As former president Trump’s legal team and his party begin to argue that it is unconstitutional to impeach a president once his party has run out the constitutional clock on an impeachment trial, and that anything the president might have said that made certain irrational people act violently against elected officials, even if seemingly in response to his exhortations, was within his protected First Amendment right to free speech, I have a personal anecdote that is directly on point. I’ll try to set it out in a flash for you.
When I was thirty my younger sister got married. I was the best man. There is a photo of me in my rented tuxedo making my ironic, prophetic toast welcoming my brother-in-law to the family. Behind me in the photo the caterer, also in a tuxedo, if I recall correctly, is glaring at me. Not a fan of irony, perhaps, I don’t know. A short time later the caterer was pounding me with his fists, trying to bash my face in.
Afterwards my parents took the caterer’s side in this dispute. My disrespect toward the caterer had, understandably in their view, justified the caterer in his strong conviction that I needed to be punched in my smart fucking mouth a few times. This fight, clearly, took place long before I began trying to practice a form of ahimsa, consciously refraining from harmful actions as much as I can.
In my own defense, I had no idea the caterer was an off-duty cop. Had I known perhaps I’d have chosen a less inflammatory way of telling him to buzz off than the one I used. In hindsight, I see how disrespectful it was of me to tell the officer to suck my dick. I’m still, more than thirty years later, not certain it gave him the right to physically assault me, but that’s not our concern here.
A few days after the wedding (the party was amazingly not interrupted by my loud fist fight with the cop, the band drowned us out) my parents were still in a rage because, in their view, I had deliberately tried to ruin my sister’s wedding. I was angry too. It seemed to me too evident to dispute that the caterer, at the moment he began trying to bash my face in, was at least as culpable as I was in the ugly confrontation. My parents disagreed. It had been 100% my fault, no question. The caterer was a lovely man, I was a violent, enragingly provocative thug, as they told me several times. After a few days of a sickening stand-off I went to confront my parents about this, to try to set the record straight.
They were defensive, sticking to their guns. I was a provocative, irrationally angry, violent-tongued person. I had no right, in any universe, to tell the nice man to suck my dick. My explanation, whatever it was, was beside the point. Once I said that to him he was within his rights to charge me, get me up on his hip and begin throwing punches into my face as hard as he could.
My explanations bounced off my parents like Jewish space lasers off a kryptonite force field. Like the caterer’s punches to my smart face, which landed on my forearms as I continued to provocatively curse at him like the pugnacious potty mouthed asshole I’d always been.
Nothing I said could make them see any part of the unfortunate confrontation any differently. My father was mostly quiet, letting my mother do most of the heavy lifting. When he finally spoke, it was to calmly deliver the death blow to my arguments.
“You’re leaving out the most important part of the whole thing,” my father said confidently, holding the trump card that would cancel out all of my arguments. I walked into his trap.
“You had no right to be in the kitchen, so whatever happened after that, was completely your fault,” said my father with icy calm.
Talk about narrow framing.
I had permission to be in the kitchen, from the caterer himself, earlier in the evening, when he told me to just go into the kitchen to get something I’d asked him for.
No matter. You had no right to be in the kitchen.
There is nothing like a stubbornly narrow frame to frustrate an adversary. Frame any issue in a narrow enough legal strait jacket, and hold fast to that framing, and you can eliminate any discussion of the facts, the merits, drama, nuance, culpability, incitement, escalation, etc. from any story.
Did the president stoke escalating anger by constantly lying about a stolen, fraudulent election for months, invite his followers to a wild rally to #Stop the Steal on the day the election was going to be officially certified, exhort them to go down to the Capitol to STOP the STEAL, to TAKE THEIR STOLEN COUNTRY BACK? Did he watch the riot on TV for hours, refusing to take panicked calls from the locked down Capitol, before reluctantly allowing the National Guard in to restore order? Did he finally tell his rampaging followers to go home now, that they were right to be angry about the stolen election, that he loved them?
All irrelevant, you see. Our position is that it is clearly unconstitutional to hold a trial for a president who has already left office. Y’all know that. Y’all know that! Even if you somehow twist it and get a 51-50 vote that the constitution allows this outrage, you’re punishing free speech in an insane, partisan political stunt motivated by irrational hatred for an innocent man whose only “crime” was making America great again!
After my father pulled his Bill Barr-like parlor trick with the flimsy trump card that he claimed foreclosed all further discussion, I grew more frustrated. I laid hands on my father with violent intent for the only time in my life. Actually, I laid one finger on him, smartly across his nose, to demonstrate the difference between verbal assault and a physical one.
The cop caterer was perhaps within his rights to tell me to eat shit and die, or to go fuck myself, or that I should suck his dick, but not to start grunting and trying to punch me in the face over and over. My father was unconvinced by my demonstration, though he was now outraged too, began bellowing threats from his couch, and as my mother screamed “suck my dick! suck my dick!” over and over I took my leave of my unreasonable, angry parents.
This pathetic scene is basically what is going to be playing out in the Senate the next few days, by all appearances.
