Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

In 2013, 29% of Americans said armed rebellion might be necessary to “protect” liberty — and journalists scoffed

A year ago, it seemed as though the Republican party might snap out of its love affair with the former president. Not so

Whether it was praising white supremacists, siding with Vladimir Putin or suggesting bleach as a coronavirus cure, there was nothing that Donald Trump could do to make the Republican party fall out of love with him.

Then came 6 January, and – for a brief moment – it seemed that was no longer true.

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One of the most indelible images from the January 6 Capitol riot was of Josh Hawley, junior senator for Missouri, graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, raising his fist in support of a riotous mob that would shortly endanger his own life and the life of the institution to which he belonged. Almost immediately after he encouraged the rioters, he found himself in a secured room, being defended from them.

​At that moment of supreme crisis, Hawley represented one of the deepest mysteries of the current American predicament: why some of the best-educated men and women in the country, the most invested in its power, the luckiest, have overseen the destruction of their institutions like spoiled teenagers smashing up their parents’ house on a weekend bender.

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Abraham Lincoln asked in his Lyceum Address. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” America is approaching the fulfillment of this calamitous prediction. But Lincoln could never have predicted that America’s destruction would come from its most privileged people, that it would be a suicide of the elites.

​American populism has always been something of a misnomer. For one thing, Donald Trump never won the popular vote. For another, populists tend to be economically left-wing, and the policies of Trump’s government did nothing to restrict corporate interests or the tech monopolies. His inner circle was every bit as much a part of the American elite as its opponents—Steven Mnuchin (Yale ’85), Ben Carson (Yale ’73), Wilbur Ross (Yale ’59), Stephen Schwarzman (Yale ’69), Jared Kushner (Harvard ’03), Steve Bannon (Harvard ’85), Mike Pompeo (Harvard Law ’94), and, of course, Trump himself (University of Pennsylvania, ’68). Trump’s inaugural Cabinet had more Harvard alumni than Obama’s. In the aftermath of January 6, many of the strongest supporters of the stolen-election theory have been Ivy League graduates. Ted Cruz (Princeton ’92)  was one of the first to challenge the election’s certification, and Kayleigh McEnany (Harvard Law ’16) actively spread fraud claims as the president’s press secretary. Elise Stefanik, who graduated from Harvard in 2006 and is the youngest woman elected to Congress, has described Donald Trump as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution.”

[David Frum: Don’t let anyone normalize January 6]

​Trump’s most remarkable ability as a leader was, and is, his capacity to convince elite people, the people his vanity demands he hire, to destroy their reputation and their career in his service. No fewer than 11 Trump supporters who ran his presidential campaigns or his administration have been indicted, yet he never lacks highly educated and successful people to work for him. The death drive has entered American politics.

​The icon of this period is not Trump but Oregon State Representative Mike Nearman (not an Ivy Leaguer, to be clear), who opened the back door of the Oregon legislature to rioters after posting a video saying he would let them in, calling it “Operation Hall Pass.” The crazy part isn’t even that Nearman promoted the vandalism of his own institution. The crazy part is that, after Nearman opened the door at the back of the legislature, he walked around to the front entrance, to await the violence that he had encouraged. In that folly, Nearman represents a generation—one feeding the rage that will eventually consume it.

​The Josh Hawleys and Mike Nearmans of this world embody an inherent contradiction. They are trying to be government representatives for anti-government patriots. They are attempting to be the elite of the anti-elites. In 2020, Joe Biden won 60 percent of college-educated voters. Biden-voting counties were responsible for 70 percent of the GDP. America’s less-educated and less-productive citizens drive anti-government patriotism, both in its armed and elected wings, but they mostly, despite themselves, pick their representatives from the ranks of the Ivy League and other similarly elite institutions around the country. Even in their rage against elites, the anti-elitists fall back on the deep structure of American power.

​Despite the hyper-partisanship that is roiling the United States, Ivy League dominance transcends political affiliation. And many of the most prominent people fighting to keep American institutions alive come from the Ivy League, too. But what I’ve described so far—GOP elites turning with petulant ferocity on the institutions from which they derive their power—is new. The failure of the elites who have always run the country—on the left, in the middle, and on the right—is not. The greatest study of the failure of American expertise is still David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest; it was written before I was born, but the process it describes, in rich detail, has been more or less completely replicated twice in my lifetime. Institutionally approved people, the top men and women, with the best intentions and the fullest education and access to the best available information, create elaborate policies that misunderstand the most basic facts about the world, leading to immense suffering for ordinary people. That is the Ivy League way— “brilliant policies that defied common sense,” in Halberstam’s phrasing.

