I couldn’t bring myself to watch the horror show of outraged GOP members on the Senate Judiciary Committee making fiery sound bites for MAGA nation by attacking a supremely qualified future Supreme Court justice (Manchin and Sinema permitting). I knew the Democrats would be unable to make these bigots shut up, improvisationally challenged corporate institutionalists that many of them are. Chris Hayes and his team assembled a nice, hideous little collage of angry white senators attacking the nominee about her race, a passion play that no doubt played bigly with their Trump-addicted fan base.
Clarence “Black Klansman” Thomas called questions about his ongoing sexual harassment of Anita Hill during his confirmation “a high tech lynching.” Now these Trumpists are going old school, making open racism (particularly against women of color) great again, no need for tech of any height: so you’re Black so you support CRT instead of Originalism, the Christian way; what about violent crimes committed by your people, rape and murder, and RAPE and RAPE; and what about this children’s book accusing babies of being racist, babies for Christ’s sake? [1] You fucking wrote it, didn’t you? Didn’t you, you fucking liar?
The clip, starting with Tennessee genius Marsha Blackburn (“tell us honestly about your hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our abortion jurisprudence”) runs just over a minute, and as you listen, try to picture any of these provocative, idiotic “questions” asked of one of the carefully vetted right-wing judicial activist ideologues appointed, filibuster-free, by Putin’s favorite totally exonerated American president.
[1]
Lyin’, Toadyin’ Ted, in prime form, like when he said to the dignified Attorney General “give me a break, Garland… You admitted that giving a Nazi salute is protected expression under the First Amendment and you’re making a big deal about a little Nazi salute, oh, my God, the guy did a Nazi salute! What’s America coming to, MAGA nation, when you can’t even give a goddamn Nazi salute to some know-it-all fucking metrosexual quinoa eating smart guy at aschool board meeting?”
This turd literally has no idea what decency is, or good citizenship, or the American ideal.
The truth is important, for its own sake and to advance intelligent decision making. It is impossible for the governed to give informed consent about anything if important information is hidden. Those who don’t know all the facts can’t decide anything knowingly, can’t meaningfully consent to anything.
Would it have hurt a presidential candidate if the voters knew he paid off a porn actress and a Playboy model to keep quiet about having sex with him while he was married to his third wife? We’ll never know, but keeping that damaging information secret certainly didn’t hurt him in the polls. The only person who paid any price for the crime of using campaign funds to buy the silence of hired adulterous sex companions was the henchman who did some time in jail carrying out his Evangelical Christian-endorsed master’s wishes for absolute secrecy.
The best policy for those who would hide shameful or otherwise damaging things, it appears, is simply not to be transparent. It doesn’t take a dictator to realize this. Here’s an example from the recently elected DA of NY County, Alvin Bragg. He decided he didn’t want to risk being the first to criminally prosecute Donald Trump, it was too dangerous for him, or for whatever his reasons are. He kept everything nice and opaque as he brazened his way through quietly dropping the case.
His predecessor, a fairly cowardly (or just compromised) man named Cyrus Vance, Jr. hired two experienced, specialized lead prosecutors to try Donald Trump for his regular, fraudulent, wildly changing valuations of his properties. Vance convened a criminal grand jury, put the crack legal team in place to collect the evidenve and then announced he would not run for reelection as Manhattan DA. His successor, Alvin Bragg, appeared to be dragging his feet on the criminal prosecution of Trump’s business empire. The grand jury hadn’t heard testimony for weeks, there was rumbling as the gathering case suddenly stood still. Then the two top Trump prosecutors resigned.
Bragg immediately announced that his criminal probe was going forward, that the two lead prosecutors who’d resigned would be immediately replaced by a lawyer who had defended many powerful white collar defendants in Trump’s position. In response to requests for the resignation letters, he claimed he could not release them because they contained information that might compromise the prosecution of Trump. A ridiculous claim, since no experienced prosecutor would include compromising info in a resignation letter. Bragg refused to release the letters, but he appeared to be letting the grand jury’s term expire, quietly running out the game clock, ending the prosecution before an indictment could be filed. In this case, appearance was soon confirmed as reality.
Eventually things come out. Sometimes it is decades later, but in this case, only a few weeks. The NY Times published Mark Pomerantz’s resignation letter yesterday. It reads, in part:
As you know from our recent conversations and presentations, I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did. . .
