tour of human depravity including a raid by ICE brownshirts which stole
hundreds of Latino and Hispanic parents away from their crying children on the
first day of school. </div>
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At the end of this week's podcast Chauncey reads a wonderful
animal friends story about an honored elder who adopted an amazing senior cat. </div>
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<span style="color: #339966; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 10.5pt;">SELECTED LINKS OF INTEREST FOR THIS EPISODE OF THE CHAUNCEY
DEVEGA SHOW </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/08/08/trump-immigrants-rhetoric-criticized-el-paso-dayton-shootings/1936742001/">Trump
used words like 'invasion' and 'killer' to discuss immigrants at rallies
500 times: USA TODAY analysis</a></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/08/us/mississippi-ice-raids-cnnphotos/index.html">Their
first day of school turned into a nightmare after record immigration raids</a></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/trumps-el-paso-photo-is-obscene/595888/">Trump’s
El Paso Photo Is Obscene</a></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/10/el-paso-shooting-227612">This
Is What Latinos Think Everyone Got Wrong About El Paso</a></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="color: blue; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="color: windowtext;"><a href="https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/j5yekp/exclusive-dayton-shooter-was-in-a-pornogrind-band-that-released-songs-about-raping-and-killing-women">EXCLUSIVE:
Dayton Shooter Was in a “Pornogrind” Band</a><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/pornogrind-dayton-shooter-band-868429/"><o:p></o:p></a></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/pornogrind-dayton-shooter-band-868429/">WTF
Is Pornogrind? – Rolling Stone</a></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><a href="https://bestfriends.org/stories-blog-videos/latest-news/elderly-woman-adopts-senior-cat">Elderly
adopter shows senior cat how life gets better with age</a></li>
</ul>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-89559483015142703442019-08-03T22:30:00.000-05:002019-08-03T22:30:36.063-05:00The Truth Report: My Conversation with Tim Wise About White Rage and Donald Trump's "Race War" in AmericaTim Wise is one of America's and the world's leading experts on white privilege and racism. He is the author of numerous books including his most recent Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America.<br /><br />Tim Wise explains why three years into Trump's presidency there are still so many journalists, reporters and other political observers who are "shocked" and "surprised" by his blatant racism and authoritarian behavior. <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-readies-his-mob-for-the-race-war">Is Republican strategist Rick Wilson correct in his assessment that Donald Trump wants a "race war"</a> in America? And in what ways is<a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Investigators-find-items-in-Nevada-apartment-of-14268336.php?utm_campaign=thirdparty&utm_source=article&utm_medium=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nhregister.com%2Fnews%2Farticle%2FReport-White-supremacist-radical-Islam-14273512.php">the recent mass shooting in California by an apparent Nazi</a> -- as well as a very large increase in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rhetoric-does-inspire-more-hate-crimes/?utm_term=.d59cd464ff0a">right-wing political violence</a> more generally in America -- the expected outcome of Donald Trump's presidency?<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" height="90" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/10748384/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/" style="border: none;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="100%"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-84601591967072820542019-07-23T02:16:00.000-05:002019-07-23T02:16:11.266-05:00A Conversation with MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid About How Donald Trump Represents Everything Wrong With AmericaJoy-Ann Reid is the host of <i>AM Joy</i> on MSNBC. She is the author of several books including Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide as well as <i>We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama</i>. Her new book is <i>The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story</i>. <br /><br />Reid explains how Donald Trump has betrayed American democracy, why his violence, racism and other vile behavior is appealing to his supporters, and how he is the human embodiment of America's cultural and social ills.<br /><br />Joy-Ann Reid also reflects on how best to make sense of this confusing and disorienting moment in American history and a Republican Party and Donald Trump which are committed to restoring American Apartheid and total white rule over an increasingly diverse country.<br /><br />On this week's show Chauncey DeVega ponders why so many journalists, reporters, and the American people as a whole, are still surprised by Donald Trump's racism and his newest exercise in presidential white supremacy -- the slurring of four nonwhite Democratic congresswomen (most notably Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) as somehow being inherently "un-American" and who should be kicked out of the United States if they do not bow in fealty to Trump's racial authoritarian regime.<br /><br />Chauncey also shares several news items which highlight Trump's war on America's multiracial democracy and his campaign of cruelty against nonwhites and then asks you, the listeners, to connect the dots.<div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-19721981882033096912019-07-20T10:00:00.000-05:002019-07-20T10:00:02.599-05:00"Two years ago I compared Trump to Hitler. People didn't believe me": Dr. John Gartner Explains How Donald Trump's Poor Mental Health is Grounds for Impeachment<a href="http://johngartner.com/">Dr. John Gartner</a> is a former professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Gartner is also the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, <a href="http://www.adutytowarn.org/">an organization</a> working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump.<br /><br />He was a contributor to the 2017 bestselling book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Case-Donald-Trump-Psychiatrists/dp/1250179459/?tag=saloncom08-20">The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President</a>. Gartner along with two other expert mental health professionals, is the author of the recent and widely-read USA Today op-ed <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/05/31/donald-trump-should-impeached-because-his-bad-mental-health-column/1260781001/">"President Donald Trump's poor mental health is grounds for impeachment</a>".<br /><br />Dr. Gartner explains why there is no mass resistance to Donald Trump's movement and his assault on American democracy and freedom. He also answers the following questions.<br /><br />Why have so many Americans chosen to surrender? How can psychology help to explain Donald Trump and his movement's assault on reality and why so many Americans have been seduced by this malignant reality? How has the Mueller Report empowered Donald Trump and fueled his apparent public mental illness and other dangerous behavior? What must be done to force Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party to impeach Donald Trump? Will there be violence from Trump's supporters if he is forced to leave office? <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-62421905977103290062019-07-19T10:00:00.000-05:002019-07-19T10:00:13.828-05:00Political Scientist Ashley Jardina Explains How "White Identity Politics" Are a Dire Threat to American DemocracyToday's Republican Party is the largest, most powerful and most dangerous white racist organization in the United States -- if not the world. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is its leader. These are plain if not understated facts. No embellishment is needed. The examples are many. <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/07/15/trumps-racist-outburst-was-unbelievably-vile-but-why-is-anyone-surprised/"> Over the last few days Donald Trump has repeatedly dug into his bucket of racist political scatology,</a> saying on Twitter and elsewhere that four nonwhite members of Congress ("Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen," as he mockingly put it) should leave America and go back to their own "crime infested" and "totally broken" countries.<br /><br />Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib were all born in the United States. Rep. Ilhan Omar is a naturalized citizen who was born in Somalia. This is not the first time that Donald Trump has said such vile things, which are almost word-for-word white supremacist or white nationalist talking points about how being a "real American" means one must first and foremost be "white" — and that nonwhites should be removed from the United States if they do not submit to white rule and authority.<br /><br />Trump's racism is part of a much larger pattern of white supremacist behavior by his administration: Interning nonwhite migrants and immigrants in concentration camps, seeking to ban Muslims from entering the United States, suggesting that black athletes who oppose police brutality are traitors, changing the country's immigration laws with the aim of maintaining a white majority, and disenfranchising nonwhite people through gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter intimidation and other tactics, legal and otherwise.<br /><br />Republican elected officials almost unanimously support Trump's racist agenda. To wit: only four Republicans voted "yes" in support of Tuesday's House resolution condemning Donald Trump's gross and obvious racism.<div>
<br /><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/16/president-is-not-racist-mitch-mcconnells-defense-trump-annotated/?utm_term=.ad95932a41d9">Senior Republican leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell</a>, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/07/16/mitt-romney-excuses-himself-and-walks-away-when-reporter-asks-him-if-trumps-tweets-were-racist/">Sen. Mitt Romney</a> have either stated support for Trump's racist comments or avoided answering questions about them.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/07/16/while-denying-president-trump-is-a-racist-kellyanne-conway-asks-a-reporter-about-his-ethnicity/">Trump's White House spokespeople</a> and <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/07/16/trump-believes-white-nationalism-is-a-winning-strategy-because-fox-news-tells-him-so/">the right-wing media</a> have of course enthusiastically supported Donald Trump's most recent example of public white supremacy. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-poll/republican-support-for-trump-rises-after-racially-charged-tweets-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKCN1UB2UD">Public opinion polls show that support for Donald Trump has grown among Republican voters </a>because of his racist attacks.<br /><br />Donald Trump and the Republican Party's racist agenda is in service to white identity politics and a foundational assumption that white people should always and forever be the most privileged and dominant group in the United States. But what are the specific contours of white identity politics, and why has it been so politically effective and personally seductive for Trump, the Republican Party and their voters? Is white identity politics an existential threat to America's multiracial democracy? What does it mean to be "white" in post-civil rights America? Are white men and white women invested in white identity in the same way?<br /><br />In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Ashley Jardina, a professor of political science at Duke University and author of the new book "White Identity Politics."<br /><br />This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.<a name='more'></a><b><br /></b></div>
