Archive for category: Emotion

Police officers in riot gear stand across from protesters on May 30, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky, where demonstrators marched after the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. | Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

How a surge in police force against demonstrators collided with last summer’s protests.

Part of the Recovery Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

This story contains detailed depictions of violence against protesters that may be disturbing to some readers.

When 21-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, activist Cheyenne Osuala was violently arrested at a protest in July 2020, she tried to get the whole thing on video. An officer grabbed her, slammed her up against a wall, and started pulling the handcuff so far behind her back that her wrist fractured. As he tugged her arm further and further, she remembers screaming, standing on her toes to try to relieve the pain.

She dropped her phone during the attack, but shaky footage from a bystander shows the officer pushing her face-first against the wall while other protesters scream for her release.

Osuala said she was gathered with a small group of protesters outside of a parking garage when she noticed plainclothed men on the roof shooting pepper balls down at the people gathered below. Concerned that the men could be counterprotesters looking to harm their group, Osuala and other protesters asked Louisville police officers to confirm if the men on the roof were police. Osuala says the officers told them they weren’t aware of anyone currently stationed at the top of the parking garage, so they headed up to find out who the men were — and why they were firing at a peaceful crowd.

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
Protesters at a May 2020 demonstration in Louisville, among a series of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests last year that drew tens of millions of demonstrators — an unprecedented number.

That’s when, she said, officers followed them into the parking garage, blocked them from leaving, and arrested her, breaking her wrist in the process. She was later charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct, although both charges were later dismissed by a judge.

Osuala filed a complaint with the Louisville Metro Police Department but received no response. She later filed a lawsuit, alleging that she was wrongfully arrested and assaulted by the department’s officers, and this spring, the Justice Department separately opened an investigation into the Louisville department’s practices, including use of force against protesters. (Louisville police did not respond to requests for comment.)

Osuala said she can recall the experience in excruciating detail, but said that she still won’t go back and watch the video. “It was too traumatizing,” she said.

The broken wrist and resulting nerve damage eventually healed, but in the months that followed, she was left feeling powerless. “I still remember feeling his weight on top of me. He was so much bigger,” she said. “It felt like a power trip. He wanted to hurt me, and I couldn’t do anything.”

In uprisings last summer that drew tens of millions across the country — an unprecedented number — protesters called for an end to police brutality. Amid the mostly peaceful protests, some demonstrations, many spurred by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, were marked by incidents of police violence. In the first two weeks of demonstrations, more than 10,000 people were arrested. The total today sits at more than 17,000, according to the Washington Post. Most arrests were for low-level offenses, such as curfew violations or failure to follow dispersal orders.

At the height of the protests that June, police were repeatedly recorded using force, many of them punching, kicking, or shoving protesters. One criminal defense lawyer collected nearly 300 videos documenting police violence across the country. Among these videos were incidents where officers beat unarmed protesters in Las Vegas, fired tear gas canisters into a crowd in Dallas, and pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters in Columbus, Ohio.

One video showed officers in riot gear in Buffalo, New York, shoving a 75-year-old man to the ground, leaving him unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk. In New York City, an officer was caught on camera violently shoving a woman to the ground. Another video shows a group of officers beating protesters with batons in Philadelphia.

Some departments also reportedly used rubber bullets and tear gas as a form of crowd control. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reporters filmed an officer shooting a protester in the head with a foam bullet, fracturing her eye socket. In one of the most controversial and widely shared incidents, police used tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters outside the White House in Washington, DC, to allow for President Donald Trump’s photo session outside of a church.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Law enforcement responds during a protest near Lafayette Park ahead of President Trump’s trip to St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020, in downtown Washington, DC. The proceedings that day became a national incident.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Demonstrators continued to gather at Lafayette Park in the following days despite the incident, in which police used tear gas to clear a crowd of protesters.

