Archives for category: Evil
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Goes Full-Blown Fascist

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2024 //
38

Heather Cox Richardson pulls together the signs of Trump’s descent into unapologetic fascism. He offers no agenda or policies for the future, but focuses instead of who he will punish. Immigrants, he insists, are the biggest problem facing the nation. He promises to restore the U.S. to its imagined glory of white male Christian supremacy. If elected, he will call out the National Guard or the military to round up not only immigrants but his political enemies. He is a dangerous man. He is increasingly paranoid, determined to punish his enemies. Will he imprison Harris, Biden, Clinton, Obama, Newsom, and others who have opposed him?

She writes:

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” 

This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position. 

Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military. 

Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.” 

Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. 

But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn’t really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him. 

According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader’s behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.

According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.

At a MAGA rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, Trump added to this formula his determination to use the federal government to attack those he calls enemies. Standing on a stage with a backdrop that read, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” and “END MIGRANT CRIME,” he insisted that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs and proposed a federal program he called “Operation Aurora” to remove those immigrants he insists are members of “savage gangs.” When Trump said, “We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long,” a person in the crowd shouted: “Kill them!”

Officials in Aurora emphatically deny Trump’s claim that the city is a “war zone.” Republican mayor Mike Coffman said that Aurora is “not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs” and that such statements are “grossly exaggerated.” While there have been incidents, they “were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.” The chief of the Aurora police agreed that the city is “not by any means overtaken by Venezuelan gangs.”

In Aurora, Trump also promised to “invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.” As legal analyst Asha Rangappa explains, the Alien Enemies Act authorizes the government to round up, detain, and deport foreign nationals of a country with which the U.S. is at war. But it is virtually certain Trump didn’t come up with the idea to use that law on his own, raising the question of who really will be in charge of policy in a second Trump administration.

Trump aide Stephen Miller seems the likely candidate to run immigration policy. He has promised to begin a project of “denaturalization,” that is, stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship. He, too, spoke at Aurora, leading the audience in booing photos that were allegedly of migrant criminals. 

Before Miller spoke, a host from Right Side Broadcasting used the dehumanizing language associated with genocide, saying of migrants: “These people, they are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are Satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice. They are raping men, women, and children—especially underaged children.” Trump added the old trope of a population carrying disease, saying that immigrants are “very very very sick with highly contagious disease, and they’re let into our country to infect our country.” 

Trump promised the audience in Aurora that he would “liberate Colorado. I will give you back your freedom and your life.”

On Saturday, October 12, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded.  

And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the “enemy within,” Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem. 

He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants “is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.

Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.

Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.” 

Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas. 

Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I’ve done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?… Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?” 

“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”

—

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

North Carolina: “Armed Militia” Threatens Federal Emergency Workers

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2024 //
12

The Washington Post reported that federal emergency workers had to stop work due to concerns about an “armed militia.”

It can’t happen here. We are the United States.

But we have a candidate for President who constantly encourages violence against enemies and disparages the federal government that he wants to lead.

And we have a political party that wants no restrictions on guns. And here we are.

LAKE LURE, N.C. — Federal emergency response personnel on Saturday had employees operating in hard-hit Rutherford County, N.C., stop working and move to a different area because of concerns over “armed militia” threatening government workers in the region, according to an email sent to federal agencies helping with response in the state.

Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately. The message stated that National Guard troops ‘had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA.’”

“The IMTs [incident management teams] have been notified and are coordinating the evacuation of all assigned personnel in that county,” the email added.

Two federal officials confirmed the authenticity of the email, though it was unclear whether the quoted threat was seen as credible. The National Guard referred questions to FEMA when asked about the incident. One Forest Service official coordinating the Helene recovery said responders moved to a “safe area” and at least some work in that area — which included clearing trees off dozens of damaged and blocked roads to help search-and-rescue crews, as well as groups delivering supplies — was paused.