. . .You have reached the decision not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time. The investigation has been suspended indefinitely. Of course, that is your decision to make. I do not question your authority to make it, and I accept that you have made it sincerely. However, a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong. I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position. . .
. . . To the extent you have raised issues as to the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed, I and others have advised you that we have evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and we believe that the prosecution would prevail if charges were brought and the matter were tried to an impartial jury. No case is perfect. Whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice. As I have suggested to you, respect for the rule of law, and the need to reinforce the bedrock proposition that “no man is above the law,” require that this prosecution be brought even if a conviction is not certain.
Jesus, no wonder Bragg tried to keep the letter secret. It questioned his good faith belief that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute (while refusing to call further witnesses for even more grand jury evidence) and makes a pretty good argument for that questioning. Bragg openly saying he had decided it was too risky (for his career) to prosecute Trump, and fail, would not have flown, virtually noAmerican politician would have done that. So, you do next best thing — tell a few lies, keep everything nice and opaque and count on the two second attention span of overwhelmed consumer/citizens who will soon turn their shattered attention to the next titillating outrage. It happens every few seconds in our frantic 24/7 news cycle. No worries. I’m just sorry I wasted my vote on this lying sack o’ non-transparency.
Authoritarians, who infantilize their followers by making them believe in a black and white world without any gradation or nuance, protect their sensitive followers from the psychological harm of unpleasant truths. Demagogues aggressively arm their supporters against harsh things in the past, like massacres, pogroms, unprovoked wars or genocide, things that could embarrass, shame or humiliate them.
Turkey made a law criminalizing the mention of the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians early on in WWI. Calling this mass murder, this “ethnic cleansing”, an act of genocide will land you in prison in Turkey. Never fucking happened. Holocaust denial anyone?
The unspeakably cruel Middle Passage (Africa to the New World, chained, naked, in a coffin-sized space under the deck), and the lucrative employment and torture of American slaves from Africa were actual, horrific, well-documented, centuries-long practices that happened, with reverberations into the present in terms of quality of life, life expectancy, wealth inequality, psychological and physical safety and a host of other issues. Horrific, the amount of guilt and anguish knowing any of this could cause innocent white schoolchildren.
In the US the party of aggrieved white people is convinced that the real victims of so-called racism are the innocent white people who never owned slaves yet are being made to feel shame, discomfort, chagrin, guilt, anguish and so on when the subject of the ‘peculiar institution’ is discussed by the merciless advocates of Critical Race Theory. The solution is as simple as the problem to an authoritarian — the subject of the Peculiar Institution may not be discussed in a way that could cause anyone to feel shame, discomfort, chagrin, guilt, anguish or in any way like a bad person. Talk about snowflakes…
The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 [2]? Relatively few Americans (outside of Black descendants of those massacred) heard about this massive atrocity until almost a century after it took place, accounts of it wiped from newspaper archives to ensure the children of the men who murdered countless souls, machine gunned some, bombed and burned down their entire neighborhood, then put them in an open air prison camp outside of Tulsa, would never feel shame, discomfort, etc. The massacre came in the context of the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan in the wake of World War One, though discussion of any of that could also cause shame, discomfort, chagrin, denial, anger etc. Here’s a footnote for those with a strong stomach [1].
Holodomor, the Stalinist terror famine that killed millions in Ukraine from 1931 to 1932? Not a deliberate act of vengeance by Stalin, a tragic mistake by bureaucrats that led to many deaths during that famine, the 3.9 million Ukrainians who died were not alone, many other Soviet citizens also died, plus, they were killed by fellow Ukrainians, plus, they were not loyal to the Soviet state that conquered them. So you see? Fuck Ukraine.
The My Lai Massacre [3], covered up by men famed for their integrity, guys like Colin Powell, was one of many, many such massacres in Vietnam during which locals were murdered by American boys crazed by the cruelty of a war where the enemy could be anybody, a war that no American really understood the actual reason for, except for the armament profiteers. How much shame, discomfort and guilt I have always felt when I consider that my government sent young men, a couple of years older than me, to a place where they’d be driven insane and wind up doing such things, in my name. Better to make it go away!