After protesters were arrested en masse, for some, the physical trauma was immediate. Explosive imagery from some protests shows people bleeding from projectiles, choking on tear gas, or left with swollen wrists after being detained for hours. In the face of an increasingly militarized police force — armored vehicles, military-grade riot gear, flash grenades, sound cannons, and tear gas canisters — protesters were left reeling from violence that felt like it belonged on a battlefield.

In the aftermath of the uprisings, another kind of pain lingers. While their physical wounds may have long since healed, some protesters, like Osuala, said they have been left with deep psychological scars that remain open and raw.

“I feel like we’ve all been through the war,” Osuala said. “All the people who have really been out there from the beginning and have stayed out there consistently — we all have PTSD.”

Vox spoke with several protesters about the lingering effects of last summer’s protests. Now that much of the attention on the George Floyd protests has faded, Osuala and protesters like her say they’re left wondering how to put the pieces back together when it feels like the rest of the world has moved on.

Since the protests began last summer, some therapists, including a few Vox spoke with, have reported an influx of patients experiencing hypervigilance, anxiety, panic, and nightmares from their involvement in the demonstrations.

Licensed psychotherapist Cheryl Ades has seen a spike in the number of people coming to her practice with protest-related trauma. “The level of PTSD is going to be extreme,” said Ades, who works with protesters as a part of the network Therapists for Protester Wellness in Louisville. “It might not hit for a while — a few months, a year, five years — but it’s going to come down on people sooner or later.”

Months after the demonstrations, dozens of evaluations of police departments across the country exposed the full scope of the violent response. These reviews found that officers behaved aggressively and used crowd-control munitions indiscriminately against largely peaceful demonstrators. Their tactics, the reports found, often escalated violence instead of defusing it.

These findings were the culmination of a broader shift in American policing, said Jennifer Earl, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona and an expert on policing tactics.

From the civil rights movement in the 1960s to last summer’s protests, police departments using military-grade riot gear have increasingly become the norm in American cities. In part due to the Pentagon’s 1033 program, which allows law enforcement agencies to receive military hardware, American police departments have access to a wide arsenal of such equipment. From 1998 to 2014, the value of military equipment sent to police departments shot up from $9.4 million to $796.8 million.

“The access to militarized equipment means they’re approaching the protests in a different way — with a sort of warrior mentality,” said Earl.

As the police response becomes more militarized, so do the tactics of protesters on the ground. “It contributes to the feeling of protests as a war zone,” says Dana R. Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who studies social movements in the US. “If you tear-gas people in the streets, they’re not going to go home and say they’re not going to go out again. What happens is that everybody goes home and comes out with gas masks and with helmets, leaf blowers, and umbrellas.”

Experts say that decades of research have led to a similar conclusion: Escalating force leads to more violence, not less. Police wearing riot gear and deploying military-style weapons is more likely to lead to the same kind of violence they were supposed to prevent.

Increased violence also leads to increased emotional trauma. A report by the nonprofit Don’t Shoot Portland in 2020 noted that experiencing or witnessing violence in a protest setting was linked in recent research to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.

For some Black protesters, the trauma of violence experienced on the ground is only intensified by the ancestral trauma of centuries of oppression, experts say. “It’s personal,” says Jennifer Mullan, a psychologist whose Decolonizing Therapy business provides resources for therapists to address inequities in the mental health industry. “It’s tied to your liberation and the liberation of your people. This is something that many people of color have been experiencing our entire lives. These communities are already in a heightened state of trauma. It just amplifies the trauma of protest.”

Cory, a community activist from Los Angeles who is being identified only by his first name due to safety concerns, says protesting is just another part of survival. “[Being a Black person is] like trauma upon trauma. I’m literally fighting against these people who could kill me during a traffic stop. There’s so much more invested for me.”

More than a year after her arrest in June 2020, 20-year-old Judith Velasquez finds herself trapped in a recurring flashback. When she closes her eyes, she’s back on the police bus in Los Angeles, packed alongside dozens of other protesters, her hands cuffed. It’s completely dark; the only light comes from faded street lamps seen through the reinforced glass windows. She can barely make out the silhouettes of those around her.