I wrote this sometime last week and forgot about it. Since then Jeff Bezos stepped aside to let his handpicked successor, the sassy Mr. Jassy, become CEO of the world’s most lucrative business. Bezos, perhaps the greediest prick in the world, has become my image (along with supremely smug Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg) for what’s wrong with the neoliberal “Free Market.” Like philanthropist/monopolist Bill Gates, these guys have made a career of crushing or buying out anyone seeking to do anything similar to what they did. As they went, an army of lawyers fought anti-trust lawsuits and brought other lawsuits to crush as many people as necessary to maximize their already unimaginable wealth and power.
And again, the personal is political. Think of any tyrannical personality type you have known. Were they ever generous? In my experience, taking from you, making you surrender something, is as important to them as whatever they gain. Bezos, with his $70,000,000,000 (Billion) in pandemic profits, has long refused to let his workers unionize. Why should unskilled workers making a generous, voluntarily paid $15/hr. in warehouse sweatshops tell Bezos how much personal profit he can make from the genius money machine he built exploiting the laziness of American shopping addicts? It’s unAmerican! No Robber Baron would have stood for it, neither will Jeff.
Here’s what I wrote the other day:
A friend, given the option to give a gift subscription when she purchased one, signed me up for a Washington Post digital subscription. I’m glad to have another news source on my phone, particularly one that, like the NY Times, breaks important investigative stories from time to time.
Whatever else we may say about these newspapers and the status quo enforcing beliefs of their wealthy owners, they occasionally do very important work. I installed the Washington Post app on my phone, which buzzed at 9:18 pm to alert me to important “breaking” news, to wit:
Very important to have this crucial, aggravating news beamed to me at 9 pm, with a notification beep to interrupt whatever else I was using my phone for, in case I missed the earlier news conference during which Nancy Pelosi reported her discomfort serving with House Member “enemies within” who actively support the former president’s baseless conspiracy theory about a stolen election and his attempt to violently nullify the stolen election
For some reason, the Washington Post reports, Pelosi had no healing words towards her colleagues who staunchly oppose Trump’s impeachment (on transparently bogus “constitutional grounds” mind you). Pelosi is upset that several of her most extreme and defiant Trumpist colleagues appear to have been involved in the planning and support of the violent insurrection, in addition to mockingly spreading COVID-19 to colleagues during the siege and lockdown, refusing to wear masks until a fine was eventually imposed (to be taken directly from their paychecks), and who now refuse to go through a metal detector put in place to prevent handguns from being brought to the floor of Congress by these same violence-defending extremists.
Who would have known any of this without that innovative genius Jeff Bezos and his state of the art Artificial Intelligence? Jeff Fucking Bezos, among the greediest and most selfish pieces of shit on the planet, shining a light into the darkness where democracy has slinked off to die. (“Democracy dies in darkness” was a Bezos innovation after he bought the newspaper).
Leaving no space unmonetized that can enhance his “brand” and increase his already obscene wealth, at the expense of everyone else, Bezos tirelessly soldiers on. His cause? Being the first man to a trillion dollars in personal wealth. Hopefully I can opt out of these “notifications”– though knowing the thoroughness of the obsessive control freak Bezos, probably not…
WaPo zombie executive editor being interviewed by a zombie journalist on the Clinton News Network:
Now do you see what Trump is talking about?
Back to February 8th:
There was a nice article in today’s New York Times that gives some more insight into the calculating, predatory business practices of this great man who has stepped to the side (as the shit seems likely to hit the fan for him and other billionaire tech anti-trust law evaders) to spend more time on his “philanthropy” (I wouldn’t be surprised if he donates $1,000,000,000 to causes near and dear to him!) and his plans to monetize space travel.
While Amazon has always been a super rapacious company with tentacles in everything lucrative, why dwell on the small stuff, like the media smear campaign Bezos’s public relations department launched against a worker seeking health safety measures in the warehouse where he worked when the pandemic was first raging out of control? After Amazon fired they guy they set a media hit team after him to discredit the loser malcontent in the eyes of the public. It’s not like 20,000 Amazon workers came down with COVID-19 due to the highly infectious work conditions. Oh wait, that’s the number the NY Times reported today. Hey, shit happens, we’re all humans…
The personal is political. Would you expect generosity from Jeff Bezos? Only if he was able to bask in the gratitude of the recipient, I suppose. But generosity like acknowledging that his vast fortune is built on the hard work of his underpaid workers, subject to his whims about what is best for them? Not bloody likely. I’ll take my multibillionaires with a little more concern for the people they exploit.
Fuck off, Jeff, and thanks for the considerate notification beeps you keep sending to my phone alerting me to things I already know.
My first question is, obviously, how the hell did she know about our deadly space laser? Is nothing sacred?
I was curious to find out more about the wide margin of victory Trump’s “future Republican star” enjoyed in becoming a Representative from Georgia’s deep red, eight year-old 14th District. She won in a landslide, it turns out, crushing her opponent by 50 points.