Postcards, issued in 1911, featured the hanging of African-American farm wife Laura Nelson and her castrated son from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma—an event that later inspired the activism of Woody Guthrie. Another postcard showed the burning of an unidentified Black man in Durant, and was captioned “Coon Cooking.” In 1917, 17 white members of the International Workers of the World were flogged, tarred, feathered, and turned loose on the prairie by Knights of Liberty dressed in black robes and masks. By 1921, according to historian Scott Ellsworth, a revived Tulsa Ku Klux Klan claimed an active membership of 3,200.
source(National Endowment for the Humanities, obviously an anti-white hate group…)
[2]
The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Alternatively known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, the event is considered one of “the single worst incident[s] of racial violence in American history”, and is believed to be one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the history of the United States. Wikipedia
[3]
The Mỹ Lai massacre was the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by United States troops in Sơn Tịnh District, South Vietnam, on 16 March 1968 during the Vietnam War. Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and Company B, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division. Wikipedia
I need to read George Orwell. In terms of debilitating lies, regularly told via mass media to advance a false narrative, we are living in grimly Orwellian times. What we call something makes all the difference, as all American Needle Nazis, health care professionals advocating mass vaccination during a deadly worldwide plague, know very well. This kind of re-framing and renaming happens everywhere right now, in every space, during virtually every argument over anything. What we call what we are fighting about is often the difference between prevailing and failing.
There are countless examples of this kind of force fed bullshit in our political culture — End Mask Mandate Tyranny (surprisingly never brought to state legislatures as the Freedom to Infect Act), Stop the Steal (only fraud found — a few cases of overzealous Trump voters), Voting Integrity Laws (to ensure only voters with the right kind of integrity have their votes counted), Right to Life (fetuses only, bitches), Death Tax (paid by entitled living heirs of the super rich), Death Panels (without these nobody would ever have to die!), Climate Change Skepticism (you just keep bringing more proof, we have FAITH!) and on down the list. This kind of crap is increasingly common in a world where an obvious lie can be shrugged off as “alternative fact,” if you believe it, faith-based person, it’s irrefutably true for YOU and everyone in your tribe.
A big part of this kind of Orwellian lie is insisting on the opposite of what a powerful group is actually doing. The pompous idiots who wrote Trump’s hastily prepared 1776 Report, a junior high school level American history term paper “refuting” the 1619 Project’s version of a slave-based economy during much of US history, focused on white, Christian values (First Amendment be damned to hell), began by stating the cardinal principle of our democracy — that here all are equal under the law. This was insisted on, with a straight face, after Trump’s third attorney general had engaged in all kinds of obstruction of justice on behalf of the president and his inner circle jerks, after the president had pardoned a rogue’s gallery of select criminals, including one arrested by Trump’s own DOJ (DeJoy’s postal service, actually) for ripping off Trump’s own loyal, credulous base with a fake Build the Wall scam. After the president himself proved that obstructing justice, for the wealthy and connected, may be done with impunity if you have enough lawyers to tie everything up in court for years and a spineless enough opposition party.
Of course, since almost everyone in my family was ‘euthanized’ under Nazi supervision (though none of them made it to the camps), I always think of the famous sign worked in the wrought iron gates of Auschwitz, the famous “work camp” for slave laborers — Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Liberates. The Nazis were pioneers in Language Rules, strict Sprachregelung, what you can and cannot say in Nazi Germany. They had some good ones. You had the bulk of the Jews in the category of Transport Juden, otherwise innocent Jews taken by train to the “work” camps, their papers marked Sonderbehandlung (special handling), and Schutzhaft Juden, (Jews in protective custody) criminal Jews who had a much higher status than the ordinary “workers” and tended to survive, even thrive, in places like Auschwitz. Nazi logic speaks for itself... to Nazis.
Think of it, though, how you name something is crucial for success or failure. Every marketer, brander, advertiser, lobbyist, public relations consultant knows branding and proper messaging makes all the difference. Which banner would you rather fight under during a deadly pandemic “Freedom to Infect” or “Freedom from Overreaching Government Tyranny”? A fucking no-brainer. Putin, after invading Ukraine in an intended Shock and Awe blitzkrieg, immediately made a law criminalizing anyone who referred to the move as an “invasion”, “war”, “blitzkrieg”, “hostilities”, or, actually, anything but a humanitarian, fully necessary peacekeeping mission. See? That was easy, wasn’t it?
