The Nazis, in the years before they seized power, had street thugs in organized groups all over Germany. This informal army was called the SA, the Brownshirts, angry young men who would go into the territory of their political enemies, beat people up, occasionally kill them. This was done to intimidate the public, galvanize support by a show of manly action and give angry young men a meaningful cause to completely justify their rage. After all, if fucking Jews were responsible for all the misery in Germany, undefeated in the World War, but for backstabbing fucking Jewish criminals betraying the victorious German army, why wouldn’t you join an armed gang and go publicly humiliate as many Jews as you can?
Incendiary propaganda and normalized violence go hand in hand. Activated by an infuriating lie, you can join an outraged mob attack that sends dozens of cops to the hospital. Your political leadership will dismiss that violent overrunning of the Capitol as simply protected First Amendment expression, “legitimate political discourse”. Liberals will chafe at this, which is part of the point of saying it, but very few of them will risk having their asses physically kicked over it by maniacs all too happy to kick some liberal ass.
That’s what authoritarians count on — an inflammatory lie repeated on a loop and the willingness of violent followers to take names and kick ass — that and the general public’s not unreasonable fear of being lynched by an angry armed crowd chanting about killing people.
How to halt the free mass expression of hatred, lies and violent rhetoric that lead to these kinds of atrocities is a question that has increasingly bedeviled us here in the Free Market. The right of free people to freely choose to spread hateful lies that lead to violence must be balanced, capitalism’s staunchest defenders insist, against the inherent wisdom of the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, a hand that theorists of capitalism say always turns things to the best possible outcome (in terms of maximizing profit for those who produce the best product at the lowest price). In practical terms it means the right of several obscenely wealthy people to unlimited additional billions in personal wealth,l and great returns for shareholders must be balanced against potentially profit-limiting protection of an abstraction like “democracy”.
Melania Trump’s tireless campaign to rid our society of bullying seems to have been in vain. Bullies are at their mightiest online, hiding their cowardice behind a user name they are free to use threats of violence to intimidate anyone they hate. Bullies are driven by hatred and the humiliation they experienced. So they threatened to kill Christine Blasey Ford, and gave out her home address. She has had to move four times so far (the first time even before she testified credibly against Kavanaugh) as a suddenly bipartisan Senate rushed to protect Supreme Court justices from peaceful protests outside their homes when they restrict voting, allow unlimited dark money in politics, are poised to criminalize abortion (based on centuries’ old theories about women) and are set to turn the time machine back, in every possible way, to the good old pre-Civil Rights era. If you don’t like it, vote us out, bitches, says a spicy Federalist Society justice named Alito.
What is our government doing to protect us all from online violence and hateful rhetoric based on demonstrable lies, propaganda that leads to murder? Here is an excellent, and troubling, interview by Terry Gross, of recently resigned head of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, online disinformation and bullying expert Nina Jankowicz, who, in spite of her expertise and skills, was forced to resign after a short time on the job, after a deluge of online disinformation and cyber-bullying, including threats of violence and disclosure of her personal information to make her an easier target for angry young assholes. An important story that simply never got much traction in the firehouse of reactionary Trump/Bannon/Koch diarrhea we are all constantly being sprayed by.
This piece, When Every Conversation Becomes a Game, We All Lose, from a recent New York Times is a very insightful discussion of the difference between a conversation, where both sides listen to and hear each other, and respond reasonably, and the more common American cage match where two adamant rivals are pitted against each other, will do anything to dominate the other, and only one can be declared the “winner”. The second style of discussion is, sadly, the dominant form of discourse in a nation of angry assholes.
Part of American Exceptionalism is, frankly, mass bullying by a handful of the wealthiest white men alive at any given time. Don’t want any more ten year-olds massacred by enraged young white men with legally acquired military assault rifles with high capacity clips? Then shut the fuck up about it, losers… there’s nothing your deadlocked, weak, historically unpopular, “democratic” Congress can do about it, and if they try — FILIBUSTER. It worked to protect slavery, white supremacy, lynching .. so what is your goddamned problem?