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<b>How did America arrive at a moment where it would elect a person like Donald Trump as president? Was this disaster caused by an inevitable white backlash against Barack Obama?</b><br /><br />I would not say that Donald Trump's presidency was inevitable. But I do think there is a confluence of events which took place. For the entire history of the United States, white people have had the majority of social, economic and political power. There have been different periods of time in which that power has seemed less secure or it's been chipped away at. This is especially true at present and over the last decade. This has been partly caused by immigration.<br /><br />Of course there is the symbolic power which came from the election of the nation's first African-American president Barack Obama. As a result of these factors, many whites in the United States are starting to feel like their place at the top of the pyramid is no longer guaranteed and that the United States no longer looks like a "white nation" which is dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. This arrangement looks like it may be in jeopardy to many white people. Donald Trump is very much a response to the feelings of threat and insecurity that many whites in the United States are experiencing.<br /><br /><b>These narratives about the "browning of America" are very problematic. Historically in America, groups formerly viewed as "nonwhite" are eventually included in the category of who is "white" so that white people as a group can remain numerically superior over blacks and other people of color. Why wouldn't "white" Hispanics — such as some Cubans, for example — simply not be grandfathered into whiteness?</b><br /><br />Latinos have not been subsumed by whiteness yet. There is an argument that eventually, just as took place with the Irish and Italians in the late 19th and mid-20th century, where those groups transitioned into whiteness, that this will happen with Latinos too. But such a crossing over into whiteness has not happened yet for them. There are pressures against that happening quickly. For example, there is a big push to get Latinos in the United States to develop a pan-ethnic Latino identity because it's politically strategic, particularly for Democrats.<br /><br />There are these common criticisms that "identity politics" is bad. What is so problematic with such a complaint is that "identity politics" for people of color and for underrepresented groups like women is often the consequence of shared experiences of oppression and subordination. "Identity politics" is a way for marginalized groups to achieve political power and political representation of their interests.<br /><br />In many ways this is a story of perception versus reality. It's certainly true that whites still have the majority of power and resources in America. There is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that has been dramatically chipped away at. After the 2010 census there were all these grand predictions being made about America's changing racial demographics. There were all these articles appearing about how whites as a group were going to lose their numerical majority.<br /><br />Then you've got the major symbolism of Barack Obama and the fact that Barack Obama won his second term — but not with the white vote. Obama had the lowest share of white voters of any successful presidential candidate. Obama won because of a coalition of people of color. Taken in total, all of these dynamics lead to a misperception that the power and privilege of whites in America is somehow being threatened.<br /><br /><b>This obsession by the mainstream corporate media with chronicling the "Lost Americans" in TrumpLandia — meaning "white working class" red-state denizens — is a tedious new subgenre of writing. One of the themes has been white Trump voters saying that “Well, the blacks had Obama now we've got a white man to do something for white people.” Such claims are detached from any sense of reality, yet the sentiment resonates across White America.</b><br /><br />There is a sense of white group identity and racial animus prefaced on a belief, however incorrect, that Barack Obama was going to do things just for black people and other nonwhites. Of course we know that was not true. Nonetheless, Donald Trump is very much seen as the response to Barack Obama. Trump is the person who is going to come in and help white people.<br /><br />In my new book "White Identity Politics," I examine public opinion data and other research which demonstrates that there really is this feeling among a certain subset of white people who believe the government is not doing things for them. These white people want benefits for their group. This helps to explain why Donald Trump was a successful candidate, even though he is an unconventional Republican.<br /><br />Trump went against the traditional Republican platform by promising to expand government, to protect Social Security, to protect Medicare and basically to provide government benefits that white people wanted. It's not just about "small government" or taking power away from people of color. Trump's appeal is about whites wanting to feel like they're getting some share of government benefits and support. This is of course wrong: White Americans receive a disproportionate share of resources whether that's from the government or just the overall economic, social and political resources in the United States.<br /><b><br />How do these working-class Trump voters reconcile the fact that he and the Republican party are actually enacting policies which make their lives materially worse? Is this just the old story of the "wages of whiteness," where Trump's racism gives his white voters a sense of power over and against nonwhites, even if they are being hurt economically?</b><br /><br />American voters are not that sophisticated. These white voters see Trump as the candidate that's for the white person. They might not actually be getting the resources that they want, but they're not really thinking about it in a narrow, material way. What these white people are thinking is, "Hey, Trump is there for my group. He's going to help white people. He's the president for white people."<br /><br />Motivated reasoning is very important here too. This is the psychological process through which people are going to believe things that are consistent with their prior beliefs, and they're going to reject information that's inconsistent with them. Trump might not be doing a good job helping this particular subset of voters. He might not be delivering on his promises. But his supporters are going to want to believe that he is. Trump's voters and other supporters are going to be highly resistant to being disappointed.</div>