By Sunday afternoon, personnel were back in place, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The setback is one of the latest examples of growing concerns about safety and security in western North Carolina, where many towns were almost wiped off the map after the historic hurricane made landfall two weeks ago. In the weeks since, misinformation and rumors have made the recovery more difficult, targeting multiple federal agencies operating as part of the recovery. Federal officials such as the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA’s director of public affairs have been the target of antisemitic attacks.

Chimney Rock, in Rutherford County, has become one of the centers of tension and conflict after a rumor spread on social media that government officials planned to seize the decimated village and bulldoze bodies under the rubble. Authorities and news outlets debunked the assertion, but people still took to social media imploring militias to go after FEMA.

A person familiar with FEMA operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the agency was working out of an abundance of caution and its teams were operating at fixed locations and secure areas instead of the usual practice of going door to door.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Guns, North Carolina, Republicans, Trump

Jay Kuo: Trump Has “Jumped the Shark” in His Desperation

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2024 //
20

Jay Kuo writes a delightful and informative blog called “The Status Kuo.” In his latest, he explains the origin of the phrase “jumping the shark,” which was new to me. He went on to show that Trump had grown so desperate as his polls declined that he had “jumped the shark.”

He writes:

Photo courtesy of ABC

Toward the end of the fifth year of the popular TV series Happy Days, the writers had The Fonz put on water skis and jump over a live shark. Everyone watching at the time had the same question: What the hell are they doing?

Jumping the shark became a cautionary metaphor for when a show goes awry and is desperate for new ideas and ratings. And since Trump is fundamentally a television personality, and we are all living through his twisted reality show, it is notable that, in desperation over his flagging candidacy and polls showing him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, the writer, producer and chief protagonist of Unhappy Dayshas now jumped the shark, too.

In today’s piece, I’ll discuss three recent examples that demonstrate this phenomenon and signal that the draw of Trump’s show may be near its end. These examples are about as different as they can be, but they all point to the same conclusion: Trump’s sway over the American public is fading.

A chestnut of a blood libel conspiracy that could fall flat

During the recent presidential debate, the ex-president amplified a gutter internet rumor about Haitian immigrants eating the dogs and cats of Springfield, Ohio. Even after being fact-checked live during the debate and later by reporters, Trump and Vance continued to double down on this sick and false claim. 

Trump refused to condemn bomb threats called in on Springfield buildings during the aftermath of his statements, making clear that he was perfectly okay with the chaos that he himself had created.

And on Sunday Vance gave a disaster class of an interview when he admitted to “creating stories” in an effort to draw the media’s attention to the problem of immigration while CNN’s Dana Bash brutally fact-checked him.

The confession was telling. Per Vance, the whole point of the made-up stories was to frighten enough voters (and therefore the media) into focusing on the immigrant question, even if that means demonizing an entire community of innocent residents, who by the way are there entirely legally. The Trump campaign will do whatever it takes to get the country talking about immigrants instead of Trump’s many crimes, his record on abortion, his poor debate performance, his declining mental acuity, and poll after bad poll.

Further, it is clear they intend to leverage the MAGA mob and a statistically predictable number of crazies to do their dirty work. But this kind of stochastic terror is hardly new ground for Trump. 

He did it when he came down the escalator and called Mexicans drug dealers and rapists—rhetoric that fueled hate and led to the El Paso Wal-Mart massacre. 

He did it again when he targeted the AAPI community during Covid by labeling it the “China Virus,” causing a sixfold increase in anti-AAPI hate crimes in America, followed by a deadly shooting spree in Atlanta at a Korean-owned spa.

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was always destined for the final, lowest kind of take: blood libel.

We have to rewind over a thousand years to understand this canard. The blood libel conspiracy during medieval times falsely alleged that Jews were reenacting the crucifixion of Christ and required human blood for the making of matzo bread. Baseless but dangerous claims against Jews in England ultimately alleged they had actually killed a child as part of ritual sacrifice. This rumor spread and was amplified by politicians of the times, leading to widespread violence, mass executions and pogroms.