​​Once, after Lyndon B. Johnson rattled off the list of experts who were helping him fight the Vietnam War, his friend Sam Rayburn replied, “Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” The Afghan and Iraq Wars were a consensus policy among both Republican and Democratic elites in the civil service, in the political class, and in the media. The repetition poses an important question: Given that America has been let down, repeatedly, by members of the same expert class, why does it keep relying on them?

​The answer lies in the specific nature of Ivy League elitism, which is an aristocracy of networks. Ivy League graduates make up 0.4 percent of the country. They are significantly overrepresented in Fortune 500 C-suites, in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, in academia, and in the media. Biden/Harris was the first presidential ticket in 44 years without an Ivy League alumnus on board. For a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court consisted of nothing but Ivy League graduates. And these entities are exclusive and self-perpetuating. Legacies at Harvard are accepted at a rate of nearly 34 percent, compared with just 5.9 percent of ordinary people. Being born to it isn’t the only way in: Buying admittance is the simplest. (Charles Kushner gave Harvard $250,000 a year for 10 years to guarantee admission for his meritless son.)

​Whoever attends has been established in the architecture of power before they have had a chance to do anything, and that is key: The network gives power. The aristocracy of the network provides opportunity and security, both materially and spiritually. The network cradles and protects. None of the politicians or journalists or intellectuals who set in motion the past 70 years of failed wars faced any significant consequences for their failures. Quite the opposite. Those who resisted those wars demonstrated that they weren’t part of the network and therefore remained excluded even after they were proved right, while those who failed showed that they were reliably part of the network and therefore remained inside. The network responds to external threats by tightening. As long as you belong, you’ll be fine.

What the Ivy League produces, in spades, on both the left and the right, is unwarranted confidence. Its institutions are hubris factories. At the bottom of the current collapse of the American political order is a very basic, very widespread distrust of all kinds of institutions, and that distrust is based on ordinary Americans’ distrust of the hubristic people who run those institutions. Can you blame them? The same people who told Americans that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction are now telling them to get vaccinated. Mistrust is inevitable.

​For Republicans, the power of the network explains, at least in part, the perverse psychology of the suicidal elites. The network gives them meaning, and to be cast out of that network is to suffer meaninglessness, so they do whatever it takes, become whoever they need to become, to stay inside the circuits of power. Their behavior appears paradoxical from the outside—Josh Hawley, senator, raising his fist to support the ravaging of the Senate—but from the inside, the logic is immaculate: The clearest way he can keep himself in the Senate is to promote its ravaging.

[Adam Serwer: Fox hosts knew—and lied anyway]

​In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon could not decide on the ultimate cause of the empire’s destruction. Was it the result of individual failures, such as those of Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Caligula? Or were trends beyond anyone’s control, such as the rise of Christianity and the geographical limitations of expansion, to blame? In the case of the United States, the deeper trends are clear—the hyper-partisanship rendering the country ungovernable on a federal level, the high levels of vertical and horizontal inequality, the environmental degradation. But the truth is that no country can survive when the leaders of its institutions actively work toward the destruction of those institutions. Mike Pompeo graduated first in his class from West Point and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. When a man of those advantages oversees the hollowing out of the State Department, allows the president to fire inspectors general who displease him by their inspection, uses his position to cultivate donors for his party, and consistently bends the norms and destroys the traditions that have lifted him to power, what hope can there be for his country? If he cannot manage to keep faith with the system, who can?

​The response to the January 6 riots is a surer sign of political breakdown than the riots themselves. Almost half of the men and women whose lives were threatened refuse to participate in the commission to investigate the violence against themselves. Obfuscation and diminishment of the event have become the standard Republican position at this point—held on to by Ivy Leaguers and others with equal capacity for motivated forgetting. Neither the most sophisticated education nor common sense seems to make much difference. They cannot bring themselves to defend government even when their physical security is at stake.

Lenin famously said that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” He didn’t get it quite right. The enemies of the United States have nowhere near as much capacity to damage its interests as do its most educated and most celebrated citizens. Nobody needs to sell Americans rope; they are braiding it themselves.