. . . After Election Day, Trump began another, more deadly assault on the electoral process. “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” he tweeted on Dec. 30, 2020, from Mar-a-Lago, where he was spending the holidays. Longtime chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had been in and out of Trump’s favor, picked up the thread in a phone conversation with Trump that same day. “You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon told him, according to reporting in Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, “Peril.”
“You’ve got to call Pence off the f—ing ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis,” Bannon said, referring to the vice president, who was vacationing in Vail, Colo. “We’re going to bury Biden on January 6th,” Bannon said. If Republicans could cast enough of a shadow on Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, Bannon said, it would be hard for him to govern. Millions of Americans would consider him illegitimate. “We are going to kill it in the crib. Kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” Bannon said. Trump’s attack on Biden’s legitimacy included a stream of public statements, legal deceptions and a constant focus on disruption of the Jan. 6 certification in Congress
From the great Heather Cox Richardson, quoting one of the most vocally opinionated pinheads in Congress, the honorable Louie Gohmert, on the American right to lie:
Navarro was livid at being arrested and handcuffed and put in a cell, saying that if they had just called him and said they needed him down at court, he’d have shown up. (He appeared to miss the point that the subpoena he ignored is basically a call that says, “Hey, we need you down at the court….”) He claims that authorities have violated the Constitution.
Reacting to the arrest, Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told Newsmax, “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you.” He claimed that the grand jury acquitted lawyer Michael Sussman of lying to the FBI about his contact with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign with the argument that “[o]f course you’re gonna lie. Everybody lies!” but that is, of course, not true. The jury said that the Department of Justice, which brought the suit against Sussman, did not prove its case. It is against the law to lie to Congress or to the FBI. Navarro has not been tried yet; he has simply been indicted.
There is a national organization of Republican state attorneys general called RAGA, the Republican Attorneys General Association. RAGA is gaga for MAGA. In the lead up to the 2020 election, they met secretly with voter fraud conspiracy theory promoter/expert Hans von fucking Spakovsky, several times. One tangible result of these meetings was more than one of their members limiting drop boxes for voting in their state, one to a county, regardless of population. They had more in the works, they just didn’t have enough time to plan and implement it all. Now they can plan for the next elections at their leisure. They have been working at it steadily since they didn’t manage to snatch “victory” away from Joe Biden in November 2020 or January 2021. Rest assured, they are all very busy strategizing and passing laws.
RAGA was in the news yesterday, in the background, as a leaked RNC training video came out, in which plans from before the 2020 election were brought up to date, Big Lie style. You insert an army of trained Republican poll watchers/voter challengers, with MAGA attorneys, police captains and the local Republican DA on speed dial, on call to make court challenges based on suspected fraud, to hold up long lines of fake voters on the spot, (you can tell they’re fake by the color of their damned skin!), gum up the works at predominantly Democratic voting precincts, get the local DA to stop voting due to suspected massive fraud, have the local RAGA member step forward to invalidate the votes from hostile districts, throw it to the independent MAGA state legislature and so on. Remember, these ambitious souls are all, at the moment, gaga for MAGA.
Hans von Spakovsky, who works for Charles Koch and friends at the Heritage Foundation, oversees a vast voting fraud database where he has documented more than a thousand instances of proven voter fraud, dating back to the 1980s. That’s more than a thousand cases of fraud among billions of votes cast in all American elections in thirty or forty years. The percentage of voting fraud, less than a ten thousandth of one percent, is what smart people call “statistically insignificant.” Fortunately, that’s good enough for people who are gaga for MAGA, like RAGA!