Greene finished in first place in the primary election and faced John Cowan in the runoff election.[21] Greene defeated Cowan to win the nomination on August 11. Greene was considered an overwhelming favorite to win the seat in the general election, as the 14th typically votes heavily Republican.[22] The 14th has a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+27, making it the 10th most Republican district in the nation and the third most Republican district in the Eastern Time Zone. Among Georgia’s congressional districts, only the neighboring 9th district is more Republican. Since the 14th’s creation in 2012, no Democrat has won more than 30 percent of the vote.[23] Trump carried the 14th with 75 percent of the vote in 2016, his eighth-best performance in the nation.[24] On the day after Greene’s runoff victory, Trump tweeted his support for her, describing Greene as a “future Republican Star” who “is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!”[25]
Greene was expected to face Democratic IT specialist Kevin Van Ausdal, but he withdrew from the race on September 11, 2020. This left Greene unopposed for the general election, though the district is so heavily Republican that any Democratic challenger would have faced very long odds.[26][27][28]
On September 3, 2020, Greene shared a meme to her Facebook page depicting herself holding an AR-15 style rifle next to a collage of pictures of Democratic representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Greene claimed that it was time for “strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart”. The caption underneath the images read “Squad‘s worst nightmare.”[29] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the meme as a “dangerous threat of violence,” and Omar demanded that the meme be deleted after claiming it had already triggered death threats.[30] In response to questions from Forbes about whether the meme was a threat, a spokesperson for the Greene campaign called the suggestion “paranoid and ridiculous” and a “conspiracy theory”.[31] Facebook deleted the meme the following day for violating its policies on inciting violence, prompting Greene to claim that Democrats were “trying to cancel me out before I’ve even taken the oath of office”.[32]
Kevin Van Ausdal, who withdrew as a candidate on September 11th (out of fear of violent extremists and horror at how ugly the campaign had become), got 25% of the vote two months later, from Georgians who simply wanted to vote against Taylor Greene.
So the future Republican star won by a whopping majority, about as large as Trump’s landslide margin in Georgia’s 14th District back in 2016.
On the other hand, she ran unopposed in a beautifully gerrymandered district that had always voted at least 70% Republican since its creation in 2012. America the beautiful, y’all.
[1]
My apologies for this link, which will probably lead to a paywall at uber-capitalist Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. It was a fine article, but Jeff, who made $70,000,000,000 so far during the pandemic, does not leave a penny on the table, as he proved again by taking the tips of gig workers (“independent subcontractors”) hired to make deliveries for Amazon in their own vehicles, and using the confiscated tips to pay their “salaries”. Cost him $61,000,000 to settle that case, about a dime to Jeff — (plus, not to worry, not a penny came out of his pocket). Leave me a comment if you’re interested and I’ll send you a copy of the article, cut and pasted, subject to not getting a restraining order from the world’s greediest genius/predator...
Here’s a taste, from the link above:
But they all agreed that ignoring Greene was not an option, so they began drafting the statement and emailing versions to Kevin, who kept suggesting revisions that made it softer, thinking he had made it harsher.
“He needs to be ready,” Vinny told Ruth on one of their daily video calls.
“I don’t know what it’s going to take to get him to use the kind of language we need him to use,” Ruth told Vinny. “It’s a very big shift for him.”
“How’s it going?” she said to Kevin on Day 21 of the campaign, trying to sound upbeat as they began to rehearse the draft statement.
Kevin said he had been trying to stay relaxed. He had a cold.
“Okay, I know you’re not feeling well, but the good news is, sometimes when you need to push through a barrier, the best time to do that is when you’re sick, because your defenses are down,” Ruth said. “We’re not going to take you anywhere horrible.”
“We’re good,” Kevin said.
“Okay, I want you to breathe deeply,” Ruth began. “A lot of your tonality will have to go down. There will be times when you’re speaking about what Marjorie has done and you’ll be angry. You’ll need to be angry.”
More often in his life, Kevin could not afford to be angry. His voice tended to swing up, a tone he found helpful in defusing conflicts in his job at a financial services company, which had enabled his first real stability as an adult. He’d only recently bought the tan split-level where he lived with his wife and 1-year-old daughter. Now it had a “Save the American Dream” sign in the flower bed by the mailbox, one of the stories of his rise into the middle class he’d imagined telling voters about when he first started running.
In immigration news, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., is allowing the government to continue deporting unaccompanied children without a court hearing or asylum interview. The court on Friday overturned a previous ruling that had blocked a Trump-era policy which stripped asylum seekers of due process, citing public health concerns around the pandemic. Some 13,000 unaccompanied children were deported between March and November of 2020 before the practice was halted. All three judges on the court’s panel who reinstated the policy were appointed by Trump.
“by force to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States”
Of course, I can hear the crack Trump legal team dismantle this theory of the case against their persecuted client:
“We must read this law in the strict sense of the intent of its framers.This section of the federal criminal code applies to the forcible prevention, hindering or delay of the execution of any LAW. The tallying of the electoral votes is a ministerial duty, not a LAW. Likewise, the so-called peaceful transfer of power is a tradition, a norm, an aspiration, like the self-evident truth that all men are created equal — not a LAW. Where no law has been forcibly prevented, hindered, delayed… Your Honors, why is the bailiff approaching me so menacingly?”
Naturally, rightwing media, foreign and domestic, has been out in front of this story for quite some time. Check out this headline under a Der Sturmer-inspired self-created masthead:
Fake News US Mainstream Media Falls Into “Sedition Conspiracy” Trap Trump Can Now Use To Jail Them
At the site above you can find many wonderful Russian accented articles, so you know they’re true: Pompeo Oversees Capture Of UN Pedo Who Leaked Video Of Hillary Killing Child (April 18, 2018); Declassified JFK Files: Multiple Shooters, FBI Paid Oswald, CIA Makes Fake News, LBJ Was Coup Linchpin and in KKK (October 31, 2017, Happy Halloween, whackos!); Vanity Fair: Hillary threatened to “shoot the panda”, Seth Rich’s Handle was “Panda” (June 3, 2017). And so forth.