“I was terrified,” Velasquez said about the several hours she spent on the bus after being arrested for breaking curfew. “We were completely vulnerable in the dark, just waiting for them to do something.”

All the while, she said, people were screaming and pleading to be released. Some were shaking uncontrollably. According to Velasquez, one protester urinated on her seat after hours without access to a bathroom.

Every time Velasquez sees a police car — a regular presence in her working-class Latino community in Los Angeles — she freezes. “I see the red, white, and blue lights, and it takes me back,” she says. “I start shaking so hard. Because I remember how there was nobody to protect us. They could do anything to me.”

Like Velasquez, Cory says he has signs of PTSD. Difficulty sleeping, distressed by loud noises, nightmares, flashbacks.

Months after the George Floyd protests in Los Angeles, Cory found himself on the streets again to protest Dijon Kizzee’s fatal shooting by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

On the first night of protests in September 2020, he was heading toward the front lines when there was a sudden shift in the air — he turned around to look at the line of officers, looked back at the crowd, and then, he says, there were rubber bullets flying all around him. He started running, diving behind a box truck for cover while the officers continued to fire at him. There was so much tear gas on the streets around him that he couldn’t breathe. (Vox has corroborated Cory’s account with other protesters and news sources.)

Over the four days of demonstrations in Los Angeles, Cory says that the protesters experienced continual violence. As they took cover from pepper balls and chemical irritants fired by the sheriff’s department, he watched someone get hit in the head with a concussion grenade. A friend of his was struck by several pepper balls, fracturing her hand and leaving her bleeding on the sidewalk.

The impact on his mind and his body was immediate. “I couldn’t really sleep, I couldn’t really go out. My nervous system was so fucked that I couldn’t think straight.”

These symptoms are now a constant presence in his life. When he goes back to the locations where he’s experienced violence, his anxiety spikes. Loud noises send his heart racing. He has trouble concentrating and often finds himself dissociating.

“It was like being in a war zone,” he said. “Watching that happen, watching people get brutalized — it will never leave me.”

The nature of this ongoing violence — night after night, week after week — can make the path to healing complicated.

Ihotu Ali, a Minneapolis-based healer and organizer, says it may be impossible to completely recover from these experiences. “If you continuously break your leg … it’s never going to heal.”

Tasos Katopodis /Getty Images
A woman reacts to being hit with pepper spray during protests in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2020.

When protesters turn to therapy for support, they can come away feeling even more traumatized. As both a community organizer and a mental health therapist in Los Angeles, psychotherapist Devon Young has seen it happen time and time again. “They’re experiencing trauma on the ground and then go to look for support from these experts,” she said. “But they might not find validation or recognition in that industry, which tends to overlook marginalized experiences. Not to mention barriers like money and health insurance.”

Thinking back on everything she’s been through, Velasquez knows there’s no turning back now. Her outrage has only grown over the past few months, amplified by the fact that it feels like the rest of the world has moved on.

“It’s been years of pain, years of people suffering at the hands of the system and on the streets,” she said. “If you can go back to normal after this, then you exhibit a privilege that I can only dream of.”

In the face of militarized policing and the continued deaths of Black people at the hands of police, Mullan acknowledges that many activists feel a need to stay on the front lines. But she stresses that community healing is just as important — and can even act as another form of resistance.

“We know the reason why they inflict this violence. They want to take us off the streets, to split us apart,” she said. “That’s why it’s deeply necessary for us to lean on each other for healing. Even as things are burning down around us, our communities become a form of home. We educate each other, take care of each other, support each other. It’s the opposite of what the system wants us to do. They don’t want us to come together.”

Instead of relying on systems that have consistently failed the most vulnerable in the protest community, Mullan encourages a shift toward community-based care. “Trust in the community, in the possibility for transformational restorative justice work, can be extremely healing for people who are on the front lines. Community can become a point of healing.”