These comments by the Michigan head of the RNC’s Election Integrity/ Minority voter intimidation board, are Hans von fucking Spakovsky’s wet dream of massive voter suppression. Recently leaked RNC training videopresumably leaked by a goddamn traitor, Isuppose.This “precinct strategy” is probably nothing illegal, because the consent decree the RNC signed in the 1980s preventing this kind of skulduggery expired in 2018. Just like that totally unfair Voting Rights Act the stupid Senate reauthorized 98 to nothing, before neutral balls and strikes umpire John Roberts fixed it for good after Obama “won”!
They won’t lose in court this time, he urges, because it won’t get that far, they will have an army of RNC trained partisans at the polls and countless reactionary lawyers ten, twenty, thirty million strong, on standby, plus law enforcement and prosecutors on their side! The South will rise again!
A few years ago, right before Covid hit and peak Trump began, I had coffee and went to a lecture with a guy I ran into who I used to be friends with many years back. He became very rich, working as a corporate lawyer, doing mergers and acquisitions. When the subject of politics came up he smiled and told me that MSNBC and CNN were just as slanted as Fox News and that if I was dispassionate and not drinking the anti-Trump Kool-Aid I’d be able to see it.
He assured me if we sat down and watched it together he could point out how many times false information was repeated on MSNBC and CNN and prove his point. I told him that Murdoch’s Fox had been a pioneer in spreading propaganda, mentioned the lawsuits in which Fox defended itself by saying nobody in their right mind would believe this shit is actually true news, it’s clearly opinion etc.
But it wasn’t much of a discussion, because he knew the secret that I was too dense to understand. I suppose that secret is that everything is relative if you’re rich enough not to care about anything but your portfolio. This bit of premature gloating by a Fox opinion host who was recently Trump’s press secretary reminded me of that short, fruitless conversation with my apoliticalbuddy.
Equally slanted MSNBC treatment of the same story follows.
If transparency/honesty and a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve are necessary when facing vexing challenges, like, say, the regularly occurring mass shootings of American school children, opacity and obstruction, the two main tools of reactionaries intent on turning the clock back, are the sworn enemies of problem solving. This reflex to hide evidence, blame, conceal, obstruct and obscure works in politics as well as it works in personal life, as long as “winning” is the highest and only value in play.
The GOP, the party of Gingrich/Koch/Cruz/Trump, is in the business of angrily keeping their base hopping mad over wedge issues, period. Which is worse, another gun massacre of several young children by a maniac or deliberately teaching millions of those same children that we once had a particularly vicious form of race based slavery in this great nation, a shameful continuing legacy fueled by racism that is a major cause of ongoing injustice and violence today?
There’s always an angle to make people mad. Since even many older liberals may feel uncomfortable with the idea of transsexuals, why not attack that odd group? If it makes people enraged, and helps obscure the underlying issues, the GOP will say it loudly, repeatedly and in one voice. The entire well-disciplined Republican party is dedicated to one party rule, purging anyone not extreme enough to repeat the talking points and devoted to blocking any investigation of anything that could prove embarrassing or compromising. See how it trickles down to the local level:
Uvalde Police Department stonewalls Texas Department of Public Safety investigation of their botched handling of the armed maniac in the school with ten year olds he was keen to kill. The Department of Public Safety already announced it was wrong for the Uvalde police to have 19 officers wait an hour in a school hallway while the shooter was massacring children, while more than one might have been bleeding out, so why cooperate with a witch hunt that has already found you guilty?
News reports today said that the Uvalde police stopped cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety investigation after TxDPS director Colonel Steven McCraw on Friday told reporters that the police made “the wrong decision” and had not acted in accord with protocol, suggesting they had already come to a conclusion, but TxDPS later said that it was only Arredondo who was not responding to their requests. The Department of Justice is also reviewing the police response to the mass shooting.
That investigation of the RNC’s “legitimate political discourse”, that passionate mob of innocent tourists who inadvertently put 140 police officers in the hospital on January 6th? Another fucking witch hunt, just like Mueller’s, just like that attention seeking partisan DA in Fulton County (over another totally innocent “perfect” phone call), just like her angry “sister” at the head of the NY State AG’s office. Subpoena? From an “illegitimate” partisan committee formed only to persecute the rightful president and innocent patriots rightfully incensed at a provably stolen election? Fuck that.