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<br /><b>How do you define the oft-used and often vague phrase and concept "white identity politics"?</b><br />The idea behind "white identity politics" is that there is a subset of white voters and/or white Americans in general who feel a sense of attachment to their group. They feel a sense of solidarity. They think that their race and their racial identity is important to who they are. Their "white identity" influences how they see and view the political world. Tied up in that sense of identity is a belief that whites are losing out in the United States, their status and power is somehow under threat. Subsequently those white people who manifest white identity politics are responding to that perception in a political way by supporting policies and candidates who they view as protecting their racial group and preserving its status.</div>
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<br />Donald Trump is a candidate who campaigned on limiting nonwhite immigration, building a wall and doing things that were going to preserve America's literal "whiteness." Trump also promised to provide and support policies such as Social Security and Medicare. These programs disproportionately benefit white people. Donald Trump is an isolationist. "America First" and "Make America Great Again" are also isolationist slogans. Donald Trump is very much the candidate of white identity — but white identity mattered before Trump came on the scene.<br /><br />Empirical data shows that whites who felt a sense of solidarity with their racial group were far less likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2012. This did not just suddenly appear in 2016. There has been evidence of this type of racially motivated voting and other political behavior for some time.<br /><br /><b>America was founded as a racialized democracy. Denying nonwhites their human and civil rights was not generally viewed by white elites and the white mass public as being incompatible with "freedom" and "democracy." How do we reconcile your research on white identity politics with America's history and present as a racialized democracy?</b><br /><br />What we are seeing at present is the maintenance of a system of white supremacy. I want to be clear when I use the term "white supremacy." People tend to recoil from that term because they think of white supremacy as the Ku Klux Klan. I'm not talking about those people exclusively. They are a very small subset of white people who show overt, explicit racial prejudice.<br /><br />There is a much larger percentage of whites in United States who are not particularly high on racial prejudice. I would not call them bigots, but they still want to preserve and protect the privileges of their group. In doing so they are ultimately preserving a system and system of racial hierarchy in which white people are at the top.<br /><br />For a long time whiteness was associated with mainstream America. Whites had the privilege of not having to think about their race. Nonwhites have their life outcomes overdetermined by their race. Race impacts how nonwhites navigate the world and think about political and the social reality. It is not until whites start to feel some threat or anxiety that white identity politics is activated. Whiteness is very salient in the Age of Trump.<br /><br />But of course we can go back in time and consider other moments when white identity mattered more, such as the civil rights movement, and debates in the early part of the 20th century about immigration and preserving the "Nordic stock" and "Anglo-Saxon heritage" of the nation.<br /><br />These moments were very explicit about the idea that America was a white country and "we" had to protect this particular flavor or idea of whiteness and a "White America." But in between these periods of time, whites have had the luxury of not having to think about their race because they got to define what it means to be an "American" and what constitutes "mainstream America."<br /><br /><b>How do experts who study and write about race and racial inequality understand and use terms such as "racism" and "whiteness" in a way that the general public does not?</b><br /><br />First of all, "white identity" is not the same thing as overt racism or overt prejudice. Now, they're certainly related in important ways. We often think about racism in two ways. One is learned dislike or antipathy for an out-group. For whites we often talk about whites just disliking people of color generally. And often, when we discuss racism we consider how whites dislike blacks in particular which manifests through a particular set of negative stereotypes that they associate with black people and blackness.<br /><br />Another way of thinking about racism is a denial of structural inequality — and this can be ignorance or willful — and how nonwhites experience discrimination in the United States. This racist logic proceeds from an assumption that everyone has a type of equal opportunity and to the extent to which there is racial inequality, it is caused by people of color not working hard enough or not abiding by particular cherished "American values" such as "hard work" and "patriotism." This is symbolic racism. The difference with white identity is that it is an in-group attitude; it is about wanting to protect and preserve white identity.<br /><br />Yes, white identity is still part of the system of racism because it's about wanting to maintain their power at the top. By implication, this means that people of color necessarily cannot be equal with white people. This type of white identity is about maintaining a system of inequality. But from a psychological perspective, this is not the same thing as just disliking or having negative attitudes towards a racial out-group.<br /><br /><b>What do we know about the road from the Tea Party to Donald Trump's Republican Party and the racialization of white group identity?</b><br /><br />Over the period of time in which the Tea Party got its momentum, there was a very clear shift in support towards white people who measure very high on indicators of symbolic racism and racial resentment.<br /><br />Looking at the data from 2012 to the present I do not see a strong relationship between white identity and Tea Party support. instead I see a really strong relationship between racial resentment and Tea Party support, which should not be surprising.<br /><br />The Tea Party was very much latching on to an idea that "big government" was just giving "handouts" to people and that we needed to reduce the size of government. Such an argument is closely tied to symbolic racism and the idea that "undeserving" groups in the United States are "taking advantage" of government and that whites are paying too much into the system and not getting enough back. In total, the Tea Party and racial prejudice are tightly linked together.