Look, there’s a lot of noise, and political barking, screeching, posturing, etc. as our nation dances around the viability of outright American fascism. The facts of the riot at the Capitol on January 6th are pretty clear to anyone who watched the well-funded “Stop the Steal” rally, a promised “wild time” advertised for weeks by the president and climaxed in Trump himself urging patriots to go down to the Capitol to fight like hell and stop the steal. When Trump was done “provoking” them (McConnell) the mob marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to take over the Capitol and disrupt the certification of the election Trump claims was rigged against him.
There is ample footage of the mob violence right after Trump’s rousing remarks about a stolen election, several deaths (including the fatal trampling of a MAGA woman holding a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag) and, oddly only about 14 arrests (less than the amount of wheelchair-bound protesters typically handcuffed during one of their non-forcible disability rights protests in the Capitol…). Trump watched the riot unfold live on TV for HOURS, including the crowd chanting for Mike Pence’s head, before federal authorities gave local authorities permission to deploy National Guard troops. Participants in the riot were allowed to leave the Capitol unmolested (rather than “kettled” and taken into custody en masse as in most far less violent protests) and many of them walked D.C. for hours after the curfew, in the afterglow. The president publicly announced that he loved them (though he privately expressed disappointment at how “low class” they looked).
Trump’s party will do its best to allow their leader to leave the scene of carnage unmolested, his influence, prestige and historical importance intact. They took a procedural vote last week during which 45 of the 50 Republican senators signed on to the controversial idea that the impeachment is “unconstitutional” since the offender is no longer in office as of the date when the “trial” is supposed to begin (never mind when the Article of Impeachment was filed or that McConnell left the Senate on vacation until the “constitutional” time to hear the case “expired”).
This procedural dodge reminds me of what a law professor told our class the first semester of law school: “give me the choice of all the facts and the law in my favor or procedure in my favor, I’ll take procedure every time.”
The crank who brought the vote on this impeachment’s constitutionality to the floor, Rand Paul, complained two days earlier (falsely) that ALL of the Trump election fraud suits were dismissed on technicalities. If this was true (it’s not) it follows that the question of whether Trump actually won the election but was illegally deprived of victory by massive electoral fraud and irregularities was never reached in court, is still an open question. Possible massive (non-white) election fraud is a question Rand Paul will be raising, he promised, all over the country during the next two years. He also complained that the interviewer (George Stephanopolous) was calling him a liar, as the Left always likes to do with all Republicans.
Then, like his kind always does, Rand made a rousing speech on the floor of the Senate and called for a vote to invoke a technicality to make the case against his leader go away.
Of the 45 who symbolically voted to invalidate the impeachment on constitutional grounds, five of these senators were part of the delegation of ten “bipartisan Republicans” that went to Biden, in a spirit of bipartisanship, to argue that the average American doesn’t need a $1,400 check, that the COVID relief bill should be a small fraction of the $1,900,000,000,000 that the Biden administration is proposing. Of course, if Biden doesn’t take their generous offer of a fractional bipartisan bill he is a liar, far from the uniter and president of all Americans he falsely promised he would be.
You see how profitably irrationality sells these days?
newest member of the House Education and Labor Committee
Under the provisions outlined in this “Seditious Conspiracy” law, this report says it’s important to note, the legal definition of the word “conspiracy” mandates it must be an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement’s goal—and was a legal standard met just hours ago when the Democrat Party shockingly announced it had barred Fox Newsfrom hosting any of its 2020 presidential candidate debates—a vile act President Trump rapidly responded to by Tweeting: “Democrats just blocked @FoxNews from holding a debate. Good, then I think I’ll do the same thing with the Fake News Networks and the Radical Left Democrats in the General Election debates!”.
I did Seth Meyers a disservice with my recent rambling post about his excellent commentary. Here is the transcript of the section I loved from the last two minutes of the other night’s smartly written A Closer Look: “Republicans Try to Dismiss Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial”His facial expressions and movements add a great deal to the presentation, watching him is best. Here is the audio excerpt, you can read along (recommended, if you’re pressed for time):
“They don’t care that [Trump] incited an insurrection to overthrow democracy, and they wouldn’t care if he tried it again. Instead, they’re once again framing Trump as the victim and casting the Democrats’ calls for accountability as demand for vengeance.”
He plays three clips of Republican blather:
“This impeachment is nothing more than a partisan exercise designed to further divide the country. Democrats claim to want to unify the country, but impeaching a former president, a private citizen, is the antithesis of unity.”
“It’s vindictive, this is all about the Left’s demand for revenge.”
“They hate Donald J. Trump, and they’re engaging in an act that I think it is petty, I think it is retribution, I think it is vindictive, I think it’s a waste of time, and so to coin a phrase, I think it’s time to move on.“
Man, Ted Cruz, you really have no shame. Also, first of all, shave, dude.You look like the Unibomber at a custody hearing.
Second, of course you want to move on, you do this even after the mob stormed the Capitol to overturn the election, you still voted to overturn the election.
You’re like a guy who robs a bank and then, even after it all goes south, you get caught and use the money to buy a Porsche “I want to feel the wind in my scraggly beard!”
