Whenever you want a small group of wealthy men, with unpopular ideas, to weild absolute power, over the wishes of the majority of citizens, you need to employ deadly violence. These powerful autocratic men need deadly groups of violence fanatics, like the Ku Klux Klan , as enforcers of their will.
The Ku Klux Klan would be powerless without their credible rep for torture, humiliation and terrifying death, unpunishable by the law.
See that picture in your mind of laughing law enforcemeny klansmen at their attaignment for murdering three civil rights workers. They couldn’t look more relaxed, one of them dipping into a bag of Red Man tobacco, his buddy with a big Lyin’ Ted smile on his face. Those are good old boys that mutilated three voting rights advocates in Mississippi, looking forward to Justice at the hands of a a jury of their white peers, under the state criminal code, and local customs, of Mississippi.
Without groups like the Klan it would be very hard, in a democracy, to effectively suppress minority voting, that is the voting of the local majority. The majority will win elections unless intimidated by terrorism so they will not cast a vote. Hang, burn and dismember just a few of their leaders and watch how quickly the rest of them will hide on Election Day.
That’s how it’s done whenever you want a small group of wealthy men to rule absent the consent of everyone they rule. The only way to do it is by force, you have to have the threat that you will actually be able to legally torture and murder as many motherfuckers as you need to make examples of, if not all of them in the ultimate solution, or as Mr. Hitler’s colleagues called it die endlösung.
The Gray Lady hastens to remind readers that our elections are won by the party with the best slogan, a winning market-driven vision that encapsulates a compelling narrative in a single phrase, MAGA, for example, or, even better, Q.
It follows that a political party does not win an election by highlightting a wide range of policies they’ve enacted, against determined, lockstep opposition, to help millions of Americans, they do itby using effective single-issue branding and messaging.
So, according to the Grey Lady’s top headline a day or two back, top Democrats are hissing at each other because, once again, they’re going to lose because they’ve concentrated on the wrong metrics to win, instead of picking one (like “Make America Great Again”) in a majoritarian democracy wheremoney is speech, time is money, and the citizens’ attention spans are two and a half seconds long.
If it is not a single idea that fits on a baseball cap, and it doesn’t inspire blind single-minded purpose, the battle is lost, in the considered opinion of the Grey Lady’s headline writers.
They also had a top headline that Joe Biden made two verbal gaffes at a recent campaign stop. Imagine that!MAGA GAGA, NYT. I don’t know why you do it, but nobody does it better.
Television pundits tell us that Republicans have successfully made a huge voting issue about violent crime, predominantly in “anarchist (and antichrist) jurisdictions” run by godless heathens, presumably. The GOP has focused on the rise of violent crime all over the country, under the watch of “soft on crime” communist Democrats who control two branches of the federal government and are therefore responsible for all local criminal behavior.
A few seconds of research on the internet tells a different story. Here are the top 27 States, (including one that should be a state but is not), ranked in order of prevalence ofviolent crime.
Looks to me like the old Confederacy, the MAGA heartland, that region of the country who never bowed to “Negro Rule”, never lost any war, except by being cheated out of victory, leads the pack in violent crime.
Hmmm…
Meanwhile the FBI and Homeland Security have both issued reports that domestic terrorism, white supremacist violence, is the gravest threat we face as a nation going into the midterms. Talk about yer violent crime…
Get out and vote. Vote against American Nazism. It is a cliché because it always works this way, but first fascists come for those they deem helpless, poor, frightened women, and girls, and then political opponents, and then other enemy groups they have a vendetta against. In the end,if they haven’t gotten to you yet, they inevitably come for you.
I never had a strong feeling about Jake Tapper one way or the other. Tapper seemed reasonable enough, the few times I watched him opining on the news.
New leadership at CNN, formerly disparaged by the right as the “Clinton News Network,”determined to capture more centrist viewers with content more sensitive to the views of American Nazi types.
In the aftermath of the horrific assassination attempt at Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco, and in the stinking wake of new Twitter CEOs tweet claiming Pelosi’s husband was drunk and fighting with a male prostitute (tweet since taken down) Jake Tapper weighs in to remind CNN viewers that certainly not all political violence is restricted to the extreme right.
In fact, in 2017, Tapper intones, it was a left-winger who shot up a bunch of Congress people at a softball game. He then goes down a short list, a guy wanted to shoot Boof Kavanaugh. He includes on the short list the (right-wing, pro-Trump) punks recently convicted for their plot to kidnap and execute the Democratic governor of Michigan, and a presumably left wing attack on MAGA NY gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin to, eh, prove his point.Both sides are violent!
