Excellent portrait of the consummate moderately right wing sack of shit, member of the far right corporate American Legislative Exchange Council, coal broker and chairman of the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, this podcast, which Robert Reich heard and excerpted this from:

King Manchin

The Texas anti-abortion law, which deputizes citizens to act against anyone who even intends to help any woman get an abortion in the short window of time before the fetal heartbeat can be detected, a couple of weeks after the first missed period, is reminiscent of the old Fugitive Slave Act. You can hear an excellent legal discussion in the most recent episode of Dahlia Lithwick’s Amicus podcast. Here’s a bit about this deadly new law (for poor women in Texas), from that discussion:

…this does hark back to some very dark American history and dark American history that has been supported through the United States Supreme Court. So the fugitive slave acts provided for citizen participation in the establishment, the furthering the preservation of American slavery. It weaponized the citizenry, deputized citizens to surveil, to start to apprehend people who were in violation of US laws by escaping themselves out of slavery, out of an inhumane situation. And there were bounties that were provided for their success and surveilling and successfully apprehending, obtaining individuals who dared to exercise liberty, autonomy and freedom.

And when you think about this Texas law, there are certain analogs that eerily resemble that of the Fugitive Slave Act in that it provides for a right of action of private citizens. It provides for financial renumeration of those citizens who are able to successfully peg someone who has aided or abetted an individual in obtaining an Abortion.

And what this means with the law written in such broad terms that this could implicate the Uber driver, the Lyft driver, the bus driver, or the receptionist that works at an abortion clinic, virtually anybody who has been in the way of the path of a person exercising the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy?

What’s interesting about the law, Dahlia, is that after Roe v. Wade, there was Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And what comes out of there is that there should be no obstacle placed in the path of a woman and terminating a pregnancy. And Texas has flipped that on its head, which instead you may sue anybody who aids and abets a person on the path of terminating a pregnancy. It is a very dangerous law and it is very dangerous and alarming what has happened at the Supreme Court.

source

And, as you recall, there were some very religious Christians who truly believed that God and Jesus truly blessed the institution of slavery. These cocksure pieces of shit never change, since God tells them they are 100% correct, why would they change? Amy Coney Barrett and her pious ilk would be right at home with those righteous slavery defending motherfuckers.

The original, extra crispy, grass roots Ku Klux Klan arose in the defeated Confederacy right after the end of the Civil War. They viscerally hated blacks, feared their new constitutionally guaranteed electoral power and tortured and terrorized as many as possible. For a brief time, the newly formed Department of Justice, enforcing federal law against terrorist groups like the KKK, locked up all the Klan leaders. Then the Supreme Court made it clear that groups of murderers like the Klan were subject only to state law, the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments be damned.

During the rapid industrialization of the US in the early twentieth century, a new Ku Klux Klan arose, a more inclusive, corporate klan if you will. Because it was set up by marketing experts, paid a bounty for each new dues paying member (and these experts both became millionaires based on their commissions) they needed to expand their net, make the old Klan tent bigger by appealing to a wider spectrum of hatreds, tailored to local custom. In the cities where most of the industrial jobs were located it was the goddamned Jews and Italians, godless Jews and Catholics pouring into the country by the millions (until the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act, that is). In places where Latinos were hated the most, it was the goddamned Latinos! Chinese? We fucking hate ’em! Join us and we’ll make them regret being Asian! Ten dollars is all it takes to join. A big tent, open to all haters. By 1924 there were 2.4 million proud, card carrying Ku Klux Klansmen and women, though the men, as men will, committed most of the muscular atrocities against their hated enemies (the women had their backs, though).

Charles M. Blow, writing in the NY Times, provides the rest of the story, in his op-ed From ‘Ku Kluxism’ to Trumpism.

One hundred years ago this week, The New York World began to publish a 21-part explosive exposé on the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was a sensation. At least 18 other newspapers across the country ran The World’s bombshell reporting. According to The Columbia Journalism Review, “The series drew two million readers nationwide. New Yorkers stood in line for copies. And the Justice Department and several congressmen promised to investigate the group.”

The World would win a Pulitzer Prize for its efforts.

But, as I read through that coverage to write this column, I was struck by just how resilient Klan ideology has been in the years since The World exposed the group’s systems and rituals; its ideas have been repackaged and dressed up — or, disrobed, as it were — but the core tenets remain the same. I was even struck by how many of the same tactics are still being used to preserve white supremacy and subjugate racial, ethnic and religious minorities in this country.

It proves to me that Klan thinking is not really about the organization itself or its tactics — the night riding or cross burning — but about the very meaning of America and who controls it.