Also, please stop with this preposterous talking point that impeachment is somehow divisive.
You know what’s much more divisive than impeachment?
Trying to throw out the votes of 81 million Americans, then inciting a mob to violently storm the Capitol to overthrow democracy.
Would you say that’s more or less unifying than impeachment?
Just be honest and say you’re fine with what Trump did and you’d be fine with him doing it again. It would be heinous and evil, but it would at least make this whole debate much easier.
Then we wouldn’t have to listen to your bullshit excuses anymore. I mean, you know what you are, we know what you are, who are we pretending for? The kids?
One of our two main political parties is fully radicalized against democracy in favor of authoritarianism. It’s a movement of powerful interests backed by wealthy corporate patrons, fueled by imagined grievances and conspiracy theories. We can’t ignore it, we can’t look away from it, we can’t just shrug our shoulders and say:
Comedian Seth Meyers has emerged during the Trump decade (it seems much longer…) as a witty purveyor of reality-based respite. He employs liberal doses of comedy to serve up his frequent insights against the dark backdrop of brazen, maddening, hate-filled alternative-fact based absurdity that has become the norm for many of our public officials. The choice, when our president insists that Nazis and their victims are all “very fine people” (I just prefer the former), is laughing or raging, and laughing is better — it feels good and reminds us to remain philosophical while we figure out how to organize to make things better. Meyers, a peerless master of snark, always gets a laugh out of me, a marvelous thing during times like these. He is as disgusted as the rest of us to have become our fellow citizen of a shit-hole country and much funnier about it. He takes a closer look at some of the worst of “current events”, sets out the facts, reports them, mocks them, often while providing a serious, sensible comment you don’t hear anywhere else.
Seth’s recent A Closer Look: “Republicans Try to Dismiss Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial” concludes with the smart observation that Republicans, in their focus on maintaining power at any cost, have shown they truly don’t care whether Trump organized and incited a murderous riot against Congress or not. (It’s not like anyone actually strung up Mike Pence… get over it!!! Pelosi is alive too, so shut up!) He points out that the GOP also, by taking the position that Trump, now that his term has expired, may not be constitutionally impeached or otherwise punished for “provoking the riot” (in Mitch “this is unconstitutional” McConnell’s phrase), shows they don’t care if Trump, or anyone else on their side, does the same thing again. There is clearly no problem with planning and inciting an armed insurrection against the government, as long as it is done for their side. Here’s Seth:
The arguments of Trump’s champions in Congress — and their charges of Democrat [sic] “hypocrisy” “double standards” and “breathless hysteria” — are hard to refute — unless you look plainly at the facts of the case.
‘This impeachment is nothing more than a partisan exercise designed to further divide the country. Democrats claim to want to unify the country, but impeaching a former president, a private citizen, is the antithesis of unity.” — Libertarian Rand Paul introducing his vote on the constitutionality of Trumps’ second impeachment.
“They hate Donald J. Trump and they are engaging in an act that I think is petty, I think it is retribution, I think it is vindictive, and I think it’s a waste of time. And so, to coin a phrase, I think it’s time to move on.” — Lyin’ Ted Cruz, dismissing the whole thing as more ugly, left-wing bullshit.
“You’ve got nothing to apologize for!… this is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics, and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you have done to this guy! Are you a gang rapist? [Kavanaugh: “no”]. I cannot imagine what you and your family have gone through. Boy, y’all want power. God, I hope you never get it! I hope the American people can see through this sham… Dr. Ford is as much a victim as you are…”
Here is the mind-twisting fact about truth — it is versatile, it can be used just as righteously for good or for ill. The truth, plainly stated, will be agreed to by virtually everyone who hears it.
Here’s one: if you let somebody take over your mind and beliefs, they will be able to control you.
There is no question that this is true. The devil is in how this truth is applied to the larger discussion/argument. It depends completely on who the somebody is that is trying to control your beliefs. Are you warning against Charles Koch and his ilk controlling you by controlling the information you get and what you believe or George Soros and his?
I can find no fault with the absolute truth of the following statement by right-wing provocateur/opinion journalist Tucker Carlson, a celebrity newscaster and culture warrior I generally disagree with. In the clip below, Tucker’s statement is followed by opinion journalist Medhi Hasan, putting his finger on the larger problem — the mainstreaming of crazy beliefs across the conservative right. Hasan rightfully identifies that alarming trend as one of the big stories of our time:
Take Tucker’s comment by itself, out of context. It is hard to dispute the truth of it.Tucker is absolutely right, if a dictator takes over your mind, you are his mindless slave.When I read this to Sekhnet (omitting the reference to Q) she guessed Malcolm X had said it. I thought that was a good guess, Malcolm surely made the same point many times. Here’s Tucker:
(The real threat is a forbidden idea, it’s something called Q-Anon.) [1] Your mind belongs to you, it is yours and yours alone. Once politicians attempt to control what you believe, they are no longer politicians, they are by definition dictators, and if they succeed in controlling what you believe, you are no longer a citizen, you are not a free man, you are a slave.
