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Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Caesarism
To predict future developments among the US far-right, we can look at one particular niche of current far-right thinking: its biologized notion of masculinity.
‘It is absolutely essential for our democracy that we win,’ speaker of the House says in interview
The Democratic speaker of the US House, Nancy Pelosi, said she “fears for democracy” if Republicans retake the chamber in November.
“It is absolutely essential for our democracy that we win,” Pelosi said in an interview during the 2022 Toner Prizes for political journalism on Monday night.
The Money Trail to the Ginni Thomas Emails to Overturn Biden’s Election Leads to Charles Koch
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 28, 2022 ~ The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Bob Costa of CBS News have unleashed a fury of renewed interest in the work of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Last Thursday, Woodward and Costa set off a political firestorm when they released the contents of emails that Ginni Thomas, wife of the sitting Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, had sent to President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, in 2020, urging him to overturn the Biden election win and attempting to steer his efforts in that regard. A total of 29 emails were obtained by Woodward and Costa, with the bulk of the emails occurring in just the month of November 2020, raising questions as to how many more emails are still out there from Thomas to the White House from December 1, 2020 through … Continue reading →
Fox Nation host Laura Logan joined a QAnon show called And We Know where she tried to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution was bought and paid for by a Jewish global cabal.
One of the deep QAnon conspiracies goes way back. For many years wingers have claimed the Rothchilds were the ultimate globalists controlling the entire world.
I’ve watched some of it and it’s more than bizarre.
“They can go back to the Big Bang theory – Darwin, I mean when I found out. Does anyone know when, who employed Darwin? Where Darwinism comes from? Well, I mean, you know, look it up. The Rothschilds,” Logan said.
“Look it up,” she said.
I did and I wonder, did she? There’s no evidence of her conspiracy as usual, but it’s discussed on Quora.
Right on cue, Logan then linked the globalists to England.
“It goes right back to 10 Downing Street,” Logan surmised.
Logan continued, “The same people who employed Darwin, and that’s when Darwin wrote his theory of evolution.”
Attacking science, Logan said Darwin was hired by the Jews to come up with that “evolution theory.” It’s insane.
What’s also crazy is she says it’s all “based on evidence, fine.”
As if that’s a problem.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the two-headed main character Zaphod Beeblebrox finds himself fed up with a particularly bewildering receptionist who does not appear to be making sense. “Don’t try to out-weird me, lady,” he growls. “I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.”
That pretty much pegs where I’m at today. In a land where Donald Trump was and could again be president, where a huge swath of the populace angrily denounces BandAid-level technology meant to thwart a murderous pandemic, and where a slap at the Oscars merits equal press ink with a civilian massacre in Europe, one must eat their Wheaties in triplicate and bank eight good hours of sleep before daring to reach the new and utterly terrifying threshold of modern-day “weird.”
Enter Ginni Thomas, wife of Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Please place your seat backs and tray tables in their proper positions, prepare for turbulence ahead, and oh God tell my mom I love her.
Ginni Thomas is not the first politically active spouse in the history of Washington D.C., but she is the first one I’ve come across who does a superlative impression of a mid-sermon Pentecostal minister with a live snake up her nose, preaching the Gospel of Trump.
According to a February report in The New York Times:
Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action.
Together they believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.
Justice Thomas’ political leanings are so extremely freighted to the right that he makes the other conservatives on that court look like Che Guevara, and his wife is even farther out beyond the Oort Cloud than he is. Her true time to shine came when she hitched her wagon to Trump’s WE WUZ ROBBED train all the way to the steps of the Capitol Building on January 6 and beyond.
In the process, Ginni Thomas began keeping some very interesting company. Most noteworthy was Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff, who began exchanging text messages with Thomas in the immediate aftermath of the election. Before getting into the subtext here, it is important to read some of the actual texts in their frothing apocalyptic Christian glory.
Thomas to Meadows, 11/10/21: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! … You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Meadows reply, 11/24/21: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
One must eat their Wheaties in triplicate and bank eight good hours of sleep before daring to reach the new and utterly terrifying threshold of modern-day “weird.”
I but wait what? King of Kings? Was he referring to God or Trump? The fact that the question needs asking definitely meets the Beeblebrox Standard for Weird, and according to The Washington Post, there are at least 29 more just like these. “They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal,” writes David French for The Atlantic, “they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness … represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square.”