The post Major Corporations Have ‘Broken Promises and Funded Seditionists’ Since Jan. 6, Reports Reveal appeared first on DeSmog.

Coup plot called “a well thought-out plan based on sound, constitutional law and existing legislative precedent”

Don’t take what Republicans say to pollsters at face value — they are happy to lie in service of the fascist cause

The past four years have seen terms like “antifa” hit common parlance around the U.S., but have also seen confusing distortions of what that term means. As right-wing pundits work desperately to paint any and all potentially left-leaning protest action as anti-fascist, and then reframe anti-fascism as a series of nefarious terrorist plots, this has shifted much of the climate toward suspicion of anti-fascist activists. Despite the violence related to 2020’s protests being largely from far right vigilantes and the police, the mythology of “antifa violence” has still been spurred on by rumors, conspiracy theories and dubious allegations. This has provided cover to the far right, which uses claims of “community safety” to head into cities and attack anti-fascist protesters, as has been seen in a sequence of confrontations between far right and anti-fascist demonstrators in places like Portland, Oregon. This perception, along with attempts to crack down on activists through state repression, have led to what many people have alleged are excessive sentences that were disproportionate to the charges being faced.

In cases around the country, such as David Campbell in New York City, activists were facing prison terms for what they have claimed are self-defense against violence by far right groups, such as the Proud Boys. For many activists who have made it their job to try and prevent far right groups from parading into marginalized communities, threatening further attacks, they are finding that prosecutors’ offices see them as the antagonist in the situation.

This is what happened to Alexander Dial, a Portland, Oregon, resident who faced a series of serious felonies after a confrontation at an August 19, 2019, anti-fascist demonstration. Dial came to national prominence after photos surfaced of him taking a hammer away from a member of the fascist group the American Guard, which the Anti-Defamation League refers to as “hardcore white supremacists,” amidst what people on the scene referred to as an attack. Dial was wearing a mask and a shirt that said “Beta Cuck 4 Lyfe,” a play on the insult that far right internet trolls try to use to demean leftist men.

Dial said that he has attended protests most of his adult life, and had attended the August 17 event to show his support for the anti-fascists being targeted. The event was organized by the anti-fascist group Pop Mob and a coalition of other leftist and progressive organizations in response to a planned Proud Boys rally. The Proud Boys planned their event after another protest, just a few weeks earlier, where Pop Mob had created a dance party in response to another pair of planned far right demonstrations, one by the Proud Boys and the other by affiliates of a local far right group, Patriot Prayer. The dance party was named the “milkshake” after the then-recent “milkshaking” of English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, known for agitating Islamophobic hatred in Britain, where activists threw milkshakes on him to humiliate him on camera and ruin his clothes. Far right media figure Andy Ngo had milkshakes thrown on him and was assaulted at that event in a well-publicized incident, which launched him to right-wing celebrity status. The Proud Boys, in response, planned a rally “against domestic terrorism,” and hundreds were set to descend on Portland.

The event itself was relatively peaceful as Pop Mob orchestrated a carnivalesque atmosphere less than a mile away from the Proud Boys, but in the same waterfront park. Black bloc activists, who dress in head-to-toe black outfits as a protest tactic and often take on more militant approaches, separated the two groups, ensuring that the Proud Boys could not attack those attending the Pop Mob event. Eventually, the police let the Proud Boys take to the bridge that separates the East and West sides of town. The American Guard members, however, allegedly took a bus back over to the Westside, near the anti-fascist demonstration, where they were met by anti-fascists.

“[I thought] those guys are here to cause trouble. Something is going to happen wherever they are,” Dial told Truthout. He then joined with a group of other activists he did not know to try and stand in the way of the American Guard from reaching other demonstrators. “They started to brandish weapons from inside. Knives. A clawhammer. They had guns,” said Dial.

Dial says that when they came out, one of the American Guard members tripped, was approached by someone else, and the Guard member dropped the clawhammer. That is when Dial got ahold of it, swung it to get them away, and threw it at them. The American Guard bus eventually left, and Dial was later circled by multiple police and arrested. It wasn’t until days later that he found out that he was being charged with multiple felony counts, including assault in the second degree and a riot charge. They charged five additional people with riot charges, making a total of six, the number legally necessary in Oregon to charge that an illegal riot had, in fact, taken place. Dial was taken from his arraignment straight to Multnomah County Jail, where he sat for 11 days until his bail was posted.