Young echoes the need for a transformative shift in therapy for front-liners. “We need to build a better mental health infrastructure,” she said. “And it won’t come from the state. It needs to happen from within activist circles. We know the fight will continue and these traumas are going to occur. The best we can do is create support systems that are built by the people.”

For Velasquez and other dedicated protesters, stopping the fight for justice isn’t an option. The more the police try to drive them off the streets, they said, the more determined they are to stay.

“There’s something that stays with you after you’ve gone through something like this,” Velasquez said. “Even with everything that happened, I kept going.”

While her experiences left a deep emotional impact, she also remembers how the protesters kept their spirits up on the prison bus: singing songs, chanting protest slogans, pulling up each other’s masks, and finding ways to break free from the plastic cuffs. “We were all supporting each other,” she said. “And we weren’t quiet for one second.”

Even with the progress the movement has made over the past year, Velasquez can’t help but feel disillusioned with the system. Looking back on everything protesters have been through — and continue to go through — she says no amount of accountability or reform can make up for the impact of her experiences. But through community healing, she’s found a way forward.

“They’re not going to protect us,” she said. “But we can protect us.”

Julia Dupuis is a Los Angeles-based writer covering protest movements and police violence.

Too many white men suffer from irrational fears and deep-seated insecurity — and the social consequences are dire

Exhausted healthcare workers admit they feel demoralized as the fourth surge spreads across the US

Last February, Dr Bryce Meck, 30, would lock herself in the bathroom to cry for five minutes when her patients, whom she had watched over for weeks in the medical intensive care unit, were dying from Covid-19. They begged her to tell people in their community to get vaccinated. Of the 20 patients with Covid-19 in her care, only three survived.

Each week, Meck’s frustration grew when she saw patients in a Columbia, Missouri, primary care clinic. They expressed vaccine hesitancy, shared misinformation or told her that their friends were pressuring them to remain unvaccinated. “If only the patients in the clinic could just meet the people who are suffering in the hospital,” said Meck, who continues to experience long-term effects of the virus herself.

QAnon conspiracy theorists have long fancied themselves “digital soldiers” whose skills at posting dank memes and owning libs on the internet plays a key role in former President Donald Trump’s purported operation to take down the global network of satanic pedophiles that supposedly secretly runs the world.

Dave Hayes, who built a reputation as a leading “decoder” of Q posts under the handle “Praying Medic” until he was booted from most major social media platforms for spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation, takes his role as a “digital soldier” very seriously. Appearing on fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist Greg Harvey’s livestream program Monday, Hayes said that he and other QAnon activists are the online equivalent of the special forces in the military who have been trained to overcome any obstacle in order to achieve their objective.

“The thing that we have to realize as anons is that we went through a three-year course of training and equipping to detect, expose, and help wake other people up to the realities of corruption through Q,” Hayes said. “Q’s operation … was a training course to teach us how to do research in such a way that we could detect corruption and then find a way to make that information available to the public.”

“We have been trained for years to do exactly what we’re doing,” he continued. “Even though we don’t necessarily know what’s coming in the future, we have been trained to deal with whatever comes. It’s like being in the special forces in the military. Special forces groups don’t necessarily know what plans, what attacks, what kind of opposition they’re going to face when they go into a certain territory. When they’re doing an operation, they don’t necessarily know the troop strength that’s going to oppose them, they don’t know how well armed their enemy is, but they rely on their training, they rely on the fact that they are trained and equipped, and they’re able to overcome whatever obstacle is set in front of them.”

“We’re the same way,” Hayes boasted. “We have been trained by God, we have been trained by Q to adapt, improvise, and overcome. We’ve been equipped. We’ve been trained. We’re relatively smart people. We can see through the BS narratives, generally speaking. We know how to research and come to the truth, and we can make that information publicly available. So even though we don’t necessarily know the obstacles that we’re going to face in the future, we can rely on our training. We are well trained, well equipped, and we are more than up to the task to face down whatever they send our way.”