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection would like a word with Thomas about those 29 texts, among other things. “In a series of text exchanges with Meadows,” reports the Post, “Thomas sought to influence Trump’s strategy to overturn the election results and lobbied for lawyer Sidney Powell to be ‘the lead and the face’ of Trump’s legal team. Thomas’s repeated outreach to Meadows came at period when Trump and his allies sought to enlist the Supreme Court to negate the results of the election. The revelations of his wife’s texts have drawn calls from Democrats urging Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election.”
Recusal would be nice. Resignation in disgrace followed by ejection from public life would seem more appropriate. Modern Republicans have mastered the art of disdaining rules, traditions, laws and moral codes whenever doing so benefits “the cause.” The Thomases, working in tandem both inside and outside the Supreme Court to usurp the rule of law in the name of Jesus or Whatever, have taken the practice to its most extreme point to date.
Thomas has no place on the high court.
Trump’s margin of victory in 2016 was the evangelical vote, represented in near-caricature fashion by Ginni Thomas. Trump has been hard at work keeping these voters in the fold, as they represent his most menacing weapons: the evangelical radicals with, paradoxically, Jesus in their eyes and hate in their hearts. Ginni Thomas and her connection to the doings of the highest court serve as tall warning: The Trump virus, like COVID, is everywhere.
Understanding the growing combination of racism, climate science denial, and fossil fuel promotion
Over the last several weeks, cracks have emerged in the foundation of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. Although his endorsement record was always more checkered than he likes to claim—a truism that covers all of Trump’s boasts—in recent weeks, his hand-picked candidates have faltered across the country. On Wednesday, he withdrew his endorsement of Alabama Senate candidate Mo Brooks—the root cause seemingly being the hard-core Trumpian loyalist’s mighty struggles with his campaign war chest and his polling numbers. Brooks’s response was curious in his own right: Rather than suck up, he hit back by releasing a statement claiming that Trump had sought his assistance in his attempt to “rescind the 2020 elections,” remove Joe Biden from office, and reinstate Trump.
Brooks has become the most noteworthy of Trump’s failures, if for no other reason than that his statement will surely attract the interest of the January 6 committee. But Brooks has hardly been the only Trump acolyte to chafe at the leash lately. As many, including myself, have pointed out, often with more than a little glee, these were signs that his hold on the Republican Party may be slackening, or at least that his effort to take it over completely was proving harder than expected.
On Thursday, Politico founder John F. Harris took things even further, arguing that Trump’s flip-flop on Brooks hit at a growing political problem for the former president. Trump’s rise to political prominence was premised on his authenticity, but he’s starting to act like a phony in recent days in ways that cut against the way he reinvented himself to run for office. Back then, when other career politicians would waffle and equivocate when asked questions that might have complicated answers, Trump would call bullshit—and he didn’t let the fact that he didn’t always know what he was talking about stop him from proclaiming his authority.
On Iraq, the financial collapse, and perhaps most of all, immigration, Trump was never concerned about the niceties of political correctness. He barely seemed to care about politics at all, for that matter. He went for the jugular in a raw and unfiltered way that well-heeled political consultants and pollsters are forever telling politicians not to attempt. All of this was bolstered by his obnoxious personality and propensity to reach for an insult instead of an explanation, which landed in Beltway ears as too-coarse-for-consideration but only underlined the fact that he was not like other politicians with his base. As Harris put it: “His grandiose self-conception, his vanity, his gleeful satyriasis—these are common traits in politicians, but most would try to hide them from view. Trump put them proudly on display.”
Trump’s decision to changes horses midstream in Alabama, Harris argues, is the culmination of a long-running trend: Trump himself has gone from America’s chief critic of politicians to being one of the greatest practitioners of politics as usual. “Trump has moved from being the beneficiary of America’s instinctual suspicion that most politicians are phonies who don’t really believe a thing they say, to being the enforcer against politicians who are insufficiently phony in professing blind devotion to him,” Harris argues. “One suspects that Trump himself does not realize how far he has drifted from the original source of his appeal as someone who is not connected to a reigning power structure and may lie and even cheat but does not traffic in the usual political B.S. Now Trump is trying to create his own power structure.” In so doing, he’s lately made a series of statements and actions that are inherently inauthentic; his brand has deteriorated as a result, and former devotees like Brooks can smell the blood in the water. In politics, as in music, once authenticity is gone, it’s gone forever.