<br /><br /><b>How does gender interact with white identity?</b><br /><br />There are gender differences with respects to levels of white identity. I often find that a slightly higher percentage of white women identify as being white as compared relative to white men. In some ways this runs counter to a narrative that I have never found very compelling. There is this argument that the most disgruntled and aggrieved person in the United States is the working-class white man. From that premise one would expect such a person to measure high on indicators of white identity. In fact it is white women who identify as being white, more so than do white men.<br /><br />One potential hypothesis is that people tend to want to identify with higher status groups. If you're a white woman and you have a choice between identifying with your gender or your race you are likely going to pick your race because it is the higher status identity.<br /><br />Historically and through to the present, white women have been deeply involved with supporting, enforcing and benefiting from white supremacy. How does this complicate alliances across the color line between women?<br /><br />There are several things going on here. Many people think that white women are really aligned with the Democratic Party. They are not. Most white women in the United States have voted for Republican candidates. There have only been two elections since the 1950s in which the majority of white women have not voted for Republican presidential candidates.<br /><br />Why is this? Married white women tend to adopt the partisanship of their husbands. White women are moved to vote for Republicans in part because of the influence of their husbands. I can imagine a response where someone says, "That's so disappointing." Most people do not realize that white women in the United States are not very progressive when it comes to their views about gender roles. We have the sense that women are vastly more supportive of egalitarian gender roles in the United States, and that's not actually true. In fact, women in general, and white women in particular, are pretty supportive of more traditional gender roles.<br /><br />This is not very surprising. Women have traditionally been more excluded from the political world. As such, it is less likely that they are going to develop their own separate sorts of political interests or political views from their husbands. That is just the reality of gender dynamics in the United States. There have also been some interesting patterns when we look at the 2016 presidential election. There was a really big educational divide that has not been observed in previous elections. If you look back to 2012 and compare white women with a college degree and those without a college degree, the two groups did not vote that differently.<br /><br />By comparison, in 2016 white women with a college degree who were not happy about Trump were much more likely to vote for Clinton.<br /><br /><b>What of the obvious and overt white supremacy increasingly advocated for by Republicans such as Steve King and, of course, Donald Trump? How does that fit into your findings about white identity politics?</b><br /><br />I've asked people on surveys the extent to which they think that whites have made greater contributions to human civilization than people of color. A huge percentage of white Americans agree that whites have made greater contributions.<br /><br />One of the dangers of white identity politics is that white people as a group definitely do not want to associate themselves with the Ku Klux Klan. They do not want to be seen as white supremacists. Nevertheless many white Americans do hold such attitudes. And these attitudes do start to look a lot like those which are espoused by bonafide members of white supremacist hate organizations.<br /><br />This is where we really need to start worrying as a country: These arguments by white extremist groups are starting to sound pretty persuasive to a sizable group of white people. If these dangerous messages are being delivered by politicians who are not wearing white Klan robes, but instead who seem like they have some degree of decorum, then that racism seems reasonable. I believe that many white people are willing to openly adopt the views of white hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and others.<br /><br /><b>What does whiteness and white identity mean for white voters in Trump's America, versus white people who supported Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?</b><br /><br />Many of the white voters who supported Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton do not really think about their racial identity or feel a strong attachment to it. And there is a subset of these white voters for Obama and Clinton who do possess a more progressive type of white identity where they recognize the privileges or advantages that they have as a result of being white in this country and would prefer a more racially egalitarian society.</div>
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<b>What are you most worried about regarding America's future? Does anything give you hope?</b></div>
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I’m worried about going backwards and away from the racial progress we have made as a society here in the United States. I'm also worried about the increasing legitimacy of racialized language and racism.<br /><br />If we look at public opinion data, Donald Trump is not doing well. There is some hope: A sizable percentage of both white Americans and Americans of color are angry about our current political moment with Donald Trump and all that he has done to the country.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-51993018984489052162019-07-18T17:00:00.000-05:002019-07-18T17:00:02.507-05:00Donald Trump is America's Racist-in-Chief: Why is Anyone Surprised By His Vile Attacks on Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley?Donald Trump dug deeper than ever into his bucket of political scatology this weekend. On Sunday, in tweets already made infamous, he proclaimed:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!</blockquote>