Speaking of Russians keeping the peace in Ukraine, ever heard of the Holomodor? Not many here have, though everyone in Ukraine is well aware of this mass atrocity:
The Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine’s man-made nature and alleged intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement.
Holodomor, man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, peaking in the late spring of 1933. It was part of a broader Soviet famine (1931–34) that also caused mass starvation in the grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian famine, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–33 is often called the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor). https://www.britannica.com/event/Holodomor
The body count of those who died (or more accurately, who were killed by Stalin) during the year of the Holodomor was a shade under four million. Four million murdered Ukrainians, in a fraction of the time it took the New York Times’s Mr. Hitler to get rid of six million pesky Transport Juden. Like many other atrocities (though few have been on this scale) it has largely been forgotten in history by all but the offspring of the victims. Don’t we all know how that goes?
I heard a great podcast yesterday from someone I’ve never heard of, she calls herself the Politics Girl. She makes all the connections between Manafort, Trump and Putin and outlines Putin’s long-term psy-ops plan, a deliberate and clever information war to sow discord and violent division to destabilize “the West” dating back a decade or more.
Manafort, of course, worked for a years to the get corrupt pro-Russian, anti-Nato Putinist Viktor Yanukovych, elected president of Ukraine. In 2004 then-Prime Minister Yanukovych lost a second run-off election for president after the first runoff was marked by massive fraud on his behalf. [1] In the new runoff election demanded by the “Orange Revolution”, and ordered by the Ukrainian court, Yanukovych lost 52% to 44% to a candidate who had been poisoned with a high tech toxin during the campaign (and lived) [2]. Paul Manafort arrived too late to swing the2004 election to Putin’s man, but after six years of grooming the the savvypolitical dirty trickster helpedYanukovych win the presidency in 2010, only tosee himousted for corruption by a popular uprising, the “Orange Revolution”. Putin, who had annexed Crimea earlier in 2014 was furious at the setback, and kicked up his radical psy ops/disinformation war against democracy.
Soon after Yanukovych’s ouster Manafort, of course,still in contact with pro-Putin oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine, was managing Trump’s campaign for free. Manafort was in a Trump Tower conference room for that “dirt on Hillary, I love it!” meeting with Don. Jr., Jared Kushner and the Russian lawyer and also, according to Marco Rubio’s Senate Committee, had many communications with and gave sensitive polling data (about key states that would be narrowly won by Trump) to a GRU agent named Konstantin Kilimnik. The Politics Girl describes Putin’s long psychological war, and his skillful use of social media, including innovative work with bot farms to convince Americans that millions followed Trump early on. Putin did much to effectively sow discord in the US and other western democracies (he did similar yeoman-like work on Brexit). She sadly concludes he did a great job convincing that volatile 39% of our countrymen that lies are truth, that the true enemy of good Americans are anti-fascists and anti-racists, that Putin good, Ukraine bad, that only Trump can save them, etc. I need to transcribe several sections of that longish talk, thereis some great stuff in there, very well-said.
Here’s a slice, from about ten minutes in, explaining why so many on the right are suddenly fans of Putin’s, and support mob violence to oust dangerous radical far-left Communist Joe Biden, after laying out the predicate stuff beautifully:
Between the two rounds of the election, dramatic increases in turnout were recorded in Yanukovych-supporting regions, while Yushchenko-supporting regions recorded the same turnout or lower than recorded in the first round. This effect was most marked in eastern Ukraine and especially in Yanukovych’s stronghold of Donetsk Oblast, where a turnout of 98.5% was reportedly claimed—more than 40% up from the first round.[2][3] In some districts, turnout was recorded to be more than 100% than the previous ballot, with one district reported by observers to have recorded a 127% turnout.[2][3] According to election observers and post-election investigations, pro-Yanukovych activists traveled around the country and voted many times as absentees.[2][3] Some groups dependent on government assistance, such as students, hospital patients and prisoners, were told to vote for the government candidate.[7]
[2]Despite his poisoning Yushchenkosurvivedand won the election by a wide margin:
Manafort arrived in Ukraine in the wake of the Orange Revolution, a popular uprising that had blocked the pro-Russian Yanukovych from taking power in 2004. One of the leaders of that revolt, an economist named Viktor Yushchenko, fell suddenly ill as his movement for European integration was gaining momentum that fall; doctors determined that he had been poisoned with dioxin, a substance that turned his telegenic face into a mask of green and yellow scars.