Now a criminal grand jury is sending a subpoena to the Trump sidekick who went on TV to describe the political arm of the insurrection in detail, and if the guy defies that subpoena he can be thrown in jail … how unfair is that? That guy, Peter Navarro, already said, after defying the congressional subpoena, that he’s protected by the executive privilege he waived on TV by describing the “Green Bay Sweep” to some sneaky Jew lawyer/”journalist” on a left wing corporate network! The witch hunts continue, and will, until the GOP claws back Congress and Biden and Harris start getting impeached once a week, along with Raskin, Schiff, Cheney, Pelosi and others, and we’ll see how they feel when the tables are turned… Speaking of politically motivated witch hunts:
To prove that the Trump/Russher thing was a hoax, that Trump’s campaign never sought or accepted any help whatsoever from the Russians, in spite of the lies told, under oath, and reported by Mueller and Marco Rubio’s senate committee (which explicitly named the compromised, cash strapped, Russian oligarch-friendly, pardoned felon Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort as a conduit, via Konstantin Kilimnik, to Putin and the oligarchs), and that the whole Mueller probe was an illegal, partisan witch hunt based on pure bullshit promoted by lying Democrat [sic] spies, Bill Barr appointed a stern-looking hard-ass religious conservative federal prosecutor named John Durham to provide some juicy proof of illegal Clinton/Obama/Democratic treachery in the months and weeks leading up to the 2020 election. Durham indicted one guy, in three years, but the trial didn’t go well.
After six hours of deliberation, a federal jury today acquitted Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman of making a false statement to the FBI. This is the outcome of the Trump administration’s attempt to discredit the investigation into the ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. . .
. . . Using “investigations” to sway public opinion has been a Republican tactic since House Speaker Newt Gingrich ran investigations about “voter fraud” in the 1990s. Those investigations never turned up any evidence, but the constant news coverage convinced many voters that voter fraud was a huge problem. Ditto with Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails. Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say he was investigating Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.[1]
If you understand the troubling power of deliberate, targeted disinformation that can almost instantly spur thousands to wild action, skip this next story of Republican bad faith. When formation of Homeland Security’s new Disinformation Governance Board was announced, the right wing media megaphone went into overdrive, accusing the newly launched board of being Biden’s “woke” censorious propaganda gazpacho police agency designed to crush patriotic, First and Second Amendment protected, right wing dissent. It was a highly inaccurate description of the mission of that new office, but it did the trick and the Biden administration was very slow to respond forcefully to the right wing narrative. Pressure and threats of violence by angry Trumpist trolls who released the director’s home address and other personal and family information caused the director of the newly launched Disinformation Governance Board to resign amid an online onslaught by radicalized “patriots”.
Lest we forget, Christina Blasey Ford, who testified credibly and at personal risk, that she was sexually assaulted by a drunken teenaged Boof Kavanuah and his friend, has had to move four times as a result of death threats her family received in the aftermath of her testifying. Blasey Ford’s allegations and Kavanaughs actions were never investigated by the FBI, neither she, nor Kavanaugh, nor his reclusive alcoholic friend were interviewed and the agency sent thousands of tips about Kavanaugh directly to Kavanaugh’s sponsor White House Counsel Don “we’ll tie up your subpoena in court for two years” McGahn, for a decent burial. The onetime drunken teenager now sits, unimpeachably, on the Supreme Court, after narrowly missing having his life destroyed by dark money funded vindictive Left Wing operatives shamelessly using this so-called victim, who has been the target of one righteously angry mob after another. The real victim was Kavanaugh!