Like so much in life, the entire enchilada is in the framing, the context, how the indisputable statement is used to support the argument it proves. Change just one word here — “forbidden” (the left doesn’t want you to know about this idea) to “dangerous” (if you believe this blood curdling fantasy you will do just about anything to save innocent children from these sick fucks who richly deserve death) and there is no problem at all with what Tucker said. It is 100% true. Add in some kind of indisputable right to act on your belief that you are fighting a powerful cabal of blood drinking child rapists and you have a different proposition.
But therein lies the cleverness of the skilled propagandist. Take a true premise nobody can disagree with — if your leaders control your beliefs you are their slave. Then, since that’s self-evident, and we all value our freedom — well, follow me, it’s a short step to convincing the gullible that whatever they believe, no matter how wildly improbable, no matter how demonstrably false, is their god-given right to believe and that no godless leftwing radical so-called “Truther” has the right to say anything about a fervently held belief of yours. They may not judge you! It is a matter of belief, not intellectual analysis. In many ways, belief is more powerful than mere knowledge.
This relates closely to the true concept that it is impossible to argue with a feeling. A person may be right or wrong to feel the way they do, but the feeling is real, and the feeling colors everything else in the conversation. The reality of the feeling must be dealt with first, before the facts of the cognitive matter at issue can be productively discussed.
At the risk of being tedious with a personal example I’ve offered before, here’s a scenario that illustrates this feeling/fact split to yer proverbial T. Watch how the end of this interaction with a very smart, intellectually capable friend, mirrors what Tucker stressed in that clip — the right to your belief is the thing that matters most. It is worth infinitely more than preserving your dearest lifelong friendship.
After my health insurance was illegally terminated for the first time in 2020 (the second time was during April of the pandemic), an old friend calls me to challenge me about my anger, which he says is disproportionate, out of control and which, my old friend stresses, concerns him greatly, as it’s very unhealthy for me to be so angry. He was angry about an email he got from me. He called my email snide and inaccurate, said it revealed an unfair anger directed at him, which was, in any case, totally misplaced.
After I managed to avoid a violent argument with him, declining his loud challenge to tell him to “go fuck himself” and we talked further, he conceded that my email had not actually been inaccurate, but that it was still somewhat snide, he said, particularly coming from someone who claims to be dedicated to ahimsa, non-harm. I do claim to be, and try to be, mild in my emotional reactions, to the extent I can be. There is a great value to not giving in to anger, whenever you can manage to. There is even value to the exercise when you fail.
Over the next few months we did an increasingly frustrating dance for clarity about whether I had a right to be angry about anything. It ended in him snarling at me and hanging up the phone in frustration at the implacability of my “righteous” anger. At one point he thanked me for my generosity in not blaming the blow up on him. That gratitude was soon outweighed by unbearable grievance.
In the course of our long email attempts to salvage our mortally wounded friendship, I mentioned the concept of Complementary Schismogenesis, which our impasse seemed to vividly illustrate (I know of no better illustration, actually). I wrote:
There is a dynamic called Complementary Schismogenesis — two people in an emotional cul du sac, locked in a conflict both want to solve, each of their best efforts to resolve things making the schism worse. Their conflicting styles and clashing emotional needs exacerbate the problem. One, when upset, needs a period of quiet to think, the other needs more talk, immediately.
A: “I need quiet to think, then we’ll talk” confronts B’s “I need to talk right now, then we can be quiet.” And here we go loop de loo.
Empathy should, ideally, not have to be requested, especially when a friend is up against a concrete circumstance that is both frightening and unfair, is at wits’ end, and cries out for help. A can say: but this IS me being empathetic; B will say: feels like you being defensive.
A hurt feeling does not go away because an intelligent, analytical friend says “you really shouldn’t feel that way, it isn’t healthy, cortisol’s a killer, I don’t understand why you have such a strong feeling about this thing that happened to you, you seem disproportionately angry. To make matters more upsetting, you’re not explaining it very well, I don’t know what you actually expect of me since you’re not being clear and you’re also not letting me get a word in, even as you unfairly accuse me of things I can’t even understand. Can I defend why I feel this way? Do I get a chance to defend myself against your unfair charge that I’m hurting you?”
A feeling may turn out to be unreasonable, and when it’s shown to be, after its intensity has faded a bit, hopefully the misunderstanding is over and a lesson learned — but the time to debate the validity of the feeling is not when the strong feeling is still incomprehensible to the friend who keeps demanding a rational account of why the strong feeling is not unreasonable.
In our case, the more times he told me he had no idea what my issue was and asked me to please explain again, the more pointed my explanations became as I had to tamp down more and more frustration at his inability to understand or empathize — and his repeated refusal/inability to engage with or respond to anything I wrote.
That was probably the single factor that made me more and more pessimistic about saving our long friendship — his silence on any point I raised. Though he repeatedly asked for my thoughts, and further clarification, and I’d expressed several times how hurtful silence is to me by way of response, his only response to anything I raised was silence, and telling me he still didn’t understand why I was so unforgiving. When he eventually told me he was sorry, for whatever he might have done that was hurtful, my position remained that accepting an apology for something you insist you don’t understand the hurtfulness of is a piss-poor sign for the future of a mutual friendship.
Predictably, in hindsight, my analysis fell on deaf ears, in spite of several attempts at simplifying, clarifying. I heard nothing back on any point I raised — including how hurtful I find it not to be responded to — only more genuine confusion about what I was actually talking about, what exactly had hurt me so much in his series of inadvertently hurtful acts. All this as though I do not express myself clearly. He simply would not even allow that I express myself with reasonable clarity.