This is another version of "America: Love it or leave it!" It's troglodyte patriotism, low and unseemly coming from a drunk on a barstool, and nearly impossible to believe coming from the president of the United States.<br /><br />Trump's "Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen" are no mystery. He means Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, all freshmen elected last year. Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx. Pressley was born in Cincinnati. Tlaib was born in Detroit.<br /><br />Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and came to America as a refugee in 1995. Unlike those Americans who hit the geographic and genetic lottery by being born in the United States, she chose to become an American citizen in the year 2000, at 17 years old. Her patriotism and loyalty to America are proven by her choice to be a public servant and by the policy goals she has pursued.This kind of "Love it or leave it!" patriotism has always been infused with white supremacy. Such language has have routinely been directed towards nonwhites and others — especially liberals, progressives and socialists — who want to make the United States a better country. Those who throw these rhetorical bombs imagine the nation as one being a "real American" is synonymous with being white and Christian.<br /><br />Trump's comments are not surprising or shocking. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/trump-racism-comments/588067/">Throughout his public life, Trump has shown himself to be a racist and a bigot</a>.<br /><br />Journalist Jonathan M. Katz summarized this perfectly on Twitter, writing on Sunday: "Donald Trump was an authoritarian white supremacist with fascist tendencies in 2015, and every single public figure and publication that did not make that clear from the moment he announced is complicit in the #ICEraid, the concentration camps, and everything happening today."<br /><br />For all of the talk about how the Democrats are obsessed with "identity politics" in reality it is Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their supporters who wield it like a whipsaw against multiracial democracy and black and brown people.<br /><br />The only riddle — and it is not much of one — is why so many members of the chattering class remain in denial about who and what Donald Trump really is.<br /><br />The answer lies in white racial innocence: the presumption that to be "white" is to be inherently benign in one's intent and behavior, and in the outcomes which generally result. Donald Trump is the country's most prominent beneficiary of that type of white privilege.<br /><br />There remains, even now, a fear and reluctance among the mainstream news media to describe Donald Trump as a racist or a white supremacist. Instead his bigotry is treated as a puzzle or the source of indecipherable questions. We can't know what is in his heart. Trump is often said to "misspeak" or to "make inaccurate statements."<a name='more'></a><br /><br /><a href="http://bostonreview.net/race/lawrence-glickman-racially-tinged">In the Boston Review, historian Lawrence B. Glickman summarizes such rhetorical trickery this way</a>:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
The media’s use of “racially tinged” telegraphs that racism is normal, non-pathological, and within the range of mainstream political disagreement. </blockquote>
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An October 22 headline in the New York Times claimed that “Trump and G.O.P. Candidates Escalate Race and Fear as Election Ploys.” How exactly does one “escalate race”? The article didn’t say, although it did note that “Mr. Trump and other Republicans . . . have attacked minority candidates in nakedly racial terms.” A Washington Post article by Matt Viser on how Republicans were “stoking racial animosity” used the word “racism” twice. But Viser also twice used “racially tinged,” employed the phrase “race-based,” and modified the word “racial” in more ways than I thought possible, speaking of “racial insults,” “racial undercurrents,” “racial animosity,” “racial fringes,” “racial attacks,” “racial connotations,” and “racial fears.”</blockquote>
Glickman continues with an explanation of these "semantic somersaults," writing that such expressions arrived in the 1990s "as matter-of-fact description of forms of racism that had become normalized as essentially non-pathological and within the range of mainstream political disagreement." <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
Given this historical context, what on the left has been so often treated as Trump’s radical departure from political norms comes into focus as the terminal outcome of mainstreaming the color-blind language of post–civil rights white supremacy. By extension, the cure cannot be more of the same: by amplifying this language of “racially tinged” and its kin, the media replicates the very same language of indirection that was invented by right ideologues to make it difficult to speak accurately of racial oppression. Color-blind and euphemistic coverage not only masks the danger of racism, it reinforces it. If this language was harmful during the era of “Massive Resistance” to the civil rights movement in the late 1950s, it is no less so in the age of Trump, when subtle dog whistles have been replaced with overt appeals.</blockquote>
Donald Trump has called right-wing hate-mongers "very fine people" and somehow his words are reinterpreted by his defenders and enablers to mean something other than exactly what he said.<br /><br />Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump's victory <a href="https://www.salon.com/control/2017/01/05/it-was-the-racism-stupid-white-working-class-economic-anxiety-is-a-zombie-idea-that-needs-to-die/">is still described as a result of "economic anxiety" among the white working class,</a> rather than as a national temper tantrum by white racists.<br /><br />Trump's racism is also described as "rallying his base." In fact, Donald Trump is telling his racist voters what they want to hear and that he agrees with them.<br /><br />When there is right-wing domestic terrorism and other violence committed in Donald Trump's name or inspired by his politics, he is never held responsible.<br /><br />The Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups hail Trump as their hero. Yet, it is somehow unfair to hold Trump responsible for the fact that such groups and individuals adore him.