Paul Manafort worked, for years grooming the preferred Ukrainian presidential candidate of Putin and the oligarchs, an oligarch-friendly, pro-Russian brute named Yanukovych. Manafort worked for these oligarchs for years, finally getting their man elected. Soon enough Yanokovich became notorious for his corruption and collusion with Putin. He became so hated in Ukraine that a mass uprising of Ukrainians drove him from power in 2014.
Democratic elections were held to fill the presidency vacated by Putin’s friend, who took refuge with Putin while being convicted in absentia by Ukrainian courts. A well-known Ukrainian politician was elected toserve the rest of Yanakovich’s term.
Manafort, a clever man of refined tastes who apparently loves wearing clothing made from the skins of exotic endangered species, found himself in desperate need of money and volunteered to work as Donald Trump’s campign manager, for free, no strings attched. Manafort knew from past experience (his long partnership with Rodger Stone) how lucrative it was to be able to give access to the current. U.S. president, he’d been doing it since Reagan. Working for free to get Trump elected, with guaranteed access, seemed like a win-win for Paul Manafort, until his many connections with Putin and Russian oligarchs became known and he was forced to step down as Trump’s campaign manager. He was later replaced by members of the secretive right-wing Council for National Policy, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway (Ginni Thomas is also a member) . These were who Trump was talking about when he said he got the best people, the best people.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine,Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular Jewish comedian, trained as a lawyer, was elected in 2019 by write-in vote, with a 73% majority. Zelensky was the young, brand new democratically elected president of Ukraine as the embattled Trump was gearing up for the Rigged 2020 Election while transacting assorted quid pro quo pardons with Manafort, Roger Stone and others, for their help obstructong investigations into his shady activities and connections with Putin. Putin was threatening the Ukraine border and Zelensky, the new president, was awaiting the weapons that the US Congress had already approved for sale to Ukraine. There was the little matter of just a small favor though and within a few months after being outed by treasonous whistleblowers (Barr’s attempt to quash the legally required investigation of the perfect shake down call having failed) the president released the aid to Ukraine that he is now bragging about giving them back in 2019.
Paul Manafort, pardoned felon. No harm, no foul, he kept his mouth shut to protect his boss, and it’s all good.Zelensky is parrying Putin’s assassination attempts as his country is bombed and Manafort’s friends continue to support Putin. Some are even featured on Russia’s state TV.
In a smash-mouth culture like ours, ruled by the pernicious myth of the rugged individual, someone who prevails to get billions, after receiving nothing but a modest several million dollar head start, strength is seen as decisiveness (no matter how bad the decision), a willingness to discuss, deliberate and compromise before actingis seen as a vice of the weak.
Strength here is an unhesitating punch in the fucking face. Weakness, pausing to consider the effects of giving in to a strong desire to punch somebody in the fucking face.
The party of Trump has no hesitation to talk about building more gallows, executing traitors, torturing the families of terrorists (as long as they are Muslim terrorists, of course). This kind of tough talk makes frightened people feel strong. You join the lynch mob and now you are powerful, nobody can fuck with you, especially if you are armed and law enforcement is on your side.
You know what strength is here? The power to overturn a 98 to nothing Senate vote to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, signed by a president who shares your conservative views, with an ideologically driven opinion pulled directly from your asshole. Strength is the ability to keep lying to angry crowds, whipping them into a frenzy while pointing out you have never been charged with any crime, ever. Weakness is finding yourself having to explain why no action can be taken yet to stop an insane, violent cheerleader for violence.The “strong” party would be howling to lynch anybody like that on the other side.
This false and prevalent notion of strength and weakness is only possible in a culture where most people have lost the ability to make critical distinctions about anything; a culture where ruthless wealthy bullies are seen as heroes. Well done, Charles Koch.
In the days before Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine the Soviet propaganda network was called Pravda, which translates to “truth”. By a surreal coincidence the compulsive liar Donald Trump’s new post-truth social media app is called, in Russian, Pravda. Very strong, sir!
LoyalistPeter Navarro, whose conclusive 36 page memo was cited by Trump as probable proof of a definitely stolen election in the “be there, willbe wild”tweet of December 18, 2020 (see Exhibit B).
gratuitousblahg 