My friend claimed that although he regarded me as his closest friend, loved me like a brother, he truly had no idea why I’d been upset. He expressed pessimism that anybody could truly understand what is in the heart of another person, even someone he’d been friends with for fifty years. I spent many, many hours writing and refining my replies to him, in hopes of getting through to his analytical mind. We were in the realm of feelings, though. Accordingly, he wrote that in spite of our long conversations and many words by email, I’d never given him any hint as to why I felt it necessary to be so mean to him in the end, after being so mild for many years. The long correspondence, from his point of view, was simply me trying to angrily out-lawyer this longtime successful litigator with lawyerly tactics. That was a battle the experienced litigator was not willing to lose.
In the end, for him, it all came down to me being, as originally charged, irrationally, disproportionately angry, and hurtful, and a supreme hypocrite unforgivingly insisting on the righteousness of my maddeningly superior nonviolent viciousness, directed at my innocent friend who loved me dearly, and unconditionally. He was totally justified in feeling as though I’d simply reamed him for no reason (“reaming” was the metaphor he chose, I never touched the boy, your Honor…). In the end, he wrote, I hadn’t given him a single clue as to the basis for my feelings, or convinced him of anything. He closed his final email by noting that he had searched our many emails in vain for “any clue” of what the hell had made me so insanely hurtful to him.
So, again, you can be as smart as you like and analyze things as clearly as you like. State them simply, boil them down to a point nobody can disagree with — nobody should tolerate being hurt by a thoughtless friend, even one who claims to love you. Then it is only a matter of framing and delivering your irrefutable conclusion, based on an unshakable belief: it is the fucking Jews (people like me, for example) and angry Blacks who are the real tyrants and oppressors!
Beware of people who often express hatred, suddenly bearing indisputable truths. These truths will be put to their usual uses, for better or worse.
[1]
This sentence, by itself, means little: “the real threat is a forbidden idea, it’s something called Q-Anon.” It seems to be a statement — someone, possibly Tucker (?), believes the real threat is this forbidden idea. Why is it a forbidden idea — because it is objectively bad? Because it is so ugly, inflammatory and improbable as to be unthinkable? Because, while there is no proof of any of its claims, it so easily leads to violence against the evil conspiracy set out in the idea, if you believe the forbidden theory? To forbid is to censor, to cancel, to negate someone else’s freedom of inquiry and belief.
The Q-Anon “idea” is simple enough at its root: Q is a highly placed insider of secret identity who states that Donald John Trump is the only person who can defeat an evil conspiracy of very powerful elites [top Democrats, Hollywood celebrities, wealthy liberal donors] who are pedophile sex traffickers who occasionally drink the blood of their innocent young victims. These are extremely dangerous pedophile cannibals of amazing cunning who are also, horrifyingly enough, child-murdering cannibals.
Just an idea, you dig, the details of which are constantly evolving through a kind of online crowd-sourcing. Just like Liberal Cancel Culture, you know, to “forbid it”.
The radical right, when they get a drum to beat, never stop banging it over their media megaphones. They are tireless in sticking to a few points and they hammer them endlessly. Hillary’s emails, Benghazi, Obamacare, Mueller Witch Hunt, Voter Fraud, Stolen Election, Illegitimate Democrat President (again!!!), etc.
Since I wrote this the other day (and forgot to post it) Ron Paul (see paragraph below about his principled, “patriotic” “answer” when asked if he believed Biden had been fairly elected) called for a vote about the “constitutionality” of impeaching Trump since he is no longer president. A shocking 45 of the 50 Republican senators voted “yea” to the shaky, legally dubious proposition that the Constitution prevents any accountability for an elected official who repeatedly summons, provokes and whips up a crowd that immediately turns into a deadly mob — and slips out of office while the Senate is in recess.
The logic is clear. If a president provokes a riot in the Senate to overturn an election result he attacks as a lie, but his impeachment trial is delayed because the Senate is on vacation for two weeks, then he can’t be tried for inciting the deadly attack. Pretty fucking simple, you have to admit, and certainly the way the sainted men who framed our constitution intended. Mitch McConnell announced that Trump had provoked the riot, it’s just… he was getting a leisurely bikini wax (probably also a turtle wax) and the Senate couldn’t get back together in time to do anything while the master was still in office. On his return, we have Mitch as Mitch: now that I’m back, bitches, I say it’s unconstitutional, clearly. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, cucks.
But back to our complicit mass media (all now announcing that Trump won’t be convicted, no matter how irrefutable the evidence against him presented at trial). It’s all about who wins the battle of talking points. As Trump said in his strong pre-riot address to his angry followers, during the speech where he once again claimed over and over that he’d won the stolen election in a landslide:
Now what they [the lying media] do is they go silent. It’s called suppression and that’s what happens in a communist country. That’s what they do. They suppress. You don’t fight with them anymore unless it’s a bad story. If they have a little bad story about me, they make it ten times worse and it’s a major headline.
But Hunter Biden, they don’t talk about him. What happened to Hunter? Where’s Hunter? Where is Hunter? They don’t talk about him.
We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies that we’ve been forced to believe. Over the past several weeks, we’ve amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election. This is the presidential election. Last night [run-off in Georgia] was a little bit better because of the fact that we had a lot of eyes watching one specific state, but they cheated like hell anyway. You have one of the dumbest governors in the United States [Trump loyalist Brian Kemp].