<br /><br />Trump's regime has imprisoned nonwhite migrants and refugees in concentration camps. He has slurred Latinos and Hispanics as a natural "race" of thieves, rapists, and murders who are "polluting" and "infesting" America through an "invasion" as they "breed" in the country's cities. This is greeted by public debates about language and nomenclature — are they concentration camps or something else? — rather than a focus on the crimes against humanity in which Donald Trump's regime and its supporters are engaged.<br /><br />Trump and the Republicans are doing everything they can under the law, and sometimes in violation of it, to keep nonwhites from voting as part of a broader war on civil rights and human rights<br /><br />Trump's regime is constantly trying to adjust the country's immigration laws to maintain a white majority.<br /><br />Trump left the people of Puerto Rico to die by the thousands after Hurricane Maria because in his eyes they are "lazy." Trump has said that African-American athletes and others who support the Black Lives Matter campaign to end police brutality are traitors who should be kicked out of the country. Trump has described predominantly black countries such as Nigeria or Haiti as "shitholes."<br /><br />Perhaps most dangerous, in this time of crisis there is a still a reluctance by many members of the Fourth Estate to state that Donald Trump is a fascist and an authoritarian — even though he admires such leaders, threatens political violence against his "enemies," and frequently jokes about having journalists killed or imprisoned.<br /><br />There are still many reporters, columnists and other opinion leaders who use the first-person plural when discussing how "shocked" they are at Trump's behavior as president and how "unexpected" this all seems.<br /><br />In fact, many Americans were keenly aware of the threat posed to America by Donald Trump and his movement. Black Americans, a community which has a personal and intimate understanding of fascism and authoritarianism — from slavery to Jim Crow to subtler forms of American apartheid — were entirely clear about the misery that Trump and his movement would unleash upon the country.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/22/paul-beatty-trumps-america-has-always-existed">Prize-winning novelist Paul Beatty told the Guardian in 2017,</a>"This is nothing new. To me that’s the part that feels disingenuous. When people go, I don’t recognize this place. And I’m like, where have you been? That’s the part that bothers me. With the police violence — people are like, oh I didn’t know. And it’s like people have been putting this in your face for ages and all of a sudden now … why now?”<br /><br />Excluding Trump's supporters — who knew exactly what he would do and were eager for it to happen — most white Americans chose to ignore these warnings. White racial innocence won out. White privilege once again imperiled American democracy and the country's future.<br /><br />If those white Americans who feel themselves perpetually shocked and surprised by Donald Trump's racism and other foul behavior could answer the following questions, perhaps we could expect a better result in the 2020 presidential election and the years to follow.<br /><br />When we told you that Trump and his supporters were white supremacists, why didn't you listen to us then? Three years in, have you learned anything about why you were in such denial? What are your biases and blind spots? Will you listen to us next time?<br /><br />Hope is a good thing. Hope can also be a foolish thing. Holding one's breath while waiting for answers to these questions will likely be dangerous to one's health.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-80694319695772480682019-07-18T12:00:00.000-05:002019-07-18T12:00:00.150-05:00Human Rights Attorney Hope Frye Explains the Evils She Witnessed Inside of Trump's Concentration Camps<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hope Frye is a human rights attorney who has been defending the human dignity and civil rights of migrants, refugees and other groups of vulnerable people for 40 years. Hope became involved when she chaired the Board of <a href="https://www.centerforhumanrights.org/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(51, 122, 183) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">Center for Human Rights & Constitutional Law</a> and now leads teams of lawyers and doctors into ORR, ICE and CBP detention facilities to monitor compliance with the landmark 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement governing the treatment of unaccompanied migrant and refugee children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Flores decision has governed the care of these children until Trump's vile regime circumvented that agreement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Most recently she has lead teams to McAllen, Texas, Homestead, Florida, and several facilities in the Rio Grande Valley. She is the attorney who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/advocate-immigrant-mom-and-premature-newborn-detained/2019/06/13/d9111c52-8e0f-11e9-b6f4-033356502dce_story.html?utm_term=.ab02339a44f6" rel="noopener" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(51, 122, 183) !important; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">discovered the premature newborn</a> and recovering young mother at an overcrowded processing facility in McAllen, Texas last month.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hope Frye explains how Donald Trump's regime is violating American and international law in its treatment of migrants and refugees and why the culture of the Border Patrol and ICE encourages cruelty towards non-white immigrants, refugees, and migrants. Frye also shares her experiences documenting the horrible conditions inside of Trump's concentration camps and what it was like to discover a young mother and her premature baby who were suffering at the hands of Trump's Border Patrol enforcers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">During this week's podcast Chauncey explains why Donald Trump's authoritarian right-wing July 4th "celebration" was a carnival of white supremacy where Trump's MAGAite faithful eagerly waited for his special love juice and other sacred fluids. Chauncey also "connects the dots" between Trump's vile July 4th event and how the Republican Party is a dangerous revanchist destructive organization on a global scale.