“The left is seeking progress, and that means changing institutions in ways that better more people. And if you are running the institutions that are capitalizing off of marginalized populations, you are going to fight back with all the powers of the system,” says Dial. “So overcharging anti-fascists is the easiest, cheapest thing to do.”

Without those levels of support for individual activists and long-term solidarity organizing, state repression could have a chilling effect on other organizers by making it appear too costly and dangerous.

Dial says that the expanded charges came, in part, from the release of video that was taken on that day by Elijah Schaffer, a media person with the right-wing outlet The Blaze, and was amplified by Andy Ngo (including hosting the video on his YouTube channel). Two of the charges that had come down were what are called Measure 11 crimes, those that carry with them “mandatory minimum” sentences of more than five years. Measure 11 passed in Oregon in the mid-1990s as a way of getting “tough” on violent crime, and one of the cases that was used as an example of the time was when an antiracist skinhead shot and killed a neo-Nazi when defending himself during a New Year’s Eve attack.

Because of the current bail system, and the charges that had been tacked onto his case, Dial’s bail of over half a million dollars meant that he had to put up $54,000 to get out. Fifteen percent of that money, nearly $8,000, is kept by the county permanently, and he had to solicit donations from friends and family to get this money, clearing out his savings and “financially ruining” him. Once he got out, he had to pay to have an ankle monitor on, which he wore for months, as well as observing a curfew. Because his court case was extended for over two years, he had to get by on severely limited pretrial release conditions. His ability to work was hindered and he relied on many of these anti-fascist organizations to provide a great deal of support.

“[We] knew that what he needed most was a good criminal defense lawyer,” says “Walter,” an administrator of the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, which raises money for anti-fascist activists facing legal or medical costs. (Walter is using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation for their activism.) “All mutual aid in anti-fascism is important, but we believe the Defense Fund fills a gap by ensuring that anti-fascists who run into trouble don’t ever feel like they only have themselves to rely on.”

Support came internationally, with donations from across the world and thousands of people signing a petition demanding the charges against Dial be dropped.

Dial eventually took a plea agreement, and then in November of 2021, he had all but two charges dismissed by the judge, and he was given “time served,” three years of probation and 80 hours of community service, which Dial says he will try to complete by working with a nonprofit that helps upgrade the homes of people with disabilities to make them more accessible.

“No matter what you’re choosing to organize or whatever actions you want to take, [you need to] develop and maintain strong community ties with people you trust,” says Dial, who points out that this means real-world relationships and not just virtual ones mediated through social media. “You need connections with people who have your back and who know how to reach out to other people who might be able to help you in ways they can’t. What got me through all of this … was my community.”

These are the types of bonds that many anti-fascist groups are creating, and what can sustain many activists when targeted by state agencies. Community organizing is built on these bonds, and as was seen during the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, mutual aid and fundraising support was a key part of sustaining the organizing itself. Without those levels of support for individual activists and long-term solidarity organizing, state repression could have a chilling effect on other organizers by making it appear too costly and dangerous.

The International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund addresses those needs by raising money and disseminating it where needed. Since 2017, the fund has disseminated over $19,000 to a total of 15 recipients who have faced financial hardship from their activism or have been targeted by the far right, according to Walter.

“[We] all recognize that standing up to bigotry [and] fascism is dangerous but necessary work, which is why it is important for everyone to stand behind anti-fascists when they run into trouble,” says Walter. “We believe that this is real solidarity and is true to the saying, ‘We keep us safe!’”

Dial’s story shows that it is these community connections that get activists through these situations, which may become more necessary as leftist protesters deal with the fallout from intense policing practices during the 2020 protests. By connecting different movements through bonds of resource solidarity, social movements become sustainable and individuals can come through these challenges with enough stability to continue.

Dial says that he is going to work to repeal Measure 11 in Oregon, which has reinforced a carceral culture that has been used disproportionately against marginalized communities. By sharing his story, he wants to give insight to those facing similar challenges about what it takes to survive overcharging by the state.

“You need connections to people who have your back and who know how to reach out to people to help you in ways they can’t,” says Dial. “That’s the whole point of why we’re all doing this in the first place. It’s about community.”