Trump and Vance’s false claims have led to a modern day version of this, where scary “others” are devouring the beloved family members, in this case pets, of the local residents. And it has had its intended effect. Schools and hospitals in Springfield are now closed due to threats of mass shootings and bombings. Immigrants are afraid to go outside and are keeping their children at home. Vehicles of Haitian immigrants have been vandalized and hit with acid. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP continue their call for “mass deportations,” even of legal immigrants, in what is essentially a call for ethnic cleansing.

Trump is now planning an appearance in Springfield to drive home his false narrative, but this could backfire. To put it in television terms, the attention Trump hopes to draw has been overshadowed by the reckless stunt he pulled in an attempt to juice his ratings.

Trump has jumped the shark.

It is worth noting that Trump’s initial statement was initially met with derisive laughter and disbelief, not just from the left but from most of the center of the country. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post noted, a poll of voters showed that independents disbelieved the claim by a factor of two to one, and five times as many independents are sure that it’s false as those who believe it’s true.

And according to a recent Data for Progress poll, huge majorities of voters of all persuasions believe that Trump’s statements about immigrants eating pets is a weird thing to say.

Trump’s ploy might well result in the worst of all outcomes for him and his campaign: the American public collectively shaking their heads at him with contempt over his racist targeting of a whole community and entirely unmoved by his upping the ante.

Collective yawn

As evidence that Trump has overplayed his hand in what we hope is his final season, it appears there was a second attempted assassination, this time by someone who was caught by authoritieswith an AK-47 a few hundred yards down the golf course where Trump was playing on Sunday. The only shots fired were by the Secret Service.

(To those on the right questioning how the would-be assailant could have possibly known where to find Trump, it was at his golf course. That’s where he always is.)

Note that the second would-be assassin is, like the first, also a white male. He is not an immigrant, a Haitian or a drag queen. He’s a gun enthusiast who voted for Trump in 2016 but soured on him by 2020, and whose social media indicates he is a vaccine conspiracy theorist while supporting a Haley/Ramaswamy GOP ticket. Not exactly a stable individual.

The first time Trump was shot at, there was a collective gasp from the public and an outpouring of condemnation of political violence. This time feels different. Once again, the perpetrator, however unstable is a statistically predictable outgrowth of the very toxic political environment that Trump himself created. Like his second indictment, this second attempt feels like more of the same, with Trump himself to blame for much of it. 

It didn’t help that Trump squandered whatever political capital he might have had from the first attempt by brandishing his absurd ear bandage, later taken up as a symbol of fealty by the MAGA faithful because they’re not at all in a cult.

A second attempt on Trump’s life is therefore hardly shocking to anyone who understands the kinds of chaotic forces Trump himself has unleashed. It seems only Donald Trump could manage to make us all numb to the idea of two attempts on a candidate’s life in this election season. If we were in the writers’ room, the notion quickly would be shot down as an overreach. 

In my best Miranda Priestly voice, “Another Trump assassin? Groundbreaking.”

Swift vengeance

One final indication that Trump has overreached and overplayed his hand: that Taylor Swift thing.

Right after that disastrous debate for Trump ended, the coup de grâce came from pop megastar Taylor Swift, who posted on her Instagram to her 284 million fans that she had watched the debate, done her research and would be voting for Harris/Walz. She encouraged folks to register to vote and do their own research into the election.

That endorsement led to some 400,000 visits to vote.gov and what appears to be a big surge in voter registration nationally. As Tom Bonier of TargetSmart observed, there was a “400% or 500% increase” in voter registration, meaning somewhere between 9,000-10,000 people per hour. “It’s really unlike anything I’ve seen,” Bonier said. 

In a race where key battleground states may be won by a few thousand votes, this spike in voter registration among Swifties was terrible news for Trump. That’s apparently why he then went and did the worst possible thing in response. Over the weekend, an enraged Trump tweeted in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” 

If you know anything about Swift’s fan base, this declaration of war was a terrible idea. It will only force more Swift fans to direct action and even greater involvement in the election, because nothing gets them riled up like their idol being attacked.