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And at the end of this week's show Chauncey reflects on America's moral reckoning and the poem "The Hound of Heaven" by Francis Thompson.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-79950091950605770132019-07-18T01:21:00.000-05:002019-07-18T01:21:05.172-05:00Eve Ensler on Righteous Anger, Forgiveness and Her New Book "The Apology"<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.eveensler.org/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(51, 122, 183) !important; text-decoration-line: none;">Eve Ensler</a> is an author, Tony Award-winner, playwright and activist. Her award-winning play <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Vagina Monologues</em> ran for more than 10 years and has been performed in more than 140 countries. Ensler's new book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Apology</em> is a meditation on the decades of sexual abuse and other violence she endured from her father and on how she finally purged his power over her life through creative confrontation and forgiveness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ensler reflects on the rise of Donald Trump and America's moral crisis, privilege and responsibility, healthy masculinity, why only certain groups in America are forced to forgive the transgressions against them, and how women who dare to publicly speak out against rapists and abusers are often made to suffer more trauma. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ensler also explains the power of righteous anger, her own choice to forgive her abusive father, and what she gained and sacrificed through the process of writing <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Apology</em>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">During this week's podcast Chauncey explains how the culture of violence among Trump's Border Patrol and ICE enforcers is much greater and bigger than a few "bad apples" and the ways that Michael Pence's "inspection tour" of his boss's concentration camps is an example of human evil across history. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Chauncey also cautions people that the act of brave resistance by a freedom fighter in Tacoma, Washington who engaged in direct action against one of the Trump's regime's concentration camps on Saturday will be used to make the regime's Border Patrol and other foot soldier hooligans into "the real victims".</span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And on this week's episode of <i>The Chauncey DeVega Show</i> our intrepid host shares some movie reviews and also a wonderful animal friend story. </span><div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; margin-bottom: 10px;">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-77685756890484254712019-06-16T14:21:00.000-05:002019-06-16T14:21:38.969-05:00A Global Emergency: Psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee Explains How the Mueller Report Shows that Donald Trump is Mentally Unfit to be President of the United StatesDr. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist and a leading expert on violence at the Yale School of Medicine. She is also the editor of the New York Times bestseller, <i>The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President</i>.<br /><br />In response to the Mueller report Dr. Lee convened a panel consisting of some of the country's and world's leading mental health experts. Acting in the interest of public health and safety their goal was to determine Donald Trump's mental fitness based on the information contained in the near-exhaustive and comprehensive Mueller report.<br /><br />Their conclusion: Trump is mentally unfit, a threat to the United States and the world, and as such should have his powers severely restricted.<br /><br />And it is fundraising month to support <i>The Chauncey DeVega Show</i> and now <i>The Truth Report</i>. I do not advertise on <i>The Chauncey DeVega Show</i>. Both of these podcasts take a great amount of time to produce each week. If you would like to help The Chauncey DeVega Show stay afloat and grow please show some love via Paypal which can be found over on the right sidebar. <br /><br />Many people listen to my podcast each week because of the amazing guests I have been lucky to speak with there in our shared effort to help the American people and the world understand and survive Trump's malignant reality.<br /><br />Your kindness and generosity sustains <i>The Chauncey DeVega Show</i> and allows it to continue and to grow.<div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57113078446695664.post-85470062562031168162019-06-01T17:44:00.002-05:002019-06-01T17:44:31.913-05:00A Conversation with Author Ben Fountain About How American Democracy is Broken and Donald Trump and His Supporters are Burning It All DownBen Fountain is the author of the novel <i>Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk</i>, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Fountain traveled across the country during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign in an effort to document that political and social disaster as it took place in real time. The result is his most recent book <i>Beautiful Country Burn Again</i>. <div>
<br />Fountain explains the deep and burning rage in America from a lack of hope and limited dreams which in turn helped to spawn Trumpism, why Trump's deplorables love him so, and how America's democracy went so wrong. Fountain also highlights how the Democratic Party shares no small amount of responsibility for Trump's reactionary movement because they succumbed to neoliberalism and abandoned American workers to the gangster capitalists.<br /><br />On this week's show Chauncey DeVega says what must be said about (now private citizen) Robert Mueller: he is a coward and not a hero. Chauncey also warns the public that Trump and his personal bodyguard and human shield William Barr are and will be collecting receipts against their enemies such as journalists and reporters who dare to tell the truth about this regime.<br /><br />On this week's show Chauncey DeVega says what must be said about (now private citizen) Robert Mueller: he is a coward and not a hero. Chauncey also warns the public that Trump and his personal bodyguard and human shield William Barr are and will be collecting receipts against their enemies such as journalists and reporters who dare to tell the truth about this regime. </div>
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