Apparently a highly paid shill like Tapper will read whatever is placed on his teleprompter. Fuck media pundits like Jake Tapper, who know better, but speak with the authority of paid celebrity product endorsers.
Listen for yourself to how fair and balanced CNN’s presentation of political violence is. No reason to mention that American intelligence (Homeland Security) and law enforcement (FBI) have rated the alarming rise of right-wing, white supremacist terrorism as thenumber one threatto our democracy.
Or, as Jake Tapper points out, political violence is never acceptable and does not belong to either party. Here’s 90 seconds of fair and balanced influencer Tapper, giving both sides, for his new boss at CNN.
A lie can cover shame, sure. It’s done all the time. We can tell lies we can argue aren’t actually lies, they are just ways of sparing some pain, to ourselves or others. There are gradations in lying, too. We can lie in a way that is, arguably, basically truthful. We can leave out just one key detail, more or less accidentally, and satisfy ourselves that this small omission was completely justified. Without that troubling detail, the rest of the story makes moreor less complete sense, so what is the harm of the “lie”?
Because we now live in a culture where a lie, unless told under oath and punishment for perjury is actually pursued, is no longer a big deal. So, I lied, so what? I wasn’t under oath, only loser chumps take an oath not to lie. Everybody lies, and you’re lying if you don’t think you’re a fucking liar too. And if you don’t lie, you take the fucking Fifth, like a man.
The analysis is fine, as far as it goes, which is not far at all. When you accept a lie you choose your poison.
Why is the United States poised for an era of stochastic terrorism, angry, unbalanced men, rabid lone wolves, poised to do deadly violence to themselves and others, always ready to be triggered by an angry suggestion that this person or that is deserving of death? [1]
Because the widely accepted lie that one party is run by demented, murderous, child-raping Communist blood-drinkers is as accepted (among a solid 30% of Americans) as the one that Blacks are irrationally angry about nothing, that Jews are about to replace all “white” “legacy” Americans with brown dupes, that elections lost by your candidate are rigged by these all-powerful Commie traitors, etc. If you are angry, and alone, and everyone else in your social media silo also faithfully believes these demonstrable lies are true, and you have lost faith in everything else, and an assault weapon is legal and readily available in your state, why on earth wouldn’t you take out some of these demonic scum in your heroic last act on earth?
What is the cost of accepting a lie, being faithful to defending a lie to the death? It costs you your integrity, your authenticity, your credibility.It also costs the ability to ever solve a problem or conflict based on what actually caused the problem or conflict.
As in politics, so in our personal lives. If saying something that is true enrages or humiliates someone you know, you tactfullyavoid the topic. Some topics are easier to avoid than others. If it is a shameful single event, unrelated to anything else, that you both acknowledge is mutually painful and worth avoiding, it’s reasonable to agree to not bring it up anymore. If the topic is honesty itself, that’s a tough bridge to cross with your relationship intact.
“Uh, OK, we can’t talk about why it’s better to be honest than dishonest, OK, let me try to remember never to say anything that might bring up that flaming bag of shit. Honesty is overrated, LOL!”
To me, the cost of my integrity, authenticity and credibility is too high a price to pay, in most situations. Then again, I have a lifelong issue in that regard. Life itself, making a living, often requires limiting the scope of one’s integrity, authenticity and even credibility, in the name of going along to get along. Too much insistence on a right to be whole, and treated by others with the same care you give to them, can make you as welcome as an agitated scorpion at a baby shower.
On the other hand, if you are honest, you will understand that the price of lying is almost always unacceptable.
If we don’t trust each other, what kind of love do we have between us?What kind of savage world do we live in?
[1] Walking neo-Nazi pustule Steve Bannon called for the death of Anthony Fauci, and his family, on his podcast the other day. Free Speech, bitches. First Amendment, you fucking blood-drinking Fauciistcucks!
Mehdi Hassan explains the weaponization, by America’s pugnaciousMinoritarian party, once know as the Grand Old Party, of paying government debts already incurred. A government shutdown over the artificial “debt ceiling” was unthinkable until Charles Koch and friends’ unlimited, secret, tax deductible money and hundred tentacled political machinegot enough traction in Congress and was amply amplified by dedicated right-wing media.
Put the “debt ceiling” right up there next to the sacred filibuster, something the sainted framers of the Jesus Christ-dictated Constitution never imagined in their wildest nightmares. But there it is, sacred and inviolable, ready and waiting for MAGA, to wield like Thor’s hammer as they unleash the Kraken that will destroy America’s credit rating and shake the global economy. A small price to pay for absolute power…
Give Mehdi a few minutes to explain, he does a great job.