The post Dave Hayes Says Being a QAnon Conspiracy Theorist Is ‘Like Being in the Special Forces’ appeared first on Right Wing Watch.

McCarthy dreamed of a right-wing movement rooted in bigotry, demagoguery and false accusations. Well, here it is

Something happened last Saturday that was significant because it was unprecedented: Donald Trump spoke at a rally in the heart of Trump country—Cullman, Alabama, which gave the incumbent president more than 88 percent of the vote in 2020—and he was booed. The jeers were scattered but noticeable, enough so that Trump responded to them.

Trump had encouraged those in the audience to get vaccinated. “I believe totally in your freedoms. I do. You’ve got to do what you have to do,” Trump said, “but I recommend: Take the vaccines. I did it—it’s good.” Yet for a large number of Trump supporters in the audience, even though the former president hadn’t embraced government or private-sector mandates, he had crossed a redline.

[David A. Graham: The noisy minority]

Two days later Alex Jones, the far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist Trump courted in 2016, rebuked Trump. After playing a clip of Trump declaring that the vaccines are working, Jones responded, “BS. Trump, that’s a lie. You’re not stupid.” Jones added, “Shame on you, Trump. Seriously. Hey, if you don’t have the good sense to save yourself and your political career, that’s okay. At least you’re gonna get some good Republicans elected, and you know, we like ya. But my God. Maybe you’re not that bright. Maybe Trump’s actually a dumbass.”

These incidents are just a few of the straws in the turbulent wind, signs that something ominous is happening to the Republican Party. The GOP base may be identifying less and less with Trump personally—that was inevitable after he left the presidency—but it is not identifying any less with the conspiracist and antidemocratic impulses that defined him over the past five years.

In fact, the opposite is happening.

Not long ago, Trump was viewed as avant-garde, outrageous, and scandalous, America’s enfant terrible. His actions were viewed as so shocking and norm-shattering that he couldn’t be ignored. In today’s Republican Party, however, Trump is becoming what was once unthinkable—conventional, unexceptional, even something of an establishment figure.

In a right-wing movement that is home to a growing assortment of cranks and kooks—Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks and Madison Cawthorn, Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn, Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, Cyber Ninjas and QAnon, anti-vaxxers and insurrectionists—Trump looks rather ordinary. He wants credit for the vaccines that were developed during his administration, which mark a genuine medical milestone, but in some quarters of today’s Republican Party, that makes Trump suspect, too closely aligned with the hated Anthony Fauci, a dumbass.

The dark, destructive place the GOP has found itself in isn’t shocking. For more than half a decade, the Republican base—MAGA world—has been fed a constant diet of outrageous lies and conspiracy theories, not just by Trump but also by his allies in the party and the right-wing media ecosystem. Negative emotions such as fear, rage, and resentment have been constantly stirred up. Over time, transgressive behaviors became chic; “owning the libs” became the name of the game. What mattered was hating the right people.

The MAGA brain was rewired. The psychologist Daniel Goleman refers to “amygdala hijack,” an intense emotional reaction that’s dramatically disproportionate to the situation. When a person has been triggered, their emotions take over, and they see the world through a distorted lens.

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.

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.

[Chris Hayes: The Republican Party is radicalizing against democracy]

What was seen as shocking in 2017 is now anodyne. The ethical lines that existed then turned out to have been drawn in sand. When you cross into territory devoid of moral axioms or epistemic standards—the kind of world you would find in a Turgenev novel—things can get very ugly, very quickly. Even Trump—whose derangement now includes turning a violent Capitol Hill rioter who was shot and killed by a police officer into a martyr, falsely accusing the police officer of murder, and issuing yet another barely concealed incitement to violence—can begin to look like a mainstream figure within the party. At some point in the future, the same may be said of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

All of this is not only worrisome but deeply dispiriting, especially for those of us who were loyal Republicans for our entire political life, until 2016. To watch an entire party bend and then break and stay broken, to witness it become what it once claimed to loathe, to see it move in an even more frenzied direction after Trump’s presidency than during it, is painful. But not nearly as painful as staying silent or becoming complicit with those who continue to cause grave damage to conservatism, to truth, and to our republic.