As one of the Klan’s “grand goblins” put it in a 1921 speech: “America for real Americans! Guardianship against the alien, the anarchist and all who would subvert that banner, be they white or black or yellow!”

It is that widening of the scope of hatred and oppression that first jolted me as I studied the Klan’s history. By the early 1920s, its leaders had moved on from primarily anti-Black hatred. To grow the brand, they had to grow the ring of bias. As one of The World’s articles put it, “Now the negro has become a side issue with it. Today it is primarily anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, anti-alien, and it is spreading more than twice as fast through the North and West as it is growing in the South.”

That is not dissimilar from today, when xenophobia and Islamophobia have taken a more prominent role.

In fact, The World wrote that at times the Klan would tailor its message of hate by region, appealing to Japanophobes on the Pacific Coast, framing itself as a bulwark against radicalism in the “Central West,” fanning hatred of immigrants on the Atlantic Coast and stoking fears about Jews and Catholics throughout the country. As The World put it, “Wherever a prospective member lives, he has been promised that his pet aversion will be made an object of Klan action.”

This sounds eerily similar to the successful campaign that Donald Trump ran in 2016.

Many of his supporters view America not as a grand idea, malleable and expandable, but as a white man’s invention in which the displacement and slaughter of Native people and the enslavement of Africans was a necessary evil.

So they demand a strict deference to that idea of America because, to them, it promises a society bowing at their feet, a nation defined by its reverence for whiteness.

At one of the Klan’s initiations, members were told to say, “All men in America must honor that flag — if we must make them honor it on their knees!”

Anyone else remember how Trump supporters treated Colin Kaepernick?

Furthermore, the Klan realized, much as Trump did, that hate was an industry and that the right — or wrong — man could milk it for profit. As The World wrote at the time:

The original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc., modestly begun five years ago, has become a vast enterprise, doing a thriving business in the systematic sale of race hatred, religious bigotry and “100 percent” anti-Americanism.

Perhaps the last lesson and similarity between the Klan of the 1920s and Trump’s legion of supporters are that exposure doesn’t necessarily lead to eradication. After The World’s exposé, the Klan didn’t shrink; its membership surged.

Just four years later, in 1925, anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C., in what The Washington Post called at the time “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.”

In 1913, eight years before The World’s articles, Louis D. Brandeis, soon to be nominated as a Supreme Court justice, wrote a piece in Harper’s Weekly under the headline “What Publicity Can Do,” arguing that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

But in journalism, this idiom is more complicated. Sometimes, the infected court the infection. Sometimes, the light you shine on evil also illuminates the path to it. Sometimes, publicity is advertising.

Consider how this continues to manifest today. Over the past few years, we’ve seen how the press has amplified all manner of conservative fictions and fever dreams, from election denial to the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories to the lunacy of the anti-vax movement.

Sometimes people are drawn to these, and what we believe to be fact and logic repels them. Sometimes when we expose evil, we create or amplify its allure. Sometimes people willfully plunge into — and are consumed by — the flame that provides the light.

The core ideology of the Klan lives on in a more palatable form, in suits and uniforms, among lawmakers and judges, pushing back against progress and forward in the form of gentrification.

One hundred years later, pointy-hat white supremacy has evolved into soft-shoe white supremacy: same goal, less gauche.

I was listening to the Orange Polyp’s niece, Mary Trump, discuss the collective PTSD we have been recently suffering as a nation, as a planet. When her uncle, always the selfish, abusive prick he is now, was declared president in 2016 she had a full-blown PTSD reaction. She pointed out that the trauma her PTSD awakened was not related to her infamous uncle, it was just that the election of somebody so rotten, narcissistic, unethical, racist, nakedly “transactional” and unconcerned with the well-being of anyone but himself, filled her with terror. She knew that the worst among us had once again been elevated to a position of immense power. She was not wrong to feel that way. Donald Trump’s power over others is based on terror of his inevitable reprisals, backed with barked threats of violence and revenge, actual outbreaks of violent pay back, and continual atrocious betrayals of public and private trust that her famously transgressive uncle has never been held accountable for.

Covid-19 arrived just in time for her insane, powerful uncle to weaponize it, killing hundreds of thousands, who died needlessly as the former president divided the country on how to deal with a deadly pandemic, based on personal loyalty to him and a twisted notion of “freedom from tyranny”. The pandemic, he insisted, was a hoax perpetrated by Biden’s puppet masters in the Chinese Communist Party, that threatened the controversial incumbent’s undeniable landslide re-election strategy. Dr. Fauci is seen as a Commie traitor by tens of millions of Americans who continue to follow the former president’s scattered thoughts on the pandemic. How the Polyp is still walking around a free man, with the many serious crimes there is probable cause to believe he committed, including electoral interference, obstruction of justice and incitement to insurrection, is a mystery out of a dystopian science fiction novel.