Perhaps in the back of his mind Trump intended to sow terror again by turning his MAGA faithful against Swift. After all, her concerts in Vienna were canceled due to actual planned terrorist attacks—something her fans are still in keen pain over. But if Trump believes creating online hate and stirring up further threats against Swift will cause her or her fans to back down, he has badly miscalculated.

Once again, in his desperation, he has gone a step too far. 

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Hoax, Trump

Timothy Snyder Launches His New Book in Ukraine, Underground

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2024 //
31

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. He specializes in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust.

He wrote this as he was flying from Europe to the U.S. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Snyder has been an outspoken champion of that beleaguered nation. He has used his deep knowledge of history to debunk Putin’s justifications for invading his neighbor. He has even raised money to buy defense weapons for Ukraine when the Republican Congress dithered for months before passing an aid package.

Snyder writes:

Words make their way through the world with us, changing their senses as we change our lives.  Think for example of the word “launch.”

Today and in days to come I will “launch” my book On Freedom, in the sense of the word all of my publishing friends like to use.  They want to book to “launch,” to soar, to do well.  In this spirit I talked to Tom Sutcliffe of the BBC in London this morning, and I am hoping to speak to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC tonight.  And no doubt throughout this long day, which begins in Europe and ends in the United States, I will say “launch” several times myself.

I am returning from Ukraine. My first true conversation about On Freedom this month was a week ago in Kharkiv, a major city in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border and to the front.  The Literary Museum there had invited me for a presentation at an underground site.  It was a lovely place, with a bar that made me the coffee that I needed after a long trip, and a crowd of people invited to talk about freedom (we could not announce the event for safety reasons, which I regret). In a sense, this Kharkiv discussion was the real launch of the book.

We were underground, though, because of another kind of launch, the unmetaphorical kind, not the literary launch but the literal launch — of Russian missiles.

Kharkiv, Budynok “Slovo”.

The Russians seemed close to taking Kharkiv at the beginning of the war.  There was intense combat in Saltivka, a district of the city home to about 600,000 people.  Major buildings in the city center of Kharkiv are still in ruins. The Ukrainians held the Russians back, but Russia itself remains close.  A missile fired from Russia can reach Kharkiv before people have a chance to get underground.  That, in Kharkiv, is what a “launch” too often means.

The difference in the sense of a word can help us to catch the difference in reality.  In Kharkiv, the drones and the bombs and the missiles are a normal part of the day.  People want to talk about books, they want to go to restaurants and movies, they want to live their lives, and they do, despite it all.

Those of us beyond war zones catch all of this, if at all, indirectly, through media.  We do not hear the sirens and we do not have to go underground.  We do not have to check social media to see if friends and family are alive. The word “launch” retains a kind of innocence.

This is not about countries being different, but about situations being difference.  Kharkiv in normal times is a major literary city. In the 2020s, before the Russian full-scale invasion, Kharkiv was a center of Ukrainian book production.  Before February 2022 there were plenty of launches, in the literary sense, in Kharkiv. And there are still some now!

Genocide is not only about killing people, but about eliminating a culture, making it untenable by destroying the institutions that transmit it.  Thus Russia burns books, steals museum artifacts, and bombs archives, libraries, and publishing houses.  Russia deliberately destroyed the publishing houses in Kharkiv, including where one of my own books was being printed.  One sort of launch would seem to obliterate the other.  But, to the Ukrainians’ credit, only for a time.  The book publishing industry, like a number of others, picked up in other places. The public book culture in Ukraine, expressed in new stores and cafes, is defiant.

I was thinking of “launches” in Kyiv, a couple of days after the Kharkiv visit, as I pretaped an interview about the book.  For me it was the end of a long day, spent beginning (“launching”) a big history project.  The first conference had gone well, and we had a press conference complete with a Viking sword, a Byzantine cross, and Scythian and Trypillian vessels kindly loaned by the national museum.  Ukrainian colleagues on the stage had spoken of the importance of cooperation and listening in our grand cooperative project.  I was in a good mood when I went to a side room to tape the interview.