It is hard, dirty work, but we have to keep our eye on verifiable reality, the one based on truth and evidence, not the one based on pure, righteously angry faith. One party plays by the rules, the other uses the rules only to delay, obstruct, manipulate. There is a vast difference in those two worldviews. One leads to the rule of law, our best shot at a fair, if imperfect, society, the other to the unaccountable rule of the very few, “born booted and spurred” [2] to ride the masses of losers lustily, backed by volatile lynch mobs of passionate, peaceful patriots engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”
The signs today are that this lawless cult has overreached, in its zeal to seize complete control of American life and what is allowed in the land of the free and the home of the brave, that the tide will be turning, if the good guys with the vote turn out in numbers too big to rig by bad guys counting the vote with their desired outcome foremost in mind. The tide will turn, or we are all done for. We all have some work to do.
[1] Heather Cox Richardson with the backstory of the Durham anal probe.
In May 2019, then–attorney general William Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation to see if it was “lawful and appropriate.” This was a pretty transparent attempt to salt the media with stories about how Trump was being persecuted by Democrats and how the connections between his campaign and Russian operatives were, as he said, a “hoax.”
Using “investigations” to sway public opinion has been a Republican tactic since House Speaker Newt Gingrich ran investigations about “voter fraud” in the 1990s. Those investigations never turned up any evidence, but the constant news coverage convinced many voters that voter fraud was a huge problem. Ditto with Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails. Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say he was investigating Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine.
Durham’s investigation seemed to be in this vein. Although a Department of Justice inspector concluded that the investigation had been begun properly and the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed that conclusion, in summer 2020, Barr publicly disagreed, saying that the Russia probe was “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and that Durham’s job was not to “prepare a report” but to establish criminal violations that would lead to prosecutions. Trump supporters expected that Durham’s report would help Trump in 2020, and although DOJ policy is to avoid roiling the country in the 60 days before an election, Barr said that he would feel free within that period to release the results of Durham’s investigation.
In September 2020, then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that he had seen “additional” documents from Durham’s investigation that spell “trouble” for former FBI officials who began the inquiry into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. “Additional documents that I’ve been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act and I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously,” Meadows said.
That month, a top aide to Durham resigned from the investigation, allegedly out of concerns about political pressure. A Republican congressional aide told Axios: “This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn’t happen before the election.”
But it was not until September 2021, days before the statute of limitations ran out, that Durham announced a grand jury indictment of Michael Sussman, a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign, for lying to the FBI. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the campaign, and he took to the FBI the information that cybersecurity security experts had uncovered a possible computer link between Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank and Trump Tower.
Durham said Sussman had lied to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity experts. In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions. In any case, the DOJ inspector general concluded that the FBI investigation started over something completely different: a boast from a member of the Trump campaign to an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
[2] To quote the great description of the entitlements of hereditary wealth stolen (from the words delivered from the gallows by a man executed years before by the British crown) by the always eloquent Thomas Jefferson, who, though born booted and spurred, and living a luxurious life, nonetheless saw the galling injustice of this arrangement. An arrangement, like slavery, that he feared no just God could ever allow the perpetrators and beneficiaries of to avoid a hellish eventual punishment for.
As Robert Reich explains in testimony to the Senate’s budget committee the other day, corporations, enjoying the highest profits in seventy years, are raising prices and making windfall profits as the economy recovers from the pandemic. These giant legally created persons are using using those fortuitous profits to buy back shares and drive up their stock prices at the expense of consumers, who groan under inflation.
Of course, blaming Biden and the “tax-and-spend Democrats” for Biden Inflation (worldwide, what a dick he is!) increases their chances for a president Pompeo or Mnuchin or Kushner or Carlson, and even higher profits when all government regulation is finally abolished, along with all income tax(for the wealthiest). It all goes to prove, if proof is kept strictly independent from the facts, that fairly taxing the rich means the destruction of all of us.
As if Mary was sent to earth to offset some of the great damage her psychopathic family is doing to our nation and the world. Brilliant, focused, witty, full of empathy, the opposite of the rest of her one trick Double Down clan.
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