Think of a childhood nightmare, like any good horror movie, where the monster finally leaves the scene and you can take a breath and wipe the sweat off your face. The next part of the dream happens under a beautiful blue sky, birds singing, a gentle breeze wafting through the flowers. Suddenly the bloody hand of the monster bursts up out of the earth, followed by the hideously muscled body, and the fucker is back, more terrifying than ever, and chasing you to your death by heart attack. In a healthy sequel to this nightmare your subconscious might have you suddenly stronger than the monster, grabbing the fucker and shoving it into a strong box you then lock, chain and throw into the middle of the deepest ocean. More often, though, the monster simply waits its next opportunity to chase you to a gruesome death. The terror this triggers is PTSD.

When someone rules by terror, an abusive parent, a partner, a bullying boss, a political leader, PTSD is always waiting. When you are in the grips of an abuser you don’t have time to process the trauma, all of your life force is focused on survival, particularly when the abuser appears to be all-powerful. Any moment the abuser can re-traumatize you, you have to be constantly vigilant, which is exhausting. Every abuser demands silence from his victim, snitches get stitches. If the abuse becomes well known the abuser risks people stronger than him coming to stop him from acting out against those weaker. In our current system we appear to have a shortage of people strong enough to resist the societal pressures to get rich, maintain privileges, etc. and strong enough to call bullshit on abuse in a way that can’t be ignored.

I’ve got no answer to the ultimate question of how we fight systemic abuse, except to keep finding allies and keep fighting, directly addressing the traumas we all face, with whatever means are at our disposal, in spite of how exhausting the fight is. In a nation of laws, as we are always told this is (and it’s certainly a nation of strict, even draconian laws when it comes to poor people and minorities) enforcement of the law against criminal abusers is the only protection the rest of us have. If criminals can openly threaten any reprisal imaginable, and send goon squads to harass and threaten direct violence, at say, school board meetings, and there is no consequence for this — the results are grimly predictable. We don’t actually live in a nation of law, we live in a nation of slaveholders and slaves, with a militarized army of slave catchers ready to use deadly force to enforce the bloody status quo and wink at the “crimes” committed by the protected class.

Of course, to speak of slavery in a nation that long ago outlawed it, except as punishment for a certain class of law breakers, is like comparing any other form of harmful abuse to rape. Rape is rape, slavery is slavery, a death camp is a death camp, certain things are indecent to compare other things to, we are often reminded. Indecency, of course, is famously in the eye of the beholder. Ron Deathsantis in Florida killing 69 children, and counting, with his Trump-inspired orders against reasonable pandemic precautions in his state, a hero to his enraged base, is an indecent motherfucker. The sassy Republican woman who heedlessly governs another Covid-19 hotspot, South Dakota, the muscular worm who governs the Hang ’em High state of Texas, heroes to some, indecent, irresponsible reckless killers to others.

PTSD is an illuminating frame to see things in — we are all suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a nation, in a flooding world that is also on fire and subject to drought, where there is now no penalty for public lying, even spreading lies that incite deadly violence and the dismantling of our democracy. The First Amendment protects the right tell even the most disgusting lies, we know, just as the Second Amendment, per Antonin Scalia, protects the right of zealots in Texas to outlaw all regulation of guns, including the need for a permit to carry or use one. The lack of accountability for and “rehabilitation” of our wealthiest criminals, top war criminals, traitors like Robert E. Lee (unaccountable for his treason and leading an armed rebellion that resulted in 700,000 American deaths, honored in his lifetime and pardoned posthumously by Gerald Ford…), adds to the power of our collective trauma. Our collective trauma is cumulative, since traumas of past generations get passed on in the form of reality-based terror, and ongoing reality-confirming violence, and each generation adds new layers to the constantly evolving, never-addressed trauma.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is exhausting, and debilitating, and can only be overcome with hard, patient, painful work, usually involving other PTSD victims. Most of us, of course, are famous for not wanting to do hard, painful work, particularly if it takes tremendous patience. More challenging still, because this is collective, national PTSD, based on collective, national traumas, it will require much of this hard, painful work to be done a public level, in full view of everyone. It will require painful admissions, apologies and reconciliation. It will require objective justice. Let’s fucking do it, I say.