At around the time the interview began, a missile was launched from Russia, aimed at Kyiv.   The air raid sirens began outside the window.  An air raid siren can mean different forms of attack, some more rapid and some less so.  Drones can cause terrible damage and kill large numbers of people, but they are not very fast.  If a missile is in the air, on the other hand, you have to move right away.  Since there was in fact a missile bearing down on Kyiv, I explained this to the interviewer and hastened to the stairs.  I learned that Ukrainian air defense had destroyed the missile as I reached the staircase.

This was all completely normal.  The Russians launched a number of very large strikes last week with missiles and drones.  Ukrainian air defense is excellent — when the Ukrainians are given the tools, they protect their people extremely well, and Kyiv is where their limited equipment is concentrated.  We picked up the interview as soon as I could re-establish the connection.

One sort of “launch” had been briefly interrupted by another, my literary book launch by a literal missile launch.  This was an infinitesimally tiny taste of the interruption tens of millions of Ukrainians face all the time from Russia’s senseless war, which changes the shapes of lives even when it does not end them.  Russia launches these attacks on civilians all the time, almost every day.  The point is not only to kill people and destroy civilian architecture but to instill a certain view of life.  Nothing good ever happens. Be afraid at all times.  Undertake nothing new yourselves.  Give up.

But people do start new projects in Ukraine.  Ukrainian writers have been productive during this war, including writers serving in the armed forces. Serhiy Zhadan, an extraordinary Kharkiv poet and novelist, has just published a book. I was able to have three discussions with him in two cities. One day there will be a collection of Ukrainian war poetry in translation, and it will be astounding. Ukrainians launch cultural projects one after the other, even if the word seems odd just now.  I took part in two such launches in just one week: the big history project in Kyiv, called Ukrainian History Global Initiative; and a new cultural institution in Lviv, INDEX, which is based around recording war experience from multiple methods and multiple perspectives.  The Literary Museum in Kharkiv has an interesting new (partly interactive) exhibition by K. Zorkin.

When we can meet, we can gather the senses of words from the settings.  I am grateful to all my friends and colleagues and hosts in Ukraine.  Without the time in Ukraine On Freedom would be a different and poorer book. And so, much as I am happy to be speaking about the book today in the UK and the US, it seems right that there was something like a launch in Kharkiv first. 

When we cannot meet, we still have the words.  We can follow the senses of the word “launch,” from the rougher to the gentler and back, along an arc that perhaps leads to some understanding.

TS, 16 September 2024

In Kharkiv, September 2024, in conversation with Volodymyr Yermolenko

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International

Thoughts and Prayers for Former President Trump

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2024 //
14

It’s a sad day in America indeed. Trump’s Secret Service agents thwarted an apparent effort to assassinate him. An agent saw a man with a long gun protruding into the golf course where the former president was playing. The agent fired at the man, who dropped his weapon and fled. A witness saw the suspect fleeing, took a picture of his car and license plate, and he was captured on the highway less than an hour later.

I send my thoughts and prayers to the former President.

I also note that he has stood solidly with the National Rifle Association in opposing all forms of gun control. One wishes that he might change his mind about gun control as a result of his fortunate escape from mortal peril. And one concludes that nothing will change.

The guy who was arrested, a former roofing contractor in North Carolina, has previously been arrested for weapons violations. From what I’ve read, he appears to be erratic, disturbed, and delusional. A crackpot.

The suspect apparently never fired a shot. Luckily, he was spotted and fled before he had the chance to fire his weapon.

Something must be said about Trump’s frequent encouragement of violence by his supporters. He likes violent imagery, he talks in apocalyptic tones about what will happen to the country if he is not re-elected. He has celebrated the J6 insurrectionists as “patriots.” He has downplayed the consequences of their violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. He told them on that fateful day, “You must fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore.”

Neither Trump nor JD Vance have expressed outrage when it happens to others. After the school shooting in Georgia, Vance said that school shootings are “a fact of life,” which implies that we should learn to accept them, not take meaningful steps to limit access to guns. Trump said after a school shooting in Iowa that people must “get over it” and move on.