It’s okay to be a little alarmed — behind the scenes, this cult is being transformed into an army of soldiers

An expanding notion of what “consciousness” is could have profound repercussions

In many radical Black and Brown spaces on the Internet, I’ve seen many people pose the question “What radicalized you?” And, for some time, I could not bring myself to give anything close to a direct answer. When relating the struggle for African liberation to our personal lives, many of us have our own stories or narratives that push us forward into the realm of consciousness, especially when having to do with both race and class. However, for some of us (like myself), it may have taken a while to understand how the latter is connected to the former. Growing . . .

The post Capitalism Was a Source of My Childhood Trauma appeared first on Hood Communist.

Former President Donald Trump addresses the NCGOP State Convention on June 5, 2021, in Greenville, North Carolina.

Do you remember the first year of the Trump administration? A daunting question; among Trump’s many grim accomplishments was the way he made time elastic. So much has happened since, so it’s a bit like asking if you remember the first year of the Boxer Rebellion.

The mind deals with trauma in part by deleting or obscuring traumatic memories — the oft-maligned “memory hole,” which may help us more than we appreciate — and there have been so many shocks to our mental and spiritual underpinnings that it becomes impossible to keep track. Your mileage may vary, but for me, trying to recall the eon that was 2017 to 2018 is akin to peering into deep space with a dollar store flashlight.

It’s all there, though, if I concentrate. The Muslim ban, the mocking of sexual assault survivors, the public embrace of white supremacists, the separation of children from their parents at the southern border, the disdain shown to Puerto Rico after it was flattened by a hurricane, the scorn for the rule of law, the constant inescapable media presence like a cultural migraine that won’t abate, the attacks on students who survived school shootings, a trillion-dollar tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, the singling out of individuals and groups as “enemies of the people,” the vivid racism expressed toward nations described by Trump as “shithole countries,” the coddling of violence at the rallies, the brazen broad-daylight corruption, the daily drumbeat of malicious and petty acts whose only purpose was to “own the libs”… an abridged accounting, and that was just the first year.

Donald Trump is out of office and deplatformed from social media, so he is a bit like the Deepwater Horizon of former presidents. The blowout has been capped, but the enormous mass of poison he spewed will be in the Gulf of Mexico forever.

Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic, captured the essence of what we were all trying to figure out back then: “What the hell is all this? Why?” Serwer’s masterpiece October 2018 article, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” crystallized the raw truth of the moment better than anyone has before or since, as far as I’m concerned:

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.

The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

I’d wager most who read the article when it came out said, “Oh, OK, right” afterward, and moved into the following years with something of a framework to operate from, a baseline context that made it all ever so slightly more manageable. It certainly had this effect on me. Why did Trump do that? Because it was cruel. Box checked.

Of course, there was also the money.

The dazzling graft of the Inaugural Committee, the rampant nepotism, the self-dealing that led to millions of tax dollars arriving in Trump’s bank accounts because he and his entire entourage stayed at his hotels wherever they went, and the endless frenzy of doom-swaddled fundraising aimed at a deliberately provoked and near-frantic base, all served a simple purpose: He was looting the Treasury, and his own supporters, to hose money onto the bonfire of his massive debt.

The havoc Trump promoted and the two-fisted cash grab that defined his administration were entirely symbiotic, and he hasn’t stopped just because he moved to New Jersey. The fundraising pattern in particular is altogether clear by now: Make an extravagant and entirely impossible promise or prediction (“Stop the steal,” “overthrow the election,” “Trump will be inaugurated on March 4,” etc.) and fundraise off it, and when it fails to come to pass, fundraise off that, too.