But while Harris’s observation about Trump’s slow transformation from anti-establishment figure to smarmy politician is perceptive, he’s overstating the extent of Trump’s decline. Trump’s means of choosing allies and enemies has changed, but not substantially. Moreover, there’s still some consistency: Trump has always selfishly made these kinds of determinations. Early in his political career, his enemies on the right were those who dared criticize him: John McCain, Bob Corker, and Jeff Flake come to mind. Their disloyalty singled them out for replacement. Trump wants loyalists in Congress and in key positions in statewide offices, particularly those that control elections. That Brooks is a loyalist who’s broken with Trump isn’t insignificant, but remember, he is of no use to Trump if he can’t win. While Trump is ditching him, he’s doing so in the same way he’s ditched countless other losers before.
A certain elasticity—or inauthenticity—has similarly always been a part of Trump’s politics. Yes, his speeches in 2015 and 2016 were rowdier, more boisterous, and above all more unpredictable. Now Trump stands behind a lectern, rattling off the familiar list of grievances. But those grievances are, in many ways, more outrageous than anything he said six years ago: He is fixated on the idea that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him and is relentlessly bent on rooting out any politician who refuses to subvert American democracy on his behalf. Yes, what he is building is a familiar type of political power structure, but it remains unique in that it has just one insidious goal. Republicans, moreover, are largely with him: Roughly two-thirds of GOP voters say they don’t trust the results of the 2020 presidential election.
This may change as other issues—inflation and the war in Ukraine—percolate in the news and force Trump to think about something other than his monomaniacal devotion to the Big Lie. Trump’s biggest electoral weakness may very well be something that Harris doesn’t mention: his hyping of the Covid-19 vaccine, which he thinks he has been robbed of credit for.
For the moment, however, Trump has proven to be surprisingly resilient in pushing the stolen-election conspiracy he invented out of whole cloth. As perfidious as his claims are, they aren’t particularly inconsistent with the way Trump has behaved throughout his political career: Trump spent most of his presidency accusing the deep state of conspiring against him, the Mueller investigation of being a put-up job; Democrats never had a legitimate criticism, they were solely agents of discord, seeking to subvert and delegitimize his presidency.
Yes, he grew more solipsistic and deranged as his presidency went on, but he paid little price for this politically: Let’s recall that he nearly won a second term. The aftermath of that election robbed him of his most valuable tool: his Twitter account, which he used both to set the political agenda and to attack his enemies. But it also vindicated what Trump had been saying about the illegitimate forces that were forever demonizing him.
Harris is right that Trump has grown more “political” over the last six years; for all his bombastic preening about populism and the like, it took a surprisingly short amount of time for Trump to be absorbed within the Republican establishment, rarely deviating in any way beyond mere aesthetics. But Trump has hardly been punished for his crimes against authenticity. Rather, he has been amply rewarded. The Republican Party is increasingly built in his image, and it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which he is abandoned en masse by its politicians, who have stuck with him—defended him, in fact—even after he fomented a violent insurrection at the Capitol.
One could easily draw the opposite conclusion Harris does. Yes, there are plenty of signs that Trump is not the kingmaker many thought he was or that Trump claimed to be. Yes, there are more cracks in the foundation of his political support than many believed after the GOP continued to back him following January 6. But Trump has been more successful in tweaking his brand than many appreciate. He is building a political project with a great deal of success and, if he wins the Republican Party’s 2024 nomination—something that remains highly likely—it will back him to the hilt yet again. And it should not surprise if that backing comes in the form of a subverted election. The GOP is, frankly, even more deranged than it was four years ago. More importantly, it’s even more in alignment with Trump’s authoritarian leanings than ever before. This has all come about because Trump is willing to do transparently political things, like dump Mo Brooks in a fit of fire and fury, not in spite of that.
The House probe wants to create a “narrative thriller” in hopes Americans will care about an attack on democracy
It has been darkly amusing to watch one Pavlovian “Enemy of Enemy is my Friend” buffoon after another among what CounterPuncher Eric Draitser calls those “terminally online leftists who push a pro-Kremlin narrative about [Ukrainian] Nazis” line up behind Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in the names of anti-imperialism and anti-fascism. More
The post On Putin, the Ukraine War, the United States and Fascism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.