There should be no tolerance for political violence in this country. I’d like to say “That’s not who we are,” but I can’t. It’s in the interest of every elected official to encourage unity, peace, and calm resolution of differences. It’s in the interest of every elected official to demand gun control.

The ballot, not the bullet.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Guns, Trump

Russia Closes Down Access to YouTube

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2024 //
7

Putin wants to control all access to information that citizens of Russia can see so he cut off YouTube. The channel was popular in Russia, as it is here in the U.S. He previously closed all independent Russian media.

The Washington Post reported:

Russians are losing access to YouTube, the last major Western social platform freely available in the country, cutting them off from information independent from the Kremlin and alarming internet freedom advocates, journalists and opposition activists.


The throttling of YouTube, widely used for everything including watching cartoons and exposés on government corruption, comes amid fears that Russia will also shut down the Telegram messenger app after its founder, Pavel Durov, was detained by France.


The move comes as Russia is increasingly cracking down on any alternative sources of information, especially online, and has been pushing its citizens away from foreign-based social media apps to locally developed ones over which it has tighter control, such as its video-streaming alternative RuTube.


In early August, Russian users who had grown used to playing cartoons on YouTube to distract their children or having meals with shows playing in the background began reporting that the videos were not loading. By Aug. 3, state media reported that the service stopped playing high-resolution videos in almost all browsers running the desktop version in Russia.

Categories Censorship, Evil, Fascism

Tucker Carlson Interviews Holocaust Denier

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2024 //
25

Tucker Carlson lost his popular show on FOX News, but he now has a podcast on Elon Musk’s Twitter platform (X). Recently he invited a Holocaust Denier to appear on his show.

This is personal to me because every member of my extended family in Europe was murdered. As a child in Houston, I remember meeting people who had a blue tattoo on their arm–a string of numbers. They were survivors, and they told stories and wrote books about the atrocities they saw and experienced. In fact, there are countless videos taken by the Nazis to document the atrocities that Holocaust Deniers now claim are fiction.

It’s one of the strange ironies of our time that right wingers like Tucker Carlson now look sympathetically on fascists like Viktor Orban of Hungary and dictators like Putin. Carlson scored an exclusive interview with Putin and visited a supermarket to showcase the quality of life in Moscow. Trump praises Putin and the dictators of China and North Korea.

Who is Darryl Cooper? I looked him up on Google. Checked Wikipedia. I could find no evidence that he had gone to college. He is no historian.

Then I found historian Niall Ferguson’s commentary, which he called “The Return of Anti-History.”

He wrote:

According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none. 

According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.” 

The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history. 

True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism. 

Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, was taken aback by Carlson’s latest foray into historical revisionism.

She wrote:

This week Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star who now hosts one of America’s top podcasts, had an apologist for Adolf Hitler on his show. Darryl Cooper, who runs a history podcast (and newsletter) called “Martyr Made,” considers Winston Churchill, not Hitler, the chief villain of World War II. In a social media post that he’s since deleted, Cooper argued that a Paris occupied by the Nazis was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the city on display during the opening ceremony of the recent Summer Olympics, where a drag queen performance infuriated the right. On his show, Carlson introduced Cooper to listeners as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Over the course of a wide-ranging two-hour conversation, Cooper presented the mainstream history of World War II as a mythology shrouded in taboos intended to prop up a corrupt liberal political order. The idea that Nazi Germany represented the epitome of evil, argued Cooper, is such a “core part of the state religion” that we have “emotional triggers” preventing us from examining the past dispassionately.

This clever rhetorical formulation, familiar to various strands of right-wing propaganda, flatters listeners for their willingness to reject all they’ve learned from mainstream experts, making them feel brave and savvy for imbibing absurdities. Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites. (The wildly antisemitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust named its journal An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality. They blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.

Long before 4Chan existed, the disgraced Holocaust-denying author David Irving urged his followers, in an early 1990s speech, to break through the “appalling pseudo-religious atmosphere” surrounding World War II by being aggressively tasteless. “You’ve got to say things like: ‘More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz,’” he said.