“But Hunter Biden, they don’t talk about him. What happened to Hunter? Where’s Hunter? Where is Hunter? They don’t talk about him.“
First it was that Ukrainian liar Zelensky who refused to announce a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden after a perfect phone call that led to a totally bogus, illegal partisan witch hunt “impeachment” and now silence in the media about Hunter Biden, total silence! Trump’s not the only one suspicious about this suspicious silence on a huge scandal story the entire media was covering seriously at one time.
Here you go, boss. FOX has been flogging this debunked story for the last few days on youTube, and presumably on the air.The smoking gun that proves Hunter, a supremely dumb criminal, forgot about a laptop with all the incriminating Ukraine and China evidence on it that computer repair man John Paul Mac Isaac (if that is his name) turned over to America’s Mayor, super-lawyer Rudy Giuliani — irrefutable, covered-up proof that Joe Biden is a lying fuck.
Fair, balanced and constantly stirring the simmering shit pot of godless liberal treachery.You can tell by the still photo that this patriot in the odd hat is an honest American about to tell ‘opinion journalist’ Sean Hannity the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the pathologically criminal, insanely stupid Hunter Biden and his weak, sleepy, lying, doddering, stuttering, illegitimately elected Communist puppet father.
Stay tuned for FOX updates on the real, covered-up truth about Pizzagate and Benghazi– new information on the hidden basement child sex slave prison the liberal media denied exists and footage of Hillary laughing after she learned four Americans died in Libya, pursuant to her evil plan.
In related right-wing news, Sunday Senator Rand Paul would not admit that Biden had been fairly elected president. Paul accused George Stepahnoplous (and liberals in general) of calling Republicans liars when they are merely insisting (as Paul still is) on a debate about the accurate accounting of massive electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election. According to Paul, the many court cases contesting elections lost by Trump’s and the RNC’s lawyers were thrown out on technicalities like lack of standing, not on the merits. Technicalities, Rand claims, prevented any kind of honest examination of possibly massive, massive, massive voter fraud in a few densely populated Democrat [sic] strongholds. He left the viewer with the strong impression that we’ll never know the truth, unless we spend the next two years vigorously investigating how Biden’s people pulled off this massive cheat.
Rand Paul, either lying or deluded, claims the merits of the election fraud cases were never reached in the literally hundreds of court cases his party and the Trump campaign brought, before and after the election. Then, without a hint of irony, two days later, calls for a vote claiming a technicality that will invalidate the upcoming impeachment trial weeks before the merits can even be presented. Merits, if we can use that word for anything Mr. Trump did during his glorious reign, which are clearly understood by about 70% of American citizens and, presumably at least that percentage of the lawmakers besieged by an angry MAGA insurgency (a “false flag” operation like Sandy Hook, where those dead “kids” and their falsely crying parents an siblings were all well-paid actors). Never mind, the radical right now has its fig leaf: “constitutionality”. Let the gaslighting games continue.
You can read the record of the 1 win 63 loss GOP post-election lawsuits, if you’d like to know if Paul is correct about the need for a commission to re-examine the many, many frauds that led to the “election” of this Commie-puppet Biden. The baseless Texas AG’s hail-Mary attempt to get the Supreme Court to hear a case about the unfairness of anti-Trump votes in other states was thrown out for lack of standing, true enough. But I’d refer Rand Paul to one of the many opinions, written by Trump-appointed judges like J. Nicholas Ranjan, dissecting with great precision the evidence-free, feverishly stated fraud claims in state after state.(More details from Judge Ranjan’s scathing pre-election dismissal of the GOP federal case in Pennsylvania here).
Evidence, of course, is not the issue. Never is for an extremist. Rand Paul and his indignant colleagues insist they are merely calling for the fair, nonpartisan debate we are all entitled to about whether there was massive organized Democrat [sic] fraud in the 2020 election. As Paul, Cruz, Hawley and others keep pointing out, many Republicans unaccountably (if you don’t consider Trump’s constant repetition of unfounded lies about massive Democrat [sis] electoral fraud for the last five years) believe the election was rigged, stolen from Trump, no matter what proof may or may not exist, and no matter what federal officials including William Barr’s DOJ (plus Barr himself) and the courts might have concluded.
The advocates of ongoing debate about widespread Democrat [sic] cheating in the election claim they are taking this principled stand to defend the Constitution, mainly because a large majority of Republicans believe their former president’s transparent, endlessly repeated lie about massive election fraud (as there was in 2016 when his fraud commission found none) and that it is essential to restore faith in the security and fairness of our elections.
Or Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Madison Fucking Cawthorn and company are liars, as the lying liberal media keeps implying they are.
Hopefully, for the rest of us, the evidence presented at the impeachment trial, and the witness statements, and the videos and other recordings of Trump as he schemed to stay in office in spite of the election results, coupled with some additional very stupid move by the Artist of the Deal (perhaps threats to ‘primary’ traitors as the votes are about to be cast, or during somebody’s sworn testimony) will allow a dozen of those 45 GOP lock-stepping zombies to vote what’s left of their consciences. The main thing is that Trump be disqualified campaigning for his next from future attempts to destroy and overthrow our government.
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