Trump has made millions playing the martyr to his base since November, and recently deployed a new version of the old trick. Several reports had him speaking recently with deep confidence about being “reinstated” as president come August. It does not matter that no mechanism exists to make this happen, absent a national conflagration that would make January 6 look like an episode of Barney the Dinosaur. A large portion of his base believe it, because he said it.

“Owning the libs” and fleecing the base is the new Republican gold rush. It will be a wonder if the nation survives it.

Make the claim and fundraise off it. When it fails to come to pass, fundraise off that (“See? See?! The deep state did it to us again! Trump needs your help to defeat this evil! We’re all in this together!!!”). In the immortal words of hippie Homer Simpson, “Lather, rinse and repeat. Always repeat.”

The seamless success of this pattern has not been lost on the wobbling Jell-O mold of Republican officeholders whose political existence has been digested by the Trump phenomenon they helped create.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene may seem like some wild-eyed flake with an obnoxious face mask and too much time on her hands, but don’t be fooled: Every one of her bizarre proclamations about Jewish-controlled space lasers or “false flag” school shootings, all her seemingly erratic behavior, is not merely the byproduct of a racist QAnon devotee from Georgia.

I’m confident Greene believes at least some of the stuff she spews, but by fundraising relentlessly off of it, she cleared more than $3 million in three months. By comparison, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez banked less than $800,000 in the same time frame. Batshit sells in the right marketplace, and the GOP base is buying hand over fist, because they know she is a devoted pilot fish to Trump’s hammerhead shark.

Perhaps a more egregious example is another to-the-knife Trump supporter, Rep. Matt Gaetz. In the throes of allegations that he raped teenage girls, Gaetz proclaimed he would run for president in 2024 if Trump does not. This elicited a mighty “Huh?!” from many, but Gaetz knows exactly what he was about: He pulled down about $1.8 million over the same three months as Greene by fundraising on his own self-proclaimed martyrdom and devotion to Trump. When the fundraising reports for quarter two come in next month, we’ll see how handsomely Trump’s base rewarded him for trolling the ’24 presidential race.

Some days ago, the wife of Rep. Mo Brooks — also a champion of all things Trump — was served a subpoena for her husband as part of Rep. Eric Swalwell’s allegation that he helped foment the 1/6 Capitol breach. Brooks’s wife got it because Brooks himself has been hiding from Swalwell’s process servers for weeks. Yesterday, Brooks transitioned the event into a fundraising email to the base titled, “They Came After My Wife.”

Lather, rinse and repeat. Always repeat.

The mystery of why so many Republicans have stapled themselves to Trump, even as they fear his antics may cost them a recapture of the senate in 2022, isn’t a mystery at all. Sure, they fear getting on the wrong side of Trump’s base, but they have also learned that playing to that base is the equivalent of having a bottomless ATM in the office closet.

Trump has created a near-frictionless fascist fundraising juggernaut that relies entirely on the greed of the Republican politicians he has captured, and the evangelical credulity of his closest supporters. Feed the base and the base will feed you, and you get to keep your job, too. Step out of line and you’re not only a political fistful of Thanos infinity dust, but the plug on the ATM is pulled forever. Rep. Liz Cheney is the rare exception; most of the rest got the gilded memo in triplicate, and will play along until the music stops. If having their offices sacked by Trump supporters did not dissuade them from this course, I imagine nothing can.

Remember this whenever you see a Republican rolling in the slime of conspiracy theory and abject racism with more alacrity than has been the norm. The GOP has found a new platform, the only plank Trump left them: Cruelty pays. It will all end badly, but for the foreseeable future, the madness is the method. “It’s a hustle,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said on Wednesday. Indeed, and a damned effective one. “Owning the libs” and fleecing the base is the new Republican gold rush. It will be a wonder if the nation survives it.

Archive for category: Emotion

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