Until quite recently, American conservatives mostly maintained antibodies against Irving-style disinformation. Right-wing thought leaders generally shared the same broad historical understanding of World War II as the rest of society, felt patriotic pride at America’s role in it and viewed Hitler as metaphysically wicked. Rather than recognizing the way right-wing politics, taken to extremes, could shade into National Socialism, they would hurl Nazi comparisons at the left, as the conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg did in his 2008 book “Liberal Fascism.”

[Jonah] Goldberg’s approach was dishonest, but it was representative of a broad antifascist consensus in American politics. Cooper is, in fact, correct that abhorrence of Nazism has helped structure Western societies. If we could agree on nothing else, we could agree that part of the job of liberal democracy was to erect bulwarks against the emergence of Hitler-like figures.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Lies

Mary Trump: Why Isn’t the Army Prosecuting Convicted Felon Trump for Breaking the Law Again?

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2024 //
28

Mary Trump, Donald’s estranged niece, asks an important question: Why did the U.S. Army decide not to bring charges against Donald Trump for law-breaking? He knew that it was illegal to bring cameras into Arlington National Cemetery; he knew it was illegal to stage a campaign event there. When the aide on duty reminded his crew not to break the law, they shoved her aside and ridiculed her. I assume the Department of the Army is acting out of self-interest. Those who made the decision know that if Trump is re-elected, he will wreak vengeance on them.

Mary T. writes:

Donald Trump and his minions were warned against politicizing a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. They did it anyway, violating self-evident norms and the law: military cemeteries cannot be used to stage partisan political events. When it became clear that Donald’s staff was going to ignore this prohibition, an employee at the cemetery sought to restrict photography in accordance with federal regulations. 

Arlington is “the final resting place of more than 400,000 U.S. troops, veterans and family members. Donald was there to mark the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. troops during the evacuation of Afghanistan,” an anniversary he did not see fit to commemorate in 2023 or 2022.

Cemetery staff had made it clear ahead of time that official photography was not allowed in Section 60, where veterans of recent wars are buried. When the employee sought to reinforce the guidelines, she was, according to a report released by the Army, “abruptly pushed aside” by people in Donald’s entourage. The last part should surprise no one. Donald is a foppish, chubby overlord who relies on the unquestioning thuggery of the conscienceless jackals who comprise his inner circle and staff who exist to make him look tough. For him, “toughness” means being an unrepentant asshole; people in his orbit simply follow his lead.

Arlington National Cemetery is run by the Army. The woman who tried to make sure the guidelines, and the law, were followed by Donald’s team, is employed by the Army. After the altercation with members of Donald’s staff, she filed a report. It’s understandable that she does not want to press charges—after all, she remains unidentified because of concerns for her safety—but why won’t the Army? What exactly is gained by allowing this act of desecration to go unpunished? And, by the way, engaging in the kind of behavior Donald and his campaign staff engaged in isn’t simply indecent, it’s illegal. So why is the convicted felon allowed to commit more crimes with impunity?

But let’s summon the will to be shocked, shall we? Let’s be shocked that the former Commander-in Chief is such a despicable narcissist that every interaction he has with service members is simply a means simultaneously to steal their honor while denigrating them. 

Is this the worst thing Donald’s ever done? Not by a long-shot. But the combination of selfishness, thuggery, menace, and his willingness to bring the entire weight of his power to bear on a private American citizen is a pretty good encapsulation of everything that is wrong with and disqualifying about him.

It’s time for corporate media to catch up and refuse to let this one go.

Categories Accountability, Character, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Trump

Trump Judge Rules that Machine Guns Are Legal

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2024 //
35

To anyone who wonders if there is a difference between the two parties, here’s a big one: gun control. A Trump-appointed federal judge in Kansas struck down a ban on machine guns. He was following the advice of Justice Thomas, who made the wacky argument that if something was okay when the Constitution was written, then it’s okay now. The Founding Fathers did not ban machine guns: why should we?

Politico wrote:

Up next in the arms of school shooters: fully automatic machine guns. Trump appointee U.S. District Judge John Broomes (Kansas) ruled that the ban on owning fully-automatic machine guns that’s been part of American law since the 1930s is unconstitutional. Citing Clarence Thomas’ argument that if something wasn’t illegal at the time the Constitution was written it shouldn’t be illegal now, Broomes has set up a new case that’ll almost certainly end up before the six rightwing cranks on the US Supreme Court.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Guns, History, Stupid, Trump

The New Republic: Tim Walz Is the Best Antidote to the Poison and Lies of FOX News

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
45

I don’t know how any self-respecting journalist could work for FOX News. It offers a good job in a competitive industry, but why sell your soul to the devil? I have recently seen tweets by Megyn Kelly, viciously attacking Kamala Harris, and every time I do, I remember Trump saying of her in 2016, after the first GOP debate, that she had blood coming out of her orifices. Yet still she is his sycophant.

In The New Republic, Thom Hartmann writes that Tim Walz may be the perfect antidote to FOX’s vitriol. If you want to reprogram family members, introduce them to Tim Walz. He is a good man, a decent man, not a FOX liar.

Hartmann writes:

All across America families are in mourning: Their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the right-wing hate and rage machine.

Jen Senko produced a movie—The Brainwashing of My Dad—about losing her own father to Fox “News”; it was also made into a book of the same title. She’s been a guest on my radio show a few times, and her story is one replicated across America millions of times. Her father—a totally normal Midwestern guy—began watching Fox “News” when he retired, and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate.

Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad’s TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch’s infamous hate machine had thrown him into.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, is America’s intervention against the mind poison that Trump, Fox “News,” and right-wing hate radio have infected our nation with.

He’s a normal guy, who joined the Army National Guard right out of high school at 17, rising to the rank of Commander Sergeant Major and becoming a top advocate for America’s veterans during his decade in Congress.

He used the G.I. bill to go to college, getting his master’s degree and going on to teach high school social studies. He coached his school’s football team, taking it to the state championships for the first time ever.

He smiles. His students love him, as does his family. He’s a normal guy. He’s the father everybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family wishes they had. He’s the grandpa everybody who’s lost one to Fox “News” wishes could sit down with their own and set him straight.

He carved butter at the state fair. He helped start his school’s first gay-straight alliance back in the 1990s when homophobic hate was still widely accepted; he said the coach doing so would be a powerful statement of support. He loves his country, his community, his family, and his nation.

No purchased bone-spur X-rays for Tim Walz; he embodies the very definition of patriotism that I grew up with in the Midwest. He reminds me of my own dad, who joined the Army at 17 to go fight Nazis in World War II, an echo of the past that most Americans recognize.

His contrast with Trump’s infidelities, con jobs, and constant angry bitterness is a sunlight-like disinfectant for our body politic. He shows up J.D. Vance—with his creepy obsessions with women’s genitals and birth rates and fealty to his billionaire patrons—for the weird guy that he is. He even highlights jokes about Vance, saying: “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

Trump and Vance are riding a wave of hate, fear, and bigotry made acceptable and even viral by a multibillion-dollar media machine that emerged from the Reagan years.

To steal the minds of America’s grandparents, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch in 1985 so Murdoch could legally purchase U.S. media properties; Reagan ordered the Federal Communications Commission to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.

In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting: Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times), former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Fox and Murdoch’s power in Australia came, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.

It’s the same here. When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6 coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6 attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.

Along with its relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6—while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House adviser to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.

While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox “News” did.

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox “News” poison that is now so widely imitated across the right-wing media ecosystem, stealing the hearts and minds of millions. He’s America’s everyman, a welcome dose of sanity, and a wake-up call about how badly our country has been damaged by billionaire-funded right-wing hate.

So let the dad jokes begin!

As Liz Gumbinner points out, Seth Meyers’s head writer, Sal Gentile, summarized it brilliantly on X: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your carburetor, replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door, and put a new chain on your lawnmower.”

And God willing and we all show up to vote, he’ll soon be vice president of the United States.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Goodness, Lies, Walz, Tim
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »