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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In FTR #830, we noted the mirrored ideological constructs central to Muslim Brotherhood-based Islamic fascism and the American and European fascists who have used anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim fervor to mint valuable political coinage.
Quoting from the introduction to that program: “. . . . European fascists of the National Front variety can point to the attacks and say “See! We told you so! You can’t trust these (‘Muslims;’ ‘immigrants;’ ‘Muslim immigrants’ etc.)! We are your only hope! Join with us!”
By the same token, the Islamic fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood can point to the xenophobic reaction and say “See! We told you so! You can’t trust these infidels! We are your only hope! Join with us!”
In that context, we should note that both non-Muslim Europeans and Muslim residents of that continent [Europe] are being squeezed to the breaking point by the austerity mandate being imposed on the EU by Germany and its corporate allies–von Clausewitzian economics. . . .”
In a bellwether of how acute the situation has become, The New York Times featured no fewer than four op-ed pieces on successive days in December of 2015 (12/11 and 12/12) highlighting the march of fascist sentiment and political success around the world.
The first of the New York Times op-ed pieces from successive days that we examine is a piece by Timothy Egan noting the embrace of Donald Trump by Nazis and white supremacists. Taking note of the support for Trump expressed by David Duke and the Daily Stormer website, Egan bemoans the GOP turn to the right.
A column by Paul Krugman the previous day took note of the same dynamic, driven in part by xenophobia and fear of terrorism, the angst-driven fascism is also fueled by economic oppression.
The same day that Egan’s column ran, the opposite side of the op-ed page featured discussion of Poland’s slide into blind reaction, driven by the citizens blaming ” . . . the loss of control over their lives, real or imagined, on a conspiracy between cosmopolitan-minded elites and tribal-minded immigrants.”
On the previous day, “The Grey Lady” published an insightful piece by Aatish Tasheer that expanded the focus and the depth of analysis, citing the desire to return to a mythically idealized past as a common denominator fueling arch-reaction all over the world, including the developing nations. (We highlighted this in our discussions with Peter Levenda.)
Much of the baleful media analysis in recent days has focused on the pronouncements of Donald Trump, the front-runner in the race for the GOP Presidential nod. Not the outlier he (and others) is said to be, Trump is part and parcel to the fascism manifested by the GOP and the political right in this country.
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of the corporate connections to fascism.
- Review of the development of the Nazi wing of the GOP and the Crusade For Freedom.
- Donald Trump’s links to Helene von Damm.
- Trump’s links to Norman Vincent Peale.
- Trump’s links to Joseph McCarthy aide Roy Cohn.
- Peale’s work as a front for Axis spies and activists prior to, and during, World War II.
- The assistance given to McCarthy’s witch hunts by John “Frenchy” Grombach’s network of Nazis, headed by SS general Karl Wolff (Himmler’s personal adjutant.)
1a. Paul Krugman noted the role of long-term economic malaise in generating the rise of fascism:
A few years ago de Bromhead, Eichengreen, and O’Rourke looked at the determinants of right-wing extremism in the 1930s. They found that economic factors mattered a lot; specifically, what mattered was not the current growth of the economy but cumulative growth or, more to the point, the depth of the cumulative recession. One year of contraction was not enough to significantly boost extremism, in other words, but a depression that persisted for years was.
How’s Europe doing on that basis?
...
And now the National Front has scored a first-place finish in regional elections, and will probably take a couple of regions in the second round. Economics isn’t the only factor; immigration, refugees, and terrorism play into the mix. But Europe’s underperformance is slowly eroding the legitimacy, not just of the European project, but of the open society itself.
1b. The first of the New York Times op-ed pieces from successive days that we examine is a piece by Timothy Egan noting the embrace of Donald Trump by Nazis and white supremacists.
“Goose-Steppers in the GOP” by Timothy Egan; The New York Times; 12/12/2015.
Well, he’s got the Hitler vote. The neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, was out and proud earlier this week: “Heil Donald Trump — the Ultimate Savior.” After endorsing the Republican presidential front-runner earlier this year for his call to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, the fomenters of American fascism have now added an apt twist to his slogan, one not far from the truth of the campaign: “Make America White Again.”
Nazis — I hate these guys. Oh, but they’re a tiny minority of pink-faced malcontents living in basements with the windows taped up. Everybody hates them. Add to that supporters of the Ku Klux Klan, who’ve thrown in with Trump as well. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Klan, liked everything he heard from Trump this week, embracing him for standing up for white nationalism.
And sure, all the little Hitlers probably don’t amount to a hill of beans. But what about the 35 percent of Republican voters, in the New York Times/CBS News poll, who say they’re all in with the man sieg heiled by aspiring brownshirts and men in white sheets?
It’s a very ugly political moment, but there it is: The Republican Party is now home to millions of people who would throw out the Constitution, welcome a police state against Latinos and Muslims, and enforce a religious test for entry into a country built by people fleeing religious persecution. This stuff polls well in their party, even if the Bill of Rights does not.
Trump’s proposal — “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — is not just flotsam from the lunatic fringe. Well, it is. But the fringe is huge: Early polls show a plurality of Republican voters agree with Trump on banning all Muslims. And many would go even further.
“Add in every other kind of immigrant and it’s perfect,” tweeted Ann Coulter, who sells xenophobia as a mean girl provocateur, with many friends in the far right media universe.
Trump himself doesn’t seem to care about comparisons to the buffoonish (Mussolini), the truly scary (the evil one admired by the Daily Stormer) or the fictional — worse than Voldemort, as J. K. Rowling tweeted.
He sloughed off the fascism talk by associating his proposal with the internment in America of the Japanese during World War II. There’s a winning thought. I was wondering when he was going to get around to alienating Asian-Americans, the highest-earning, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States, according to Pew.
To review: He started with “the blacks,” through his smear campaign on the citizenship of the nation’s first African-American president. Moved on to Mexicans, war veterans, women who look less than flawless in middle age, the disabled, all Muslims and now people whose grandparents were rousted from their American homes and put in camps.
Which gets us back to his base and their awful bedfellows in the neo-Nazi bunkers. Who are these people? His supporters, most of them, do not see the shadow of the Reich when they look in the mirror. They are white, lower middle class, with little education beyond high school. The global economy has run them over. They don’t recognize their country. And they need a villain.
Still, it’s hard to take seriously House Speaker Paul Ryan’s rare objection to a lunatic suggestion from his party’s presidential front-runner when he says he would also back Trump should he be the nominee.
“It’s not our party,” lamented Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. “It’s not our country.” As a Mormon, the senator has to be familiar with a time when there was an open war on his faith, when Mormons were considered not only un-American but domestic terrorists.
That history is instructive, as we struggle with Trump’s hysteria and the millions fired up by his hate. But the only way to get rid of the goose-steppers drawn to the G.O.P. is to vow to never support the man giving them something to march to.
2. The previous day, Paul Krugman noted the effects of xenophobia on electorates in Europe and the U.S.
“Empowering the Ugliness” by Paul Krugman; The New York Times; 12/11/2015.
We live in an era of political news that is, all too often, shocking but not surprising. The rise of Donald Trump definitely falls into that category. And so does the electoral earthquake that struck France in Sunday’s regional elections, with the right-wing National Front winning more votes than either of the major mainstream parties.
What do these events have in common? Both involved political figures tapping into the resentments of a bloc of xenophobic and/or racist voters who have been there all along. The good news is that such voters are a minority; the bad news is that it’s a pretty big minority, on both sides of the Atlantic. If you are wondering where the support for Mr. Trump or Marine Le Pen, the head of the National Front, is coming from, you just haven’t been paying attention.
But why are these voters making themselves heard so loudly now? Have they become much more numerous? Maybe, but it’s not clear. More important, I’d argue, is the way the strategies elites have traditionally used to keep a lid on those angry voters have finally broken down.
Let me start with what is happening in Europe, both because it’s probably less familiar to American readers and because it is, in a way, a simpler story than what is happening here.
My European friends will no doubt say that I’m oversimplifying, but from an American perspective it looks as if Europe’s establishment has tried to freeze the xenophobic right, not just out of political power, but out of any role in acceptable discourse. To be a respectable European politician, whether of the left or of the right, you have had to accept the European project of ever-closer union, of free movement of people, open borders, and harmonized regulations. This leaves no room for right-wing nationalists, even though right-wing nationalism has always had substantial popular support.
What the European establishment may not have realized, however, is that its ability to define the limits of discourse rests on the perception that it knows what it is doing. Even admirers and supporters of the European project (like me) have to admit that it has never had deep popular support or a lot of democratic legitimacy. It is, instead, an elite project sold largely on the claim that there is no alternative, that it is the path of wisdom.
And there’s nothing quite like sustained poor economic performance – the kind of poor performance brought on by Europe’s austerity and hard-money obsessions — to undermine the elite’s reputation for competence. That’s probably why one recent study found a consistent historical relationship between financial crises and the rise of right-wing extremism. And history is repeating itself.
The story is quite different in America, because the Republican Party hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.
But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.
3. On the same day that Egan’s op-ed piece ran, The Times featured a piece about Poland’s rightward shift:
During the recent electoral campaign in Poland, a constant question raised by pundits and politicians was not whether the country would go right, but whether it would go wrong.
Would the conservative Law and Justice Party, the expected victors in the poll, go the way of Viktor Orban’s increasingly authoritarian Hungary, or would it stay closer to the center? Given the nationalist, anti-liberal slant of the party’s campaign platform, could Poland’s seemingly consolidated liberal institutions reverse course? Law and Justice won decisively, and after only three weeks we have an answer: a distressing yes. . . .
. . . . These populist and radical parties aren’t just parties; they are constitutional movements. They promise voters what liberal democracy cannot: a sense of victory where majorities — not just political majorities, but ethnic and religious ones, too — can do what they please.
The rise of these parties is symptomatic of the explosion of threatened majorities as a force in European politics. They blame the loss of control over their lives, real or imagined, on a conspiracy between cosmopolitan-minded elites and tribal-minded immigrants. They blame liberal ideas and institutions for weakening the national will and eroding national unity. . . .
4. On the same day that the Krugman column above ran, The Times featured an insightful op-ed piece that extended the analysis. Noting a fixation on a mythical, idealized past, Aatish Taseer set forth the fundamental position of that dynamic in the Islamic fascism propounded by ISIS, the Hindu nationalist fascism of Modi’s India.
Taseer notes, correctly, that this is happening “all over the world.”
“The Return of History” by Aatish Taseer; The New York Times; 12/11/2015.
An Islamic philosopher in Karachi, an ideologue who provides violent ideas to some of Pakistan’s fiercest extremist groups, once told me that there are two kinds of history: dead and living. “Dead history is something on a shelf or in a museum,” he said. “Living history is part of your consciousness, something in your blood that inspires you.”
I was reminded of this last month during a conversation with a different kind of scholar. William McCants is the author of the excellent new book “The ISIS Apocalypse,” and he is nothing if not a student of “living history.” Mr. McCants looks at the Islamic State’s idea of the past and how the group’s adherents view their place in it. The picture that emerges is one of a terrific tension between the dead past and the ways in which it is being remade to fit the needs of the living present. The Islamic State’s treatment of history is particularly extreme, but a similar return of history is occurring with varying degrees of intensity all across the old world.
The jihadists in Syria and Iraq, Mr. McCants told me, are “infatuated” with Harun al-Rashid, the great Abbasid caliph whose court reportedly inspired “One Thousand and One Nights.” “They see him as the pinnacle of success, and the caliphate that he ruled over as the golden age,” Mr. McCants said, “but they elide all those parts of his rule that don’t mesh with their own.” The eighth-century caliph being idolized by the Islamic State practiced a far more lenient rule than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does. Harun was tolerant of Shiites and religious minorities. His court would engage in freewheeling debates over matters of faith. “You could play musical instruments,” Mr. McCants said. “He loved to drink wine, he loved men.”
That the Islamic State has made violent use of history shouldn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps more surprising is that in all those places where a modern nation has been grafted onto an ancient culture, history has returned with a vengeance. From Confucian China to Buddhist Myanmar to Hindu India, history has become the source of a fierce new conservatism that is being used to curb freedoms of women and stoke hatred of minorities. As the ultimate source of legitimacy, history has become a way for modernizing societies to procure the trappings of modernity while guarding themselves from its values.
When I was in Sri Lanka in 2013, the Bodu Bala Sena, a radical Buddhist nationalist group, had conjured up a prudish Buddha who scolded young girls about their clothes and told them what time they should be home at night. In reality, the Buddha, like many Eastern thinkers, was generally reticent on the subject of sexual morality. Sex concerned him only to the extent that it interfered with men realizing the fullness of their spiritual lives.
Similarly, in India, a breach has appeared between a sensuous and liberal past and an ugly, puritanical present. In my daily reading of Sanskrit poetry, there are women with disheveled hair, half-open eyes and cheeks covered in sweat from the exertion of coitus. But turn on the television and the minister of culture, who says that the Hindu holy books are ideal texts for teaching moral values, informs modern Indians that “girls wanting a night out” may be all right elsewhere, but it is “not part of Indian culture.” (He seeks to cleanse Indian culture of the pollution of the West, but if it’s sex the minister worries about, he’ll have to cleanse Indian culture of itself. No one did it better than ancient India.)
The past is alive as it never has been before. It seems almost to serve as a kind of armor against an alien and impure present. And modernity, in the shallow sense of the word — that world of highways and blue-glass malls and men in the uniforms of foreign companies — does not satisfy the demands for this “living history.” In fact a certain dispiriting experience of modernity, felt often as the loss of a sense of self and of old ways, exacerbates these demands. This is what lies behind this violent need to reclaim history. “We are called from the past and must make our home in the future,” the great South Asian philosopher and art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy wrote almost a century ago. “But to understand, to endorse with passionate conviction, and to love what we have left behind us is the only possible foundation for power.”
But there is all the difference in the world between loving the past and wishing to return to it. Love contains the spirit of regeneration; perverse nostalgia is almost always a violent enterprise. Mr. McCants pointed out the inorganic newness of the Islamic State’s experiment. “They purport to be reviving a medieval tradition of rule,” he said, “but, to my knowledge, we never had in medieval Islam a state that was so eager to impose what’s in scripture, and tradition.”
Islam, with its rich textual history and detailed recordings of the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad, offers the faithful an especially aggressive blueprint for turning the past into a weapon against the present. But the return of history is not specific to Islam. All over the old world, the spread of modernity and the wearing down of tradition have led to a frantic need to repossess the past. But this act of reclamation, through an ever-closer adherence to text without context, does not give back what was lost. It creates something radical and new — and dangerous.
5. In our discussions with Peter Levenda, we noted that an element common to fascism of various kinds is a preoccupation with, and desire to return to, a mythical, idealized past.
. . . . Both the American Nazi and the Klan movements wanted America to go back to the way it was before the Great Depression, before the First World War, to a time that never really existed the way they thought it did: a time before the advent of Communist states like the Soviet Union; a time before blacks and Jews could be considered equal citizens of the nation. Like many of today’s extreme right protestors, the Nazis and Klansmen of the 1920s and 1930s wanted to “take their country back,” in this case–and possibly in the present case also–“back” meant “back in time.” . . . .
. . . . This focus on purity could be seen as a desire to return to a more primitive time–in illo tempore–when the world was pristine. That this time probably never existed did not occur (or was not acceptable) to those promoting this “return to nature” and “return to our roots” philosophy. Legends of ancient Greece and Rome were conflated with legends concerning Atlantis and Thule: the latter the presumed ancient homeland of the Aryans. With the coming of Western civilization–according to this theory–much of humanity’s basic goodness and inherent physical and psychic powers were lost, a kind of Samson and Delilah moment when the virile and pure Samson is shorn of his hair and thus loses his potency and strength to the Levantine, Semitic seductress. . . . It is also an implicit acknowledgment of failure. This yearning for a return to some other state in the distant indicates an incapability of dealing with present-day issues in any other way. It represents a desire to wipe the slate clean and start over, which may be attractive as a fantasy but not practicable in life. . . .
6a. GOP front-runner Donald Trump has garnered much attention for his pronouncements in the racist/xenophobic vein. We note his close association with Norman Vincent Peale and former Joe McCarthy aide Roy Cohn.
“The USFL’s Trump Card” by Robert Boyle; Sports Illustrated; 2/13/2015.
. . . . As might be expected, the Trumps travel in rarefied circles. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale is their pastor, Roy Cohn their attorney. “Donald Trump is an extraordinary young man,” says Peale. “He has the elements of genius.” Cohn says Trump is “one of the most enterprising, ingenious businessmen on the American scene...a miracle man who can’t seem to make a mistake even if he tries.” . . . .
6b. Trump is close to Helene Von Damm, the Otto von Bolschwing protege who selected the personnel for Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. Von Damm became Reagan’s Ambassador to Austria. It would not be unreasonable to ask if Trump’s business dealings are involved with the Bormann capital network?
“Helene Von Damm’s Viennese Waltz” by William Drodziak; The Washington Post; 3/5/1985.
. . . . She would like to divide her time between Vienna and New York, where her campaign days reaped several close friendships in big business circles, notably with construction magnate Donald Trump. . . .
7. Among the Christian prelates operating on behalf of the Nazi cause was The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale Among the Christian prelates operating on behalf of the Nazi cause. Best known as the exponent of “the power of positive thinking,” Peale long graced the pages of publications like Reader’s Digest and his name became synonymous with wholesome, mainstream Americana in the postwar years. Prior to and during the war, however, Peale fronted for Edward A. Rumely, a spy and agitator for Germany during both World Wars. Like so many others, Rumely, too, benefited from his association with Hitler benefactor Henry Ford. Note that another of Rumely’s fellow travelers in the Fifth Column movement was Frank Gannett, founder of the newspaper chain that bears his name.
. . . . Rumely is boss of the Committee for Constitutional Government and second in command to Frank E. Gannett, publisher of a string of newspapers and founder of the committee in 1937. As soon as the Senatorial investigation was over, Rumely literally went underground and erased his name from the Committee stationery. But he continued to run it by appointing a docile Protestant clergyman as ‘acting chairman and secretary’ who visited the office only occasionally. He was the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, once a joint speaker with [American fascist] Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling and the Reverend Edward Lodge Curran [key aide to Father Coughlin] at a ‘pro-American mass meeting sponsored by more than 50 patriotic organizations’ at the Hotel Commodore in New York. . . . Rumely’s friendship with Henry Ford dated prior to the summer of 1918 when Ford rushed to Washington in an unsuccessful attempt to save Rumely from being indicted. . . .”
8. Reviewing part of the political history of McCarthyism, we detail “The Pond”–an intelligence network run by John “Frenchy” Grombach. A portion of the historical depth to the development of American fascism is contained in this analysis. The New York Times–predictably–does not discuss dynamics like this.
SS general Karl Wolff began feeding information to “Frenchy” Grombach, a former military intelligence agent who formed a network of operatives who fed information to the CIA, among others. As indicated here, one of Grombach’s major sources in his efforts was Wolff.
. . . One of Grombach’s most important assets, according to U.S. naval intelligence records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, was SS General Karl Wolff, a major war criminal who had gone into the arms trade in Europe after the war. . . . Grombach worked simultaneously under contract to the Department of State and the CIA. The ex-military intelligence man succeeded in creating ‘one of the most unusual organizations in the history of the federal government,’ according to CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick. ‘It was developed completely outside of the normal governmental structure, [but it] used all of the normal cover and communications facilities normally operated by intelligence organizations, and yet never was under any control from Washington.’ By the early 1950s the U.S. government was bankrolling Grombach’s underground activities at more than $1 million annually, Kirkpatrick has said. . . .
9. Among the primary recipients of Grombach’s and Wolff’s information was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who utilized dirt given him by the network to smear his opponents.
. . . Grombach banked on his close connections with Senators Joseph McCarthy, William Jenner, and other members of the extreme Republican right to propel him to national power. . . .Grombach’s outfit effectively became the foreign espionage agency for the far right, often serving as the overseas complement to McCarthy’s generally warm relations with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI at home . . . . U.S. government contracts bankrolling a network of former Nazis and collaborators gave him much of the ammunition he needed to do the job. Grombach used his networks primarily to gather dirt. This was the American agent’s specialty, his true passion: political dirt, sexual dirt, any kind of compromising information at all. ‘He got into a lot of garbage pails,’ as Kirkpatrick puts it, ‘and issued ‘dirty linen’ ‘reports on Americans. ‘Grombach collected scandal, cataloged it, and used it carefully, just as he had done during the earlier McCormack investigation. He leaked smears to his political allies in Congress and the press when it suited his purposes to do so. Grombach and congressional ‘internal security’ investigators bartered these dossiers with one another almost as though they were boys trading baseball cards. . . .
If you found Donald Trump’s recent comments on the ‘nuclear triad’ more than a little disturbing, get ready to be much more disturbed:
Yes, compared to Trump spokeswoman katrina Pierson, the far-right Breitbart blogger Kurt Schlichter was a voice of reason. And this is the same voice that’s prone to writing things like “razing the town, killing the men, selling the women and children into slavery and plowing the ground with salt was the kind of can-do, outside-the-box thinking that made the Romans people who were just plain not to be screwed with.” This is where we are.
Here’s a nice overview of how Donald Trump got his background in Machiavelli 101 public relations and wasn’t just from his long-time adviser Roger Stone. He also got quite an education from the fellow that introduced Trump to Stone back in 1979, Joseph McCarthy’s chief aide Roy Cohn:
“Much of what Trump says and does comes straight out of the Cohn/Stone playbook, including his eagerness to make people uncomfortable and confused.”
Well, let’s hope Trump’s eagerness to make people uncomfortable and confused remains his key focus. It’s far better to be made uncomfortable and confused by some of Trump’s political pedigree than inspired.
Here’s another indication that the GOP unofficial establishment’s plan for the 2016 elections isn’t simply to run against Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Running against the ‘official’ GOP establishment, like the new House Speaker Paul Ryan, is going to be a key selling point for the GOP. It’s all part of the narrative getting peddled by a growing number key far-right thought leaders that Donald Trump is your only hope:
“There’s no doubt about it. The working man and woman have been betrayed by both parties. They’re ready for a change … anything they think would be better.”
Yes, following the 2013 GOP “autopsy”, when the party appeared to conclude that it was dangerously out of touch with a large swathe of the American public and needed to find a way to moderate itself if it was going to have any chance of not alienating Millennials, we got to watch the GOP go even more insane than ever over the following two and half years and basically guarantee almost nothing that can help the average voter is allowed to become law. And now we’re finally seeing the rational for that “crazier than ever” strategy: If the GOP can fill a large enough chunk of the electorate with a sense of political despair, the rabble just might get to the point where “anything would be better.” And that “anything” is, in the hopes of the GOP, Donald Trump.
So instead of moderating itself following the 2012 loss, the party decided to run against itself (in the form of a laughable “Paul Ryan is a RINO”-style campaign) in the hope of ridding itself of its own taint!
Given the unpopularity of the GOP’s “brand” among anyone that isn’t already part of the cult and the unwavering desire to drag the nation back to the 19th century (which sort of precludes any actual moderation in the party), it’s a pretty clever strategy. Not exactly surprising, but clever.
Following his defense of Vladimir Putin over the suggestion that Putin’s government has had journalists killed, Donald Trump just joked about killing journalists into his campaign rallies. And because this was Trump, it wasn’t actually clear he was joking:
‘Tis the season for things that should be satire but aren’t. It’s one of seasons that you really don’t want to become a regular tradition.
Well, the inevitable just happened, although it happened in a manner that was far, far worse than was inevitable: It was probably inevitable that, at some point, a group of Muslim refugees in Europe was going to do something so awful and stupid that a large swathe of the general public were going to start homogenizing all Muslims in their heads and adopt the attitude, “hey, maybe it really is impossible for Muslims to live here, even temporarily, because they’re just too dangerous. Let’s deport them all and ban further entry (and generally cut our society off from the Muslim world).” Given the volume of the refugees flooding into Europe and the reality that many of them are coming from societies where attitudes that are highly incompatible with contemporary European values (like gross misogyny), it was pretty much an inevitability that, at some point, a group of refugees were going to do something that basically sends their hosts into a reactionary freak out mode. With over a million refugees flowing into Europe in 2015 alone, some sort of horrible incident that ends up smearing the entire refugee community really was just a matter of time.
And on New Years Eve, that inevitable happened when a wave of sexual assaults committed by highly-intoxicated Muslim migrants and refugees shocked and appalled Europe. But it wasn’t just one group of men in one city and that did this. It happened in Cologne, Frankfurt, Helsinki, to name a few, all on the same night. While some sort of horrible act was inevitable, multi-city simultaneous acts of this nature were certainly not inevitable. That’s just awful. Even worse, there are indications that the worse-than-inevitable acts which are currently roiling Europe were planned in advance, which potentially points towards either intentional sabotage by some refugees who want to encourage anti-Muslim attitudes or just a shocking degree of chauvinistic cluelessness.
Regardless of the possible planning, or drunken lack thereof, that may have been behind the New Years Eve sexual assaults, a far-right backlash and wave of anti-immigrant attacks and firebombings has already taken place too, which was also probably inevitable given the waves of far-right anti-immigrant attacks and firebombings that were taking place against refugees even before the assaults.
So the inevitable happened, although it was far worse than was inevitable. And the inevitable backlash, which isn’t really a backlash since it was already taking place, has grown even more intense:
“The sudden nature of the violent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Hamburg to Frankfurt prompted German Minister of Justice Heiko Maas to speculate in a newspaper that they had been planned or coordinated.”
Keep in mind that there’s no evidence yet that the multi-city wave of assaults really was planned. Except for Helsinki, where authorities were tipped off about plans in advance:
“Our information from these reception centres were that disturbances or other crimes would happen in the city centre. We were prepared for fights and sexual harrassment and thefts.”
That was the report from the Helsinki police. There were plans for disturbances that would happen, specifically in the city centre, which suggests that plans were for high-profile attacks that would capture a lot of attention. And if that report is accurate and there really were these plans, it suggests that at least some of those refugees actively want to drive a wedge between the refugees and their host community, which is pretty stunning, especially given the fact that a Finnish refugee center was firebombed back in September. Stunning, but then again, given the volume of refugees, it was probably inevitable that some of them would share ISIS’s declared desire to eliminate “the Gray Zone of co-existence” that allows Muslims and non-Muslims to live side-by-side. Compared to all the other things that groups like ISIS do to fellow Muslims who don’t tow their psycho-fundamentalist line, planning acts that smear all Muslims as rapists is almost tame. So who knows, maybe the multi-city wave of simultaneous assaults really was planned, not just in Helsinki, but as Germany’s Minister of Justice hinted at above, maybe it was a multi-city plan.
Of course, we have to consider another possibility raised:
Could it be that these reported assaults are either getting improperly attributed to Muslim refugees or never took place at all and were intended to smear the refugees and Muslims in general? Well, considering it’s already sort of happened, yeah, that seems possible. For example, Pamela Geller posted videos of a blond women getting assaulted by Arabic men that was supposed have taken place over New Years in Cologne, but later retracted the video when it turned out to have taken place in Egypt. Similarly, Geller has been floating a video of what appear to be Muslim men aggressively brandishing and shooting guns wildly on New Years Eve in Berlin. Of course, it turns out that firing blanks on New Years Eve in Germany is not that uncommon. And this is exactly what we would expect from folks like Geller and she’s not alone. So could there be at least some unfair smearing taking place? Well, it does seem rather inevitable. Folks like Geller aren’t nearly as rare as they should be.
Of course, it’s hard to ignore the reality that the attitudes towards women that prevail in many fundamentalist Muslim-dominated cultures really are incompatible with contemporary Western values, which is why it’s entirely possible that some of these assaults were planned while others really were the actions of genuinely clueless misogynists who really do need a lesson in what is acceptable in their host society:
As the article indicates, for at least some refugees and immigrants, there really is a genuine, deep, cultural clash that they feel upon arriving in a society where women can wear miniskirts and not expecting to be sexually assaulted. On the one hand, it’s sad and depressing that such attitudes are still so prevalent in societies across the world. On the other hand, it’s pretty sad and depressing that the West has similar attitudes towards women, what, like two generations ago? In other words, it’s sad and depressing that misogyny is still so prevalent in human cultures and so many people are walking around with such dehumanizing views of women, but that sad and depressing reality and only one aspect of a much larger, and sadder reality that the human condition has been dominated by such attitudes across cultures and throughout history. So, in some sense, the people of West can sort of think of the refugees that hold such backwards views as basically being similar to their great grandparents. Or grandparents. Or radical fundamentalist Christian current neighbors.
So yes, it’s sad and depressing that humanity still needs to all get “on the same page” regarding what should be such a simple and basic moral understanding about how people, men or women, treat each other. But not too long ago it was sad and depressing and similar ways throughout the West. Sure, there’s no shortage of incredibly sick customs like honor killings that are still the norm in some Muslim cultures, but since fears of Muslim male misogyny are frequently brought up as a reason for why the West should ban Muslims, it’s worth remember that many of the West’s ancestors would probably be banned too by the same standards. It’s something that’s especially important to keep in mind these days not only to give some historic perspective on long and widespread tradition of the dehumanizing of women, but also because many of the groups that are leading the anti-refugee charge are, themselves, examples of the kind of movements that would love to drag modern Europe back to its bigoted, chauvinistic past. For example...:
“When daylight broke in Leipzig, scenes were similar to those that followed Kristallnacht — the name referring to the shards of glass left strewn across cities in the aftermath of the bloody pogroms.”
Yep, one of the beneficiaries of the anti-immigrant rage, the far-right neo-Nazi organization Pegida, and how do they choose to capitalize on the turmoil? By going on a Kristallnacht-esque rampage and that’s on top of the general spike in violent attacks on immigrants.
It’s all pretty disturbing. But it’s important to keep in mind that the violent backlash from groups like Pegida and other xenophobic organizations aren’t just disturbing. They also point towards a very obvious path forward. How so? Well, if someone was to wave a magic wand and suddenly transformed all the misogynistic Muslims of Europe into ardent feminists, Europe would still have a problem with misogyny and dehumanizing attitudes towards women. And the source of that problem would be the non-Muslim far-right which generally view feminism as a plague on society and which happens to be the same group that’s leading the anti-Muslim charge. So why not take the New Years Eve assaults as a great opportunity to start deal with with this “clash of civilizations” into a conversation of civilization. Clashes of civilizations are inevitable. Things that differ tend to clash. That’s how it’s always been. But that doesn’t mean a clash of civilizations has to be an actual violent conflict. Conversations can create clashing too and are probably a lot more effective when you’re talking about encouraging changes in social attitudes and values. And what better way to start off the “conversation of civilizations” than for the West to both critique the rampant misogyny the dominates many Muslim cultures while also examining its own enduring misogyny? So instead of it being a conversation that goes along the lines of “the West thinks Muslims don’t treat women well,” to a much more realistic and persuasive conversations that goes along the lines “there is no society on the planet that has truly overcome misogyny, although some are certainly farther along than others. In Europe we still have to deal with [insert bigoted group here], and that’s a challenge. Here’s why it’s an important challenge to be overcome. How can we help the misogynistic elements of the Muslim world address its own challenges in this department and what of the Muslim feminist groups we can help support?” What’s going to be more likely to catalyze the change fundamentalist Muslim societies? A conversation like that, or recreating Kristallnecht and helping ISIS destroy “the Grey Zone”?
Who would lead the conversation of civilizations? Well, that’s part of the fun. Ideally you would want people from all stripes participating, especially the misogynist of all stripes. Let them articulate their views, but make them have this conversation with the kind of people that Rush Limbaugh calls “Feminazis”, otherwise known as feminists (otherwise known as people who think the genders should be treated equally). Let’s start a conversation of civilizations and watch the “Feminazis” verbally dominate the opposition. :
“The sensible thing to do in response to the Cologne attacks would be to call, as many German feminists are doing, for a far more rigorous attitude to rape and sexual assault across Europe.”
Yep, if you want to change the attitudes of conservative Muslim in Europe regarding violence towards women, why on earth would you make this a conversation targeting Muslims alone given the prevalence of misogyny across all societies unless you wanted to protect the feelings of the non-Muslim misogynists? And yes, there would be charges of equivocations and the suggestion that the theocracy of Saudi Arabia is just as misogynistic as Germany. But as Laurie Penny notes, those would also be childlike attitudes that would be laughable if they weren’t so prevalent
It’s pretty hard to argue with Laurie on these points. And that’s why a “conversation of civilizations” about how ALL civilizations could really improve themselves in a variety of ways really should be the method of choice for the contemporary clash of civilizations. If it actually came down to the quality of the arguments, the “feminazis” would make the neo-Nazis and Islamofascists look like children.
Conservative Muslim cultures are obviously on the wrong side of history regarding the treatment of women and as such, some sort of clash of civilizations is inevitable given the rapid globalization of the 21st century. It’s a small world. But every culture is, in reality, a myriad of interwoven subcultures and Islam has its feminists too. So how do we weaken the appeal of misogynistic subcultures while encouraging the growth their more enlightened brethren? So with Europe starting off 2016 with a growing number of people embracing the idea that the West should declare a Cold War on Muslims everywhere, we really need to ask ourselves what would be more effective: allow groups like Pegida or the AfD (or Donald Trump) lead us in a new Cold War on Islam and minimize the cross-cultural exchange taking place today? Or invite misogynists everywhere, Muslim and non-Muslim, to engage feminists in an actual conversation and allow today’s children, Muslim and non-Muslim, refugee and non-refugee, watch the misogynists make themselves look like preschoolers?
Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker just raised the stakes in the negotiations over how to distribute the responsibilities for dealing with Europe’s refugee crisis: If more EU nations don’t take in more refugees, Germany is going to close its borders. Within months. And if that happens, it just might start printing Deutschmarks too:
“No one can pretend that you can have a common currency without being able to cross borders relatively easily.”
That was the warning from Angela Merkel. And while it might be a bluff at this point, don’t forget that Angela Merkel really is facing a growing rebellion that could force her to close Germany’s borders. And if that happens for an extended period of time, who knows how many other eurozone members close their own boarders but we could see a wave of border closures. And if that happens, what happens to the euro?
While it’s hard to be super distraught over the prospect of the eurozone collapsing given what a disaster the eurozone has become for its weaker member states, it’s still going to be pretty traumatic. That said, given all the intra-European acrimony that has been growing ever since the start of the eurozone crisis, with the “core” and “periphery” increasingly wondering if a divorce isn’t the best option, it might in a perverse way actually be a long-term benefit for the collective psychology of the European nations if the catalyst for the implosion of one of the key elements of “the European Project” isn’t a massive squabble that results in different nations saying, “I hate living with you and I want a divorce!” Instead, it will be a massive squabble of different nations saying, “I hate all these poor, desperate foreigners fleeing for their lives, and I need to divorce you in order to protect myself from them!”
Sure, refugee-induced spite is a twisted reason for imploding the eurozone, but at least the intra-European acrimony isn’t going to be solely inwardly directed under that scenario. Now that the refugee crisis is taking the focus off of the various economic/political disputes over recent years, Europe’s long-standing internal squabble over how to manage itself now has an “other” that all the member states can simultaneously unite behind hating. And yes, that united loathing of the Muslim refugees might still lead to eurozone’s implosion, but since it seems like the eurozone could implode for a growing number of reasons that go beyond the refugee crisis, at least the refugee freak out could still ironically prevent even greater damage to Europe’s general identity and unity by framing the implosion within the context of a refugee invasion as opposed to the unworkable and increasingly undemocratic direction of the eurozone’s government structure.
Is a fragmented Europe united in a desire to keep out the refugee hordes the European social contract of the future? Well, the xenophobia probably isn’t going anywhere and all the other systemic issues with the eurozone show no signs of dissipating. And the refugee hordes are only going to get larger. So we can’t dismiss Merkel’s and Juncker’s threats as sheer bluster. It could happen. And if it does, while Europe’s own internal solidarity might avoid the damage it would have sustained if, say, an austerity-revolt resulted in a eurozone breakup, you have to wonder what’s going to happen to Europe’s ties to the Muslim world. Dissolving the eurozone over anti-Muslim sentiments is going to be kind of hard for the Muslim world to ignore.
Politico has an piece summarizing Donald Trump’s path to victory as envisioned by GOP pollsters and Trump staffer. While their vision unsurprisingly relies on factors like “news of small-scale terror plots on American soil, foiled or successful, keep voters in a state of anxiety,” some of the other political techniques Trump is expected to deploy to put him over the edge were a little counter-intuitive. For instance, they expect Trump to win a larger-than-normal share of the African-American vote. And given the GOP’s typical single-digit showing with that voting demographic it’s possible. And then there’s the plan for Trump appealing to female voters that goes beyond the expected Roger Stone-style attack Bill and Hillary Clinton (assuming she’s the nominee) as a pair of womanizers: Trump is going to win over the ladies with his sex appeal:
“Already, Trump has been laying groundwork in the African-American community that could pay dividends in a general election. With the help of his political and business adviser Michael Cohen, Trump has spent years cultivating black faith leaders. Last year, he held meetings with black pastors in Georgia and at Trump Tower in New York. Trump’s team has also made a pair of black female video bloggers, Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson, prominent surrogates online and on the trail.”
That’s right, the meeting with the black pastors at the Trump Tower that resulted in Trump canceling the press conference after the pastors made it clear that it wasn’t an endorsement, sure was some great outreach.
So minority outreach is one of the Trump campaign’s perceived secret weapons (it’s certainly been a secret so far). But that’s probably nothing compared to his most potent secret weapon: Trump lust:
Uh oh. America has a dirty little Trumpian secret: He’s irresistible! At least according to his campaign staffers. And if they’re correct, who knows, maybe we really will see Trump take states like California, Illinois and New York as his campaign predicts.
But don’t forget that if ‘Trump lust/minority outreach’ path to victory doesn’t pan out for the Trump campaign, there are other paths available, some of which the Trump campaign is already walking.
Oh look, Donald Trump just retweeted a neo-Nazi. Once again:
“This Twitter user, whose profile page says his name is “Donald Trumpovitz” and that he lives in “Jewmerica,” has a series of tweets espousing racist or Nazi-sympathetic views and sharing anti-Semitic photos and news stories. He or she also regularly tweets racist things in response to Trump’s tweets, with the obvious hope of being seen by other people who are viewing Trump’s tweets or getting a retweet from Trump himself.”
Getting Trump to retweet your neo-Nazi tweets is like an internet sport now. Wonderful. Well, it looks like a certain GOP candidate is going to have a lot more robocalls on his behalf to “disavow”.
In other news, the Nation Review has an issue dedicated to why they don’t think Donald Trump should be the nominee. The thrust of their argument? He’s too moderate.
This probably isn’t going to help alleviate concerns over Donald Trump’s seeming encouragement of acts of violence by his supporters: Trump is so impressed with the loyalty of his base that he just opined that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and would lose a vote:
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? ... It’s, like, incredible.”
It is indeed pretty incredible, especially since Trump presumably shared that insight about not losing votes after shooting someone as part of a campaign tactic to gain even more votes. And yes, this means the GOP’s previous flirtation with violent rhetoric, like Sarah Palin’s “Don’t Retreat, Instead — RELOAD,” ‘cross-hairs’ map of 2010, are now a time relatively innocence for the US’s political culture. Ah the good ‘ol days, when the GOP’s thought leaders only spoke in code.
So no we have the leading GOP candidate is joking about shooting people. Perhaps this might be an example of why some in the GOP’s “establishment” are in such a tizzy over the prospect of what a Trump candidacy will do to the party’s long-term branding issues? Perhaps, but that apprehension by some doesn’t change the fact that a growing number of GOP “establishment” insiders are coming to terms with the reality that Donald Trump has an ever-growing chance of winning the nomination and rebranding the GOP as “Trump’s own Party”.
It’s all part of why it will be extra interesting to see how the “establishment’s” dwindling Trumphobia evolves given the sudden news of a whole new third party candidate. Like Trump, this new candidate is a billionaire. But unlike Trump, this new candidate is probably just going to take votes from the Democrats. And he’s made stopping people from shooting other people one of his signature issues over the years. And the entrance of this new candidate could make a Trumpian victory (or any GOPer victory, regardless of who gets the nomination), a lot more likely. But this candidate is also apparently only likely to run specifically if the GOP nominates either Ted Cruz or Donald Trump and the Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary. Yes, Michael Bloomberg, one of the the leading backers of stricter gun control in the US, is considering an independent run for the White House under certain conditions:
“According to an online Morning Consult poll conducted in January, Bloomberg would receive 13 percent support in a three-way race with Trump and Hillary Clinton. Trump received 37 percent support and Clinton received 36 percent support.”
As we can see, Michael Bloomberg is basically telling the world that he’ll do what he can to ensure the GOP takes the White House should the Democrats nominate Bernie. It’s a declaration that double as both a threat to the Democrats that they could pay a very high price if they nominate Bernie over Hillary, but also a hint to the GOP that they could be given a free pass to the White House if they nominate Trump or Cruz...but only if they can somehow get the Democrats to nominate Bernie. So the more it looks like Trump is going to win the nomination, the greater the GOP’s incentive to see Bernie get the nomination. At the same time, recent polls of head to head match ups of Bernie vs Trump or Hillary vs Trump show Bernie with a bigger lead.
Granted, poll have limited value this far out and can change substantially as the race unfolds, but it highlights how strange the 2016 race is shaping up to be: The GOP’s “establishment” is freaked out over the stunning rise of Donald Trump, a candidate who jokes about how his cult personality is so great he can get away with shooting people on the streets. And yet if they nominate Trump and then somehow get the Democrats to nominate Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton (despite Bernie polling better than Hillary vs Trump), the GOP just might get a giant gift from the one of the nation’s top gun-control advocates, Michael Bloomberg. Strange times. Err...stranger times.
A temporary suspension of Schengen area is looking more and more likely. Not only have EU migration ministers decided that extending the “shorter-term dispensations for border controls” for two years, but it also sounds like there’s a growing consensus that Greece, yes Greece, is a major source of Europe’s refugee crisis due to its inability to deal with the flood of refugees hitting its shores. And that “let’s blame Greece!” meme is exactly the kind of thing that makes a two year closing of the Schengen area a lot more likely. Greece makes a great scapegoat. It’s familiar. And it’s part of what the Schengen area may be going on a long vacation. Although it may not be the entire Schengen area that collapses over the next two years. A ‘mini-Schengen’ of the “core” EU nations is also looking likely:
“Senior EU officials have warned of the costs to trade that new border checks could impose, although few analysts foresee a return to lines halted at frontiers around Germany, France or the Benelux countries, across which millions commute daily to work.”
That’s a reminder that, while the Schengen area might effectively close down for the next two years, that doesn’t mean a “mini-Schengen” can’t remain open. And it sounds like that’s exactly what EU officials are expecting to happen.
So it appears that a partial temporary collapse of the Schengen area is now under serious considering which means we’re going to see a new experiment unfold. There’s been high-level chatter for a while now about whether or not the eurozone would completely collapse if the Schengen area collapsed. At the same time, there’s also been chatter about creating a “mini-Schengen” zone that just includes the “core” members. So what happens to the eurozone as whole if the “core” nations maintain a mini-Schengen and it’s just the “periphery” (Greece, Italy, Spain, Eastern European members) that lose their Schengen rights? Would the eurozone still keep chugging along at that point if the mini-Schengen area is the only region where border controls don’t become the norm? We’re apparently on track to find out because it sure sounds like a partial collapse of the Schengen area is increasingly seen as the only politically viable solution. If it all doesn’t work out and the eurozone implodes they can always blame Greece. And, of course, the refugees.
Check out Denmark’s latest attempt to stem the flow of refugees: Take their valuables:
“After thorny negotiations with the other parties, Integration Minister Inger Støjberg agreed to exempt wedding rings and other items of sentimental value.”
That’s right, this was the moderate version of what the Danish government original envisioned.
So might we see an EU probe into Denmark’s new law? Ummm....probably not:
“The spokesperson explained that valuables taken from refugees are put into the state budget and go towards financing the costs of housing refugees, so that “available assets are used before the state raises extra taxes.””
That’s something to keep in mind when you hear complaints in Germany or Denmark about the all these refugees using public services once they get asylum: not only do they not have a choice on the matter, after the refugees risk their lives to get there, they’re the first ones to pay the costs of those services and it’s paid with their life savings. And family jewels.
This doesn’t bode well for the refugees in Europe who initially found a surprisingly champion in the form of Europe’s ‘Queen of mean’ Angela Merkel: Following record high domestic popularity ratings for Merkel early last year, a recent poll indicates that 40 percent of Germans want her to resign over her refugee policies:
“The three ruling parties — Merkel’s Christian Democrats, their Bavarian allies, and the SPD — are eager to show voters that the government is in control of the refugee crisis before three state votes in March and a general election next year.”
Keep in mind that Merkel has already indicated she’s running for a fourth term in 2017. And this is on top of Finland and Sweden both announcing plans for mass deportations. And this raises another issue now that Europe is leaning towards sending the refugees back: One of main arguments you hear in the US against accepting more refugees is that they lacked the proper documentation to vet them for terrorist ties. Well, in those cases where there is indeed a lack of documentation, it also means it’s not necessarily going to be be so easy sending them back to where they came from. Why? Because they won’t be able to prove they’re citizens of where they came from either:
“One of the biggest obstacles to sending people back is to obtain travel documents from their home countries. People routinely lose or even destroy their travel papers coming to Europe, creating confusion about where they are from.”
Yep, Europe has a whole bunch of freezing ‘hot potatoes’ it doesn’t want and may not be able to toss back to their home countries. It’s unclear what their options are that don’t involve sending people back to their doom, although Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris probably has some suggestions (involving letting him create a refugee island nation). It will be interesting to see if this is the year he get Europe’s ear.
Back in November, Donald Trump’s raised a few eyebrows when he suggested, in response to a protester getting aggressively thrown out of one of his events, that “maybe he should have been roughed up.” So it was already becoming apparent that the Trump campaign was going to be flirting with endorsing political violence and incorporating the psychology of a violent mob as part of the campaign’s popular appeal.
Well, last month Trump appeared to have answered his rhetorical question about whether or not protesters deserve to be “roughed up” when he told a rally that his security was going to get “so tough and so nasty, and when that happens we’re not gonna have any more problems… Pretty soon they’re gonna get so nasty that we’re not gonna have any more protesting, you know that right?”:
“As one man is thrown out of the rally, Trump directs his security not to give him his coat, and to throw him out in 10-below weather.”
Throwing people out into freezing weather without a jacket is indeed pretty nasty. And guess what: Trump’s mob security just got a big endorsement to get a lot nastier:
“So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them...I will pay for the legal fees. I promise...They won’t be so much because the courts agree with us too.”
Before Donald Trump thumped the competition in New Hampshire, there was the stumble out of the Iowa gate was inevitably going to rattle the confidence of some of Trump’s supporters. Especially those driven to the charisma of a pathological ‘winner’. But for those drawn to Trump for more ideological reasons, Trump’s loss was likely just seen as a bump in the road to victory and national greatness. Especially for those that have already embraced Trump as America’s Belated Great White Hope:
“In a Tuesday phone interview with TPM, Taylor noted that Trump’s explanation dovetailed nicely with the white nationalist views espoused by the super PAC.”
Yeah, that’s a pretty good way to describe this:
The ‘ol “I disavow this group I completely agree with for the following reasons” non-disavowal disavowal. It’s not hard to see why White Supremacists continued robo-calling for Trump in New Hampshire.
But it’s still a little suprising to see so little White Nationalist enthusiasiam towards Ted Cruz, which says a lot of what Trump says, but apparently without the white nationalist pizazz that Trump possesses:
Ouch. That’s a pretty big lack of faith in Ted from an increasingly important GOP primary constituency. So with polls closed in South Carolina’s primary and Donald Trump the projected strong first place finisher and Ted Cruz fighting Marco Rubio for a distant second or third place, it’s probably safe to say that Ted Cruz didn’t do super well with South Carolina’s White Nationalists. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t try:
“The ad aligns Trump with South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley ®, who called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the state Capitol grounds after a gunman with white supremacist sympathies killed nine black parishioners last summer at a historic Charleston church. [Defenders of the flag denied its racist connotations, calling it a symbol of Southern heritage.]”
While Ted’s line of attack clearly didn’t work in time for South Carolina, since Ted Cruz is looking like the closest thing to real competition for Trump, it’s looking like one of the emerging dynamics for the rest of the GOP primary could be a growing attempt by the second place candidate to assert that he, and not the leading candidate, is the real white nationalist candidate.
Will Cruz succeed? It’s a long shot, but it’s possible. Cruz makes a point of highlighting how much Ronald Reagan has influenced him on the campaign trail. If he can sell that as a genuine sentiment and the real and only leading candidate that would truly follow in Reagan’s footsteps, who knows, Ted Cruz just might get the support he needs. Especially when it comes to Reagan and “states’ rights”. There’s some GOP-base issue-space synergy there for Ted. And Ted knows it.
The white supremacist “American National Super PAC” expanded its pro-Trump robocalling efforts to Vermont and Minnesota. Guess what the message is now that the race has narrowed considerably and Trump has two Cuban-Americans as his primary remaining opponents: “don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump”. And, of course, there’s also some stuff about white genocide.
So if you’re living in Minnesota or Vermont, try not to be super shocked if and you get a disturbing phone call about white genocide in the next week. Sure, you can be disturbed since you’re name was somehow added to a ‘white nationalist friendly’ call list and generally shocked that this is where US politics finds itself, but try not to be super shocked about getting the actual phone call:
“Though Trump has said he “would disavow” the message espoused by his white nationalist supporters, he’s expressed sympathy with voters who are “angry” about the presence of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.”
Note that while Trump merely ‘expressing sympathy’ with the white supremacists when directly asked to disavow their previous pro-Trump robocall campaigns, recall that the initial statements about Mexican immigrants that led to such white nationalist enthusiasm for Trump in the first place went a lot farther than just expressing sympathy.
So we’ll see how much ‘white genocide’ becomes a factor in the 2016 presidential election as a Trump campaign centered around nativist themes proceeds to crush the GOP competition. Trump will presumably be downplaying these topics once he gets the general election where ‘white genocide’ and ‘don’t vote for the Cubans’ probably isn’t going to play well. But as is becoming increasingly clear, white supremacists robocalls probably aren’t going to hurt him too much with his existing base of support either:
“Nationally, the YouGov data show a similar trend: Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view.”
Yep, Donald Trump has a disproportionate level of support within the GOP from people who also support slavery. Of course, as the rest of his primary opponents fall to the wayside that relative level of slavery-supporters should be diluted as he picks up his opponents’ less-pro-slavery supporters. Unless, of course, Trump manages to bring in white supremacist voters who would have otherwise voted third party or just skipped the election altogether. If that happens, who knows how high a fraction of Trump’s supporters will be pro-Slavery before this election is over.
In other news, guess who just declared that whites who don’t support Trump are committing treason against their heritage? Hint: Think of the current House Majority Whip and just start free-associating. It’s a big hint.
With Super Tuesday looming in the US 2016 presidential primaries, with around a third of the total delegates up for grabs, the media is aflutter with a question that really captures the spirit of the contemporary political moment: Why exactly did Donald Trump refuse to disavow the support of David Duke and the KKK when asked directly three times in a row on Sunday? Was it because he wasn’t familiar with who David Duke is and what he stands for, as Trump was claiming during the interview? Could it have been due to a faulty earpiece, as Trump later asserted? Or was it that Donald Trump didn’t want to seem like he was bigoted against people who like David Duke:
You read that correctly: just hours before Donald Trump repeatedly refused to disavow David Duke’s endorsement, Trump was found retweeting quotes from a Twitter account named “@ilduce2016” that was specifically set up by Gawker to post Tweets of Benito Mussolini and attribute them to Trump. And Trump reweets them and defends it! So that was the Trumpian context before the whole David Duke non-disavowal took place.
So here we are. Two days before Super Tuesday, the leading GOP candidate who just hit 49 percent in a national GOP primary poll refused to disavow David Duke’s endorsement by playing
dumbamnesic:“I didn’t even know he endorsed me. David Duke endorsed me? I disavow, OK”
That was Donald Trump’s response to a question about David Duke’s endorsement two days before he refused to disavow Duke on CNN. It’s the kind of flip-flop that really does raise the question: did the Trump campaign determine that Friday’s Duke-disavowal was a mistake that needed to be fixed? It seems possible, which means the results of tomorrow’s Super Tuesday GOP primaries might even more disturbing than normal.
Keep in mind that this all could be worse, or at least more disturbing: Trump could have retweeted the “Blood alone moves the wheels of history” @IlDuce2016 tweet instead. That would have been more disturbing given our Trumpian political context.
David Duke has a message to the Trump campaign following Trump’s “disavowal” of Duke’s support: “Look, Donald Trump, do whatever you need to do to get elected to this country because we need a change.”
Well, it looks like the Trump campaign will need to ‘do whatever needs to do’ again. It turns out the Trump campaign issued press credentials to James Edwards of the white nationalist The Political Cesspool radio show. It was a totally innocent mistake. Really!
Not only that, but the show is going to air a previously-taped 20 minute interview with Donald Trump Jr. this Saturday. The Trump campaign is, of course, denying that it knew anything about the nature of Edwards and his show and Donald Trump Jr. swears that “wouldn’t have consented to an interview with a pro-slavery radio host had he known the host held those views.” Also a totally innocent mistake! *wink*:
“As Media Matters has documented, national civil rights groups have criticized the program for supporting anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and white supremacists like David Duke. The show openly states on its website that it’s a “pro-White” program that wishes “to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility.” Edwards has also claimed that Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “dream is our nightmare,” “interracial sex is white genocide,” and “slavery is the greatest thing that ever happened to” African-Americans.”
And now we can add Donald Trump Jr. to the long list of “pro-White” guests on the show. Except, of course, it was a totally innocent mistake! It just happens to have been an innocent mistake that doesn’t appear to apply to black journalists. How odd:
All innocent mistakes!
It’s also no doubt an innocent mistake that the airing of this interview is going to be on the same day as the Louisiana primary. Yes, David Duke’s home state is Louisiana and his strain of politics is particularly effective there, but it’s all totally coincidental and innocent! Really!
In other news...
Following the GOP’s failure to prevent Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, one of the more darkly amusing aspects of the predictable GOP soul searching were the conclusions of the Republican National Committees party “autopsy”: the GOP is too souless. That’s not how they put it, but that was the basic gist of the “autopsy” report. The party was seen as mean, xenophobic, and hostile to those that weren’t straight fundamentalist Christian white voters. In other words, the GOP was getting a little to overtly white nationalist-ish for non-white voters to feel comfortable joining. And if you’re an oligarch that relies on the GOP to secure pro-oligarchy policies, the traditional GOP ‘grand-bargain’, where the demands of traditional white social conservatives are wedding to the needs of the Big Business oligarchy, can become very bad for business if demographic changes make a white nationalist-Big Business party politically untenable.
So what was the solution to bring the party back to electoral life? Become a more “inclusive” and compassionate party, especially on policies towards undocumented immigrants, so the party doesn’t end up finding itself in a demographic tomb. That was basically it. Make a few concessions on handful of issues near and dear to Latino voters. That’s the path to a viable future for the GOP.
Of course, that was also 2013. And as we now know, the GOP did indeed give itself makeover for the 2016 election. A makeover that, according to some, gives the party a path to the future. A makeover that looks like Donald Trump in clown makeup, which has understandably prompted a number of observers to conclude that Donald Trump has killed the GOP’s ‘autopsy’. Or, rather, he smothered the post-autopsy kinder, gentler GOP while it was still in the crib.
Well, as the article below points out, it’s not so much that Trump killed the kinder, gentler GOP of the future, so much as he got in front of the rest of the GOP which was trying to do the same thing:
“A Trump primary win “would precipitate the breakup of the Republican Party. I wouldn’t be a part of it and a lot of people I know wouldn’t be a part of it,” said Pete Wehner, an aide to the last three Republican presidents. “It would take decades to undo it, potentially. The Republican Party is becoming redefined by Trump, and the question is, Can we jerk it back?””
Trump is going to send that GOP into the political desert for decades to come. That’s is the fear being expressed by a number of GOP insiders. But as we also saw, it’s a rather curious fear since Trump is hardly the only GOPer who saw the post-autopsy kinder, gentler GOP as DOA. Almost the entire party was against the plan, including the voters:
As we can see, Trump isn’t killing the future of the GOP. He’s merely leading a ritual sacrifice with many participants.
And it’s not a ritual done in despair with no hope for the future. It’s a summoning ritual and it’s intended bring forth a new GOP too. Just not the one the authors of the ‘autopsy’ report had in mind:
The Donald does have a point. For instance, if you’re an overt white nationalist who prefers candidates that overtly express white nationalist sentiments and openly flirts with figures like David Duke, a Trumpian GOP really is going to be more welcoming. Sure, such voters are largely in the GOP’s pocket anyway, but not all of them and they may not be inclined for vote for mere dog whistles. Trump is collapsing and expanding and the GOP tent the GOP ‘Big Tent’ simultaneously. And if Trump can lead this reinvigorated white nationalist ‘Big Tent’ to electoral success, the long-term demographic trends that threaten the GOP may no longer be a problem. That’s of course, assuming the Trumpian white nationalist revolt somehow leads to significantly few non-white Americans:
Yep, Richard Spencer, a leading “Alt Right” figure and a guy who advocates the creation of a separate whites-only “ethno-state”, is so excited about the prospects of a Trump presidency that his think-tank’s conference is dedicated to Trump. And if we did have some sort of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” or a not so peaceful ethnic cleansing, boy could that do wonders for the GOP’s future! No demographic crisis there! Ok, you still might need to implement Richard Spencer’s eugenics policies, but it’s not like a white American is impossible. It merely requires killing the post-Civil Right America and summoning an earlier incarnation. So while trying to create a kinder, gentler GOP that appeals more to minorities might seem like the only possible path for the GOP going forward if the party is going to avoid some sort of demographic oblivion, there’s another path: the mass deportation of non-whites and banning of new non-white immigrants. Indefinitely. And while the Trump platform isn’t quite there yet, it’s where his supporters like Richard Spencer are and it’s the logical conclusion that to the white nationalist path Trump has put forward as a post-autopsy alternative.
Who knows what the odds of success are if the GOP and the broader American oligarchy decide to head down that path, but considering that it’s the path the GOP is currently traveling and probably would still be traveling on even if Trump never got in the race, the GOP had better hope those odds are good. Everyone else should probably hope otherwise.
Josh Marshall had a recent post on the rise of the Trump phenomena with one of the more chilling observations of this political season: “a large portion of the GOP is not satisfied with what can realistically be achieved by conventional political means”:
“As I noted at the end of last month, some of this is a product of “hate debt” and “nonsense debt” — building up wildly unrealistic expectations by over-promising and trading in an increasingly apocalyptic political rhetoric. But it’s not all that. Something this powerful, as we’ve discussed, isn’t just ginned up by political leaders. It runs much deeper. But again, the overreaching point is important: The narrative of ‘betrayal’ — at this volume and intensity — only makes sense if you are dealing with a chunk of the electorate with expectations that are deeply unrealistic in the context of conventional political action.”
Yep, you can’t explain the rise of Trump just in terms of the “hate debt” and “nonsense debt” that the GOP has built over the course of the Obama presidency. Because such “debt” would be worthless if you didn’t simultaneously have an electorate that simply doesn’t seem to understand how the US political system works and what can actually be accomplished when you have one party in the White House and the other party controlling congress.
As Josh notes, when something like a quarter of the electorate simply does not have a realistic expectation of how the US political system works, that’s the kind of zeitgeist that gets you a Trump, Ted Cruz, or worse.
So, with that in mind, it’s worth noting that Roger Stone, Trump’s long-time political adviser, was recently making some rather huge promises to the Alex Jones fans at the recent event in Austin: Once elected, Trump is blowing the doors open on all the stuff Alex Jones talks about:
“Stone responded by explaining that as a political strategist, he thinks Trump raising major questions like those brought up by the audience “might make us feel good, it might ultimately get us justice, it would not help him get elected. I would rather see him raise those questions after he has the power.””
That’s right, if Trump wins, the far-right conspiracy monger industry that’s been building up a narrative for decades could become the overt worldview of White House. At least, that’s assuming Trump lives up to the expectations Roger Stone is establishing for him to the conspiracy community.
And sure, Trump will probably disappoint these voters by not going quite as far as they would prefer. But keep in mind that, of all the various promising Donald Trump has made to voters to completely transform the United States, the transformation of the White House into one where Alex Jone’s worldview becomes part of the official administration “brand” is probably the easiest transformation to achieve. It would just involve Trump, well, being Trump.
Of course, if Trump wins the White House that probably means it retains control of the House and Senate too in which case all those bold GOP promises of transforming America (eliminating Obamacare, gutting the social safety-net, etc) really can sort of happen. Sure there are the obvious right-wing goodies that can be done, like gutting social programs, restricting abortions, kicking the poor and bashing gays, etc. That can all happen with a GOP sweep.
But those are also the kind of political red meat that will appeal heavily to the GOP’s traditional base but may not have all that much resonance with the new voters Trump is bringing into the party. And the parallel promises of an economy that actually makes the lives of average GOP voters better only grows more remote the more political power the GOP obtains. Any promises of actual prosperity would be largely unachievable.
That’s all part of why, if Donald Trump does indeed end up leading the GOP to a sweep in November and the party gets the power it needs to achieve its full destructive potential, it’s going to be very interesting to see how exactly the party decides to create actual positive benefits for the electorate that extends beyond the traditional social conservative red meat. Because, again, the party can promise death, destruction and prosperity, but it can only actually deliver on the death and destruction part unless you’re really rich. That’s just how GOP-o-nomics works. Even if President Trump rounded up and deported every last undocumented immigrant, that’s not going to do a lot of good to low-wage American workers seeing the government regulations and safety-net shredded. And the promises of prosperity are potentially a pretty important aspect of the GOP’s selling point for voters that are driven to candidates like Trump in part because they’ve found themselves falling through the growing socioeconomic cracks and see him as their last chance for decent living. At the same time, a Trump presidency the a GOP-controlled congress would be a fabulous chance for the GOP to sort of “rebrand” itself in a way that expands its appeal the potential Trumpian-voters in the future.
So, should the GOP take total power and unleash its full destructive potential on the nation, something other than the standard right-wing political red-meat is going to have to be offered as a positive achievement if the GOP wants to keep its newly expanded Trump coalition. Something positive for both the traditional GOP base and those new voters. And that’s why you have to wonder if the Alex Jones-ification of the White House is going to be seen as a possible positive achievement for both the new Trump voters and traditional GOP base by having the president cater to every last right-wing conspiracy theory of the last few decades in the highly entertaining/zany manner that’s become Trumps brand.
Sure, Trump might attempt to maintain a politically ‘safe’ distance from folks like Jones once he’s in office. But since this is Donald Trump and the modern GOP we’re talking about here, who knows, maybe embracing Alex Jones to simultaneously placate the new Trumpian voter while paying back all that “hate and nonsense debt” with the traditional base is part of the GOP’s near future. It makes about as much sense as anything else we’ve seen.
Glenn Beck issued a stark warning to his followers a few weeks ago after at: Donald Trump is grooming Brownshirts. Now, normally we can ignore Beck’s ramblings as largely divorced from reality, especially when he’s making Brownshirt comparisons. But in this case, it’s actually kind of hard to disagree with Beck. *shudder*:
“Donald Trump probably doesn’t care about what happened. He is already onto the next thing...”
While that’s an understandable sentiment from the guy who just got sucker punched, you can’t say Trump doesn’t care about what happened. Trump made it very clear that he cares. He cares about seeing more incidents just like it:
“You know what? The audience swung back. And I thought it was very, very appropriate. He was swinging. He was hitting people. And the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of.”
That’s right, Donald Trump isn’t just encouraging violence against protestors like he was doing before. He’s now openly endorsing violence at his rallies after the fact.
So the question still remains: Will Trump start paying the legal fees for his rally audiences? But as the article below points out, John McGraw’s legal fees may not be the only fees Trump ends up paying since his campaign is potentially liable too:
“Because there’s potential legal liability for the campaign, then for the campaign to say, ‘I’m also going to pay the legal fees for this individual’ — I would say that probably does pass legal muster...because it’s part-and-parcel of the committee’s liability.”
Well, so it’s looks like Trump might be liable, but we don’t really know because the egging on violent mob dynamics by candidates isn’t something the law has really had to address before:
Yes, the Trump phenomena is now breaking the political and legal mold. This time violently.
Sadly, we can’t say this was unexpected. But what should be highly unexpected is the appropriate use of a Nazi analogy by Glenn Beck. That just doesn’t happen. And yet, this is where we are.
No one ever said the breakdown of civility wouldn’t get weird. Violent, yes, but not Glenn-Beck-was-right weird.
It was always clear that a Trump presidency was going to be somewhat unorthodox, at least in style. But if the following article is accurate, Trump’s plans are even more unorthodox than almost anyone could have imagined: When Trump’s campaign was trying to recruit Ohio Governor John Kasich for the VP slot, he reportedly offered to make Kasich the most powerful VP in history by putting Kasich in charge of foreign and domestic policy:
“When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.”
That’s, uh, a pretty big job for the vice president: foreign and domestic policy. And what will Donald do as president? “Make America Great Again”, presumably in ways that don’t involve shaping foreign or domestic policy. You almost have to wonder if this leak is intended to add to the Rorschach nature of Trump’s candidacy by suggesting to voters wary of Trump’s bombastic demeanor that he wouldn’t actually be allowed to break things. Either way, it will be interesting to see if some version of this offer was made to Mike Pence because, based on a comparison of congressional voting records, Mike Pence is the most conservative vice presidential nominee in modern history. that’s the kind of vice president that could break a lot of things when he’s put in charge of foreign and domestic policy.
You also have to wonder if Trump’s alleged offer to Kasich suggested that Trump himself is planning on spending the presidency basically doing reality TV shows or some other sort of self-promotional puffery as part of a “Make America Great Again” executive branch initiative and truly leaving almost all the details to someone else. The ol’ Trump-and-Dump. That does seem possible.
But if the following interview of Chris Christie accurately reflects Trump’s plans, there is another task that could keep President Trump occupied while Vice President Pence runs the executive branch: firing government employees and recruiting businesspeople to work part-time as their replacements (while keeping their jobs in private sector). If that sounds more than a little fascistic, well, this is a Trump administration we’re talking about, after all:
“Christie added that the Trump team wants to let businesspeople serve in government part time without having to give up their jobs in the private sector. Trump frequently says he is better equipped to be president because of his business experience.”
It looks like lustration isn’t just for Ukraine. So long ‘revolving door’! When businesses get to send their paid employees to staff the agencies than regulate them, there’s basically no need for a revolving door between the public and private sectors. And it’s pretty much going to have to be Trump cronies and the business filling all those federal jobs since no one is going to want to be a dedicated federal employee in general after President Trump gets done demonizing them and gutting their worker protections (and then firing half of them).
So as we can see, Trump’s plans for delegating powers apparently isn’t limited to making the vice president the chief policy architect. Once he gets done gutting the federal employment rolls and replacing key personel with corporate shills, a whole lot of power is going to be wielded directly by the corporations employing the businesspeople chosen for their “part-time” work. A massive concentration of vice presidential power coupled with a diffuse handover of government power in general directly over to Trump’s buddies in the business sector.
What’s Trump himself going to do after delegating away so many powers? Make America great again, sure, but how? Maybe he’ll wrestle Putin for glory. Or maybe not. He’s presumably still retaining his Commander in Chief responsibilities so he might just be planning on getting occupied with WWIII right away. Who knows. It’s all part of the “Make America Great Again” fun mystery. We don’t get to know what his vision of “greatness” entails other than building a “big beautiful wall” and generically “winning”.
But now, thanks to these reports that his vice president is going to be Trump’s brain when it comes to policy, we have a better understanding of why Trump has been so vague about what needs to happen to “Make America Great Again”: his vision appears to center around handing the reigns of power over to the GOP (via Vice President Pence) and over to the business sector (via the new “part-time” federal employees), and allowing those twin forces of the GOP and the business elites to just impose whatever their vision of Greatness is on the nation. Because don’t forget, unlike with Hillary Clinton, if Trump wins, his party will likely have control of both houses of congress too. So if Vice President Pence and Trump’s business cronies decide to pursue an agenda that would make the George W. Bush administration blush, guess what, that will actually happen. All of it. The whole agenda.
You have to admit it’s a pretty great vision. Assuming you’re a Trump crony.
The Illinois Republican delegate just removed one its delegates over her Facebook postings this week. It turns out she’s an open white supremacist. So was she removed for being an open white supremacist? Nope. She was actually profiled by the Chicago Tribune back in May about the open white supremacists joining the Illinois Trump delegation. No, she was removed for advocating violence against Black Lives Matter protestors (while also using racial slurs, of course, but it’s very unclear that part played a role in her removal):
“In May, a Tribune profile of Trump delegates elected in the March 15 primary revealed that Gayne used the handle “whitepride” on social media.”
That’s right, the Illinois GOP delegation decided to keep Lori “whitepride” Gayne even after the Chicago Tribune profile of as one of the many open white supremacists Trump delegates but decided to remove her now because she crossed the line by posting pro-violence posts on Facebook. Ok, well, at least the Illinois delegation has standards. They might be standards that embraces open white supremacists, but now we know where the line is with the Illinois GOP. At least for Trump delegates.
Where that line is when it comes to flirtations with violence from the Trump campaign itself, however, remains an unfortunately open question:
“I’m not sure I’ve seen a better example of the wink-wink attitude of the Trump campaign — here not just Trump’s impulsive retorts but the campaign apparatus itself — to things that used to get people totally written out of the world of legitimate political discourse. I’m working on a piece about how the biggest legacy of the Trump campaign — assuming he isn’t elected president — is the re-normalization of racism and anti-semitism in American political life. This is another part of the same story. We’ve already discussed the numerous ways Trump has embraced the stylings, policies and speech of a would-be autocrat. He’s now moving on to the kinds of banana republic politicking where the cost of political defeat is imprisonment or death or even a legitimate form of ‘activism’ in advance of the ballot.”
Well that’s pretty shocking. Oh wait, never mind, it used to be shocking but is now what we should expect. That’s unfortunate. And shocking.
Louisiana’s congressional races are now open for registration and the candidates are flooding in. Especially for Louisiana’s Senate seat being vacated by Senator David Vitter this year, with over 21 candidates so far. So with that in mind, check out who just threw his hood into the ring:
““There are a lot of strong conservative candidates in the race, but he remains a visible person with name recognition around the country,” Louisiana State University political communication professor Martin Johnson said in an interview. “In that sense, maybe he peaks his head above the pack.””
Wow, so the KKK guy peaks his head above the pack at this point in the race in part because of his name recognition but also because there are so many other candidates. That sounds eerily familiar.
And now we get to find out if David Duke’s sale pitch can work in a Trumpian media environment. And that’s not guaranteed, in part because Duke is almost using a Trumpian sales pitch that he alone can stand up for the white guy, but it’s a pitch that doesn’t really make sense given the reality of Trump:
LOL. Yes, there isn’t one person is standing up for the white guy in the US Congress (He must have checked out of national politics following his gubernatorial run).
Although it is true that there’s a dearth of open bigots in Congress fighting for the poor white guy since the GOP is the party of plutocrats and poor conservative whites have simply been voting against their economic self-interests for decades in exchange for the promise of social conservatism. So there is a potential opening for someone like Duke similar to the one Trump exploited, which is part of why it’s going to be interesting to see how closely Duke’s economic message follows to Trump model of using immigrant-bashing as simultaneous play towards populist economics and anti-minority sentiments. Don’t forget that the one of the key lessons of the Trump phenomena is that the nativist element of GOP base doesn’t actually agree with the GOP’s long-time agenda of slashing government programs and entitlements. The nativist base merely wants that public spending slashed for non-whites. And the only way to really thread that needle is by basically creating ethnically homogeneous states which is clearly the next logical step for the Trump movement to take. Between banning Muslims and deporting undocumented Latinos the Trump agenda is clearly dog-whistling a white separatist tune. And that’s David Duke’s tune.
So now that Trump has successfully used David Duke-like rhetoric and tactics to help lockup the GOP nomination, David Duke can now use that updated Trumpian model to promote himself too. Although if Duke does manage to ride the Trump train to even a top-tier finish in the Senate race, which would be a pretty big accomplishment, he won’t just have Donald Trump to thank. It will be more a of a team effort:
“The tweet, written by the account @Western_Triumph, appeared on four large screens in the Quicken Loans Arena Republican after the halfway mark during Donald Trump’s acceptance speech on Thursday night. It was one of a series of tweets by Twitter users that appeared in the hall that were curated by the Republican National Convention.”
That was the RNC’s curated tweet displayed across the arena after the halfway mark of Trump’s acceptance speech. At least Trump himself wasn’t responsible for the white supremacist retweet. This time.
All in all, it’s obviously a pretty good year for another David Duke run. The zeitgeist is certainly in his favor. But there is one big obstacle facing his electoral ambitions: when it comes to branding himself as the “I’m for white guys!”-candidate, he’s going to have a lot of competition. This isn’t the same GOP it was when David Duke was nominated as the party’s gubernatorial candidate back in 1991. This is Trump’s GOP, which means David Duke is much less of a novelty than he used to be. Thanks, in part, to David Duke. So it’s going to be a lot harder to run and win as David Duke in a packed race that undoubtedly includes a number of candidates that follow the “David Duke without the baggage” model that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise has been using to win office since the mid-90’s. Or, at least, it’s going to be harder in theory. But in a year when politicians declare “political correctness” a national security threat, is David Duke’s “baggage” still “baggage”? That’s very unclear.
With all of the head-scratching over the possible Kremlin backing and/or influences on Donald Trump and his inner-circle and the potentially serious implications of that, here’s a fun look at what might be another example a pro-Trump foreign backing. In this case foreign corporate backing and this isn’t just some random corporation. It’s Axel Springer:
First, let’s ask a question that Pando’s Paul Carr asked back in November: Why does Henry Blodget, founder and chief editor of Business Insider, love Donald Trump so much?:
“Perhaps Business Insider’s new German owners could take Blodget aside and point out a few of the risks inherent in endorsing policies and speech like Trump’s.”
Yes, perhaps Business Insider’s new owners, German publishing giant Axel Springer, should have a chat with Blodget about the potential consequences of aggressively backing a politician like Trump.
You also have to wonder what Blodget himself is thinking since given his personal history and the fact that Business Insider was sort of the path to redemption for a man who was permanently banned from the US securities industry. It’s especially interesting given how Blodget pined for a fiscal conservative he could vote for in 2012, whereas Donald Trump’s proposed tax slashing plan could spike the deficit by over $12 trillion by some estimates. Why would a fiscal conservative out to rebuild his reputation aggressively back Trump?
But even more interesting is why a German media empire would buy a US publication that was aggressively backing Trump? Well, one possibility that Axel Springer wanted Business Insider to back Trump. And it’s a possibility we can’t rule out because as the article below point out, all that aggressive Trump backing by Blodget and Business Insider took place shortly after Axel Springer bought Business Insider (for a very premium price) with the condition that Blodget stay at the company for a long time:
“Blodget and Döpfner’s discussions boiled down to one question: Would Blodget and Hansen stay if Axel Springer bought the company?”
Ok, so it would appear that retaining Henry Blodget for an extended period of time was a sticking point for the buyout negotiations. And sure enough Blodget agreed to stay and the buyout was finalized at the end of September. Then, a couple of months later, we have Paul Carr at Pando writing about how Henry Blodget and Business Insider have suddenly because super pro-Trump. Wow. What a coincidence. A coincidence that fits Axel Springer’s long-standing right-wing editorial tilt:
“This month, Newsweek quietly reported that a German media conglomerate called Axel Springer was the “most serious” contender to buy the Huffington Post in the proposed sale of the magazine’s corporate parent, AOL, to Verizon. While Newsweek detailed Springer’s sizable media holdings in Germany and beyond, from the tabloid Bild to the newspaper Die Welt, it failed to note the stringently enforced right-wing editorial line that makes Springer the German equivalent of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.”
Note that the sale of the Huffington Post to Axel Springer never happened. And maybe breath a sigh of relief.
So Germany’s equivalent of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. fully acquires Business Insider and the publication proceeds to fall in love with Donald Trump. And Axel Springer isn’t done with its US media spending spree.
So as alarming as it would be if it turned out Trump is getting covert assistance from the Kremlin and WikiLeaks, it’s worth keeping in mind that covert assistance from a German media giant on a US spending spree is arguably going to be more damaging because it’s the kind of damage that’s completely legal and largely the same kind of damage Fox News does to society every single day. A new News Corp.-like entity entering the US media space is a pretty big deal. An pretty big horrible deal.
In other news...
This July 28, 2016 Daily Mail Article (UK) shows that the Munich gunman was a Nazi who believe he was an Aryan.
Headline: Teen gunman who murdered nine in Munich worshipped Hitler and saw it as ‘an honor’ that they shared the same birthday
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3712190/Teen-gunman-murdered-nine-Munich-worshipped-Hitler-saw-honour-shared-birthday.html
Some of the key statements in the article are:
“Munich gunman Ali David Sonly worshipped Adolf Hitler and saw it as an ‘honour’ that he shared the same birthday as the Nazi leader, it has been revealed.”
“Sonly, 18, shot nine people dead at a shopping centre in the southern German city on Friday before turning his handgun on himself.”
“The German-Iranian considered himself ‘Aryan’ and had built up resentment against Arabs and Turks, who, it is claimed, bullied him at school.”
“The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper said he was a racist who held extreme right wing views about foreigners and minorities.”
“Sonly had Iranian parents and held an Iranian as well as German passport.”
With Donald Trump’s surrogates like Roger Stone now pushing the meme that Khizr Khan is a Muslim Brotherhood agent and his son was secretly on an “Islamist mission” inside the US military when he died in combat, it’s worth noting that the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, a site that is about as vigilante about the real threats associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and promoting of Islamist theocracy as you’ll find anywhere, finds the charges against the Khan family to be flimsy at at best:
“The GMBDW has reviewed Mr. Khan’s article on Islamic Law and finds nothing within that could remotely be construed as “promotion” of Islamic Sharia Law.”
That’s a pretty strong endorsement for the Khan family.
So we’ll see if the Trump campaign turns this “the Khans are promoting Shariah” meme into a permanent line of attack for the rest of the campaign. Since the back and forth between Trump and the Khans doesn’t appear to be ending any time soon it’s entirely possible we’ll see the Khan family, and their secret Shariah plot, become a much bigger part of the 2016 campaign. If that happens, it’s also worth noting that one of the best ways to promote Islamist theocratic ambitions is to smear every Muslim as a secret Islamist out to destroy democracy. Just ask ISIS since that’s their strategy too.
This isn’t going to go well: It sounds like GOP leaders, including enthusiastic Trump backers like Newt Gingrich, are starting to hatch a plan to get Donald Trump to stop causing a new controversy almost every day. They’re hoping to enlist the help of Trump’s kids for some sort of intervention designed to convince Trump to “reset” his campaign (LOL). Beyond that, there’s reportedly even talk about the mechanics of replacing Trump if he leaves the race (let’s hope the GOP doesn’t drag Rafael Cruz out of his alleged retirement). So there appears to be an effort to gobble together an “intervention” team capable of sitting Trump down and convincing him that he absolutely must break his addiction to behaving like himself, along with a recognition that if things don’t go the way Trump wants them to go there’s nothing stopping him from leaving the race.
All in all, it’s the kind of situation that couldn’t happen to a nicer party. Literally. Because a nicer party would have never nominated Trump in the first place. Oh well. Here we are:
“There’s absolutely no indication Trump is considering leaving the race, a move that would seem wildly out of character for a candidate who has prided himself on “winning” and grasped at any poll that shows him dominating an opponent. Still, some Republicans are quietly considering the arcane mechanics of what would happen to the party’s ticket if Trump was to leave the presidential race.”
Keep in mind that while there is no indication Trump is consideration leaving the race, there are strong indications that Trump is laying the groundwork to claim that the race is rigged against him since that’s what he keeps saying. So if if polls end up showing Hillary Clinton with a widening lead as the election approaches it’s not inconceivable that Trump will used the “rigged election” charge as an excuse to walk away. So while the GOP appears to be experiencing some existential angst over the damage the Trump campaign might do to the party, Trump himself has got to be feeling some intense existential angst over the prospect of losing to Hillary Clinton since “winning” and a celebration of Trump winning is sort of the basis of both his authoritarian appeal and personal ego.
With those existential angst-inducing situations in mind, check out the latest update on Donald Trump’s views on the use of nuclear weapons:
“I have to follow up with that, but I’ll be very careful here. Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked, at one point, ‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?”
If we have them, why can’t we use them? Good question. Or rather, terrifying question. But it was apparently a question on the mind of the man the GOP is trying to arrange an “intervention” for in order to ensure he does what they consider necessary to win the election and obtain the nuclear launch codes. It’s one more reason why the GOP’s Trumpian existential crisis is everyone’s existential crisis. Thanks GOP.
Oh look, Donald Trump just hinted at political violence if he doesn’t win again:
“Hillary wants to abolish — essentially the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
It’s worth noting that, while this vague threat was obviously directed at Hillary Clinton, it was also less obviously directed at the Supreme Court and presumably any other branches of the government that would be involved in preventing “the Second Amendment people” from basically just taking over in a violent coup. Because it’s not like Trump becomes President and the “the Second Amendment people” just get to take control if something happens to Hillary (maybe someone needs to clarify this with him). There’s going to be a lot more involved than that if “the Second Amendment people” decide to take things into their own hands. You basically need some sort of Serpent’s Walk scenario for Trump’s vague threat to even make any sense.
So, yes, Trump did threaten Hillary Clinton. But basically everyone else too.
One of the interesting questions raised by Julian Assange’s new role as Donald Trump’s dirty tricks hacker/propagandist is what on earth the left-wing government of Ecuador thinks of all given Assange’s resident status in their London embassy and Trump’s started off his presidential campaign portraying Latino immigrants as rapists. Well, back in March Ecuaador’s president Rafael Correa shared his views on the prospect of a Trump presidency which were surprisingly positive. Why so positive? Because Correa sees a Trump presidency as likely to spark a left-wing populist backlash across Central and South America and create a divide between global powers:
“Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa told the Ecuadorian Broadcasting Association that Donald Trump winning the presidency is good for Latin America. However, Correa pointed out that it will be bad for the United States if Trump becomes president, as reported by teleSURtv.”
Note the Correa has stated that he hopes Hillary Clinton wins for the sake of the US and the World. Still, it’s kind of fascinating that a candidate who’s personal business involves building large structures is garnering so much of his support, from both real supporters and ironic supporters like Correa, over everyone’s faith that he’ll just burn the place down and they will somehow benefit from this. Disturbing, but also fascinating.
Here’s the latest indication that Trump campaign’s plan for winning the the White House at this point mostly revolves around planning on first losing and then declaring the vote invalid. Roger Stone has already made it clear that the Trump campaign will be claiming there was electronic voting machine fraud, but as the article below points out, that doesn’t mean the Trump campaign isn’t also planning on declaring widespread in-person voter fraud. It’s going to be full spectrum voter fraud! Or rather, a full spectrum fraudulent campaign to declare full-spectrum voter fraud. When Trump does voter fraud fraud, you know it’s going to be YUUUUGE.
So that’s something we should expect based on Trump’s recent proclamations. Interestingly, the particular plan the Trump campaign is currently developing for winning through losing — calling for his supporters to be “Trump Election Observer” on election day to try to spot signs of voter fraud — might actually violate a consent decree imposed on the GOP back in 1981 when it attempted to use similar voter intimidation tactics. As the article also points out, it’s a consent decree that the GOP has violated numerous times since making the decree anyway, but that doesn’t stop them from trying again. So Trump’s new plans for expanding his voter fraud fraud is an old GOP trick. Imagine that:
In Ohio 2004, “14 percent of new voters in majority-white voting precincts would face challengers while 97 percent of new voters in majority-black locations would face challengers,” wrote the Brennan Center. RNC staffers referred to the voter challenge list as a “goldmine” and also had plans to challenge Democratic-leaning voters in New Mexico, Florida, Nevada, and Pennsylvania if John Kerry had won.
More recently, the Tea Party group True the Vote tried to recruit one million poll watchers in 2012, to make voting “like driving and seeing the police following you.”
Forty-six states allow private citizens to challenge the eligibility of prospective voters, either on or before Election Day, and 24 allow private citizens to challenge a voter at the polls without offering any documentation to show that the voter is actually ineligible, according to the Brennan Center.
The problem of voter intimidation is particularly worrisome in 2016 because after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice “severely curtailed” the number of federal election observers who monitor voting discrimination at the polls.
The only election rigging occurring in 2016 is the GOP’s attempt to suppress the vote. It likely won’t succeed, especially with recent court victories, but that doesn’t mean Trump and company won’t try.
“The problem of voter intimidation is particularly worrisome in 2016 because after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Justice “severely curtailed” the number of federal election observers who monitor voting discrimination at the polls.”
Yep, while Trump’s apparent voter intimidation plan may sound eerily like the GOP’s many past attempts at voter intimidation, but now with one key difference: it’s being attempted in the post-Voting Rights Act-era where the federal government if forced to pretend the GOP isn’t a party dedicated to (and increasingly reliant on) using voter intimidation tactics to win elections.
So will Trump manage to intimidate his way into higher office this time around? We’ll see. But as the article below notes, it’s not entirely clear that winning the White House is Trump’s top priority. Sure, becoming President is likely a high a Trumpian priority, but perhaps not the top Trumpian priority:
“Trump has a purpose — it’s just not the one the “experts” think it is. And it could prove to be much more dangerous. Which means we have to work even harder to defeat and delegitimize him in November.”
Yes, if Trump winning scares you, just imagine how much scarier it would be if he’s not even trying to win but instead trying to become a white nationalist political martyr. A martyr who would have won if it wasn’t for all that vote rigging.
So, all in all, it appears that we might have a situation where Trump’s plan to win is to lose and claim a victory that was thwarted by election fraud in order to create a giant crisis. But that strategy for victory might actually be part of a larger strategy of, win or lose, creating a white nationalist “awakening” intended to give white America a big push towards neo-Nazi thinking. While it might seem like the one silver lining of this scenario is that Trump might not actually be trying to win the election and become president but instead merely wants to create a big electoral crisis, keep in mind that if you’re trying to turn your losing presidential campaign into a national platform for white nationalist memes you’re stilling probably planning on becoming president someday. Just not necessarily the elected president.
Did you hear? Donald Trump expressed regret for all the offensive things he’s said over the last year. Is a general election “pivot” actually materializing?
Well, here’s a sign. It’s not a great sign: The Trump campaign just released its first TV ad of the general election and according to the NPR article below it’s part of the campaigns recent shift in strategy to create a kinder, gentler, more “theme” based Trump campaign. So what’s the theme in this new ad? Why, it’s that illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees are flooding into the country, collecting Social Security, and generally trashing the place. What a big shift in strategy:
“That’s something he has landed in controversy for during this campaign right from the start. In his speech announcing his run last year, he said that immigrants coming to the U.S. illegally from Mexico were bringing drugs and were rapists, and some, he assumed, “were good people.””
Yep, the first ad of the general election is basically a slightly warmed over version of the opening speech Trump made when he announced his campaign when he called Mexican immigrants largely rapists and criminals. And this is part of the campaign’s new shakeup. Shocker.
And here’s another shocker: That statement in the new ad about undocumented immigrants collecting Social Security benefits included a citation in the ad. A citation for the Center for Immigration Studies, a far right organization with strong ties to a variety of white nationalist organizations. In the first Trump ad of general election. How totally shocking and what a big shift:
“The ad, also unsurprisingly, cites the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the group whose reports provide a constant stream of ammunition to anti-immigrant politicians despite its troubling roots in white nationalism and history of skewing the facts.”
Yes, the big shift in the Trump campaign appears to be that now it cites white nationalist groups explicitly in its advertising. That should totally improve his popularity with the minority groups. Especially the more they about groups like CIS and its white nationalist, pro-eugenicist John Tanton, who has the stated goal of a keeping the US overwhelmingly demographically white forever over fears that society will otherwise be destroyed:
“Tanton has made it clear that one of the major factors driving his anti-immigration activism is his interest in the United States remaining a majority-white nation. He wrote in a 1993 letter: “I have come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist, it requires an European-American majority and a clear one at that. I doubt very much that our traditions will be carried on by other peoples.” He warned in 1997 that America could be overrun by immigrants “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” In 1993, he wrote a memo outlining an idea he had come up with along with three well-known white nationalists to start a group called “League for European American Defense, Education, and Research” — a group dedicated to preventing the end of a white majority in America.”
So the very first general election ad from the Trump campaign features a citation to an anti-immigrant think-tank dedicated to maintaining a clear white majority in the US because he’s convinced that society will implode if that is no longer the case.
In other news, the Trump campaign and RNC just met with Hispanic leaders to bolster the GOP’s Latino voter outreach efforts.
Politico has an article on the growing concerns over the Trump campaign’s growing plans to preemptively declare to the US electoral system and polls as all rigged and threatening to not recognize the legitimacy of the election if he loses. In particular, the article addresses concerns within the GOP over the possible consequences of this strategy. There were the obvious potential consequences like how this mine undermine the Trump voters’ faith in democracy and really erode the general social consensus that makes democracy work.
But the article focuses the GOP-specific concerns like the possibility that Trump and the Alt-Right are going to use their rigging charges as an excuse declare a need to revenge against the system and then go off to start their own Alt-Right party that would become a direct competitor to the GOP. And that’s not an unimaginable concern, especially when you considering the grifter-nature of both Trump and the Alt-Right media mavens like Steve Bannon and the incredible money they could make in coming years tapping into Trumpian grievance politics.
Now, granted, having a Trump third party pop up that’s a direct Alt-Right competitor to the GOP (which is basically crypto-Alt-Right anyways) could be great for splitting the right-wing vote during elections and allowing the country to move out of its current political Dark Age. But that scenario comes at the cost of having an overtly Alt-Right/borderline-neo-Nazi third party with substantial support basically permanently becoming part of the American political mainstream, which is a pretty massive price to pay to see the GOP permanently weakened (don’t we already have enough of those?).
It’s all a reminder that the damages the Trump could pose for the GOP in the long-term are really only limited to the GOP as long as the Trumpian movement doesn’t become long-term too:
“And many worry that the newly consummated Trump-Breitbart partnership will endure, perhaps in another form — and that both men will be eager to exact revenge.”
Trumpian revanchism. Or rather, preemptive fantasy revanchism. That does seem like a reasonable concern. For everyone.
But perhaps the group that should be most concerned about revenge plots is the GOPers who will be placed in a position to either follow Trump’s lead and declare the election a rigged sham and the government illegitimate or just accepting a loss and planing for 2020. Because if Trump loses and declares “this was rigged! I don’t accept this at all!”, every single elected GOPer is going to be expect publicly choose sides on that issue and you can be sure the Trumpian hordes are going to be keeping track of who betrayed Trump.
In other words, if Trump goes through with his “it’s all rigged” plan and loses big, his last gift to the GOP this election might be to place the rest of the GOP into a position where they are either on “Team Trump” or, in the eyes of Trump voters convinced it was all rigged, “Team Trump Traitor.” Those are basically going to be the two options for each individual GOPer. It’s also a strategy that could easily drag every last elected GOPer in the House and Senate and maybe even state officials into the scheme if Trump’s plan for not accepting defeat somehow involves having state governments refuse to accept their state’s electoral outcome.
So is the rest of the GOP willing to go all in on Trump’s “it’s all rigged!” strategy or resist it and risk a new revenge-oriented Trumpian third party? They had better decide soon, because while this growing “it’s all rigged!” campaign strategy might seem like a Trump campaign strategy the rest of the GOP is part of that strategy too whether they like it or not. They can join “Team Trump” and fuel the fantasy revanchist revenge movement, or join “Team Trump Traitor” and fuel the fantasy revanchist revenge movement’s desire for revenge on the GOP too.
And either choice is probably fine with Trump since he’s guaranteed to get at least some GOPers to back him all the way on any attempt to declare the government illegitimate. When someone traps you in a divide and conquer ploy, they’ probably don’t care very much which side you choose as long as there’s division. And there’s definitely going to be division.
A recent press release revealed that the Law Firm of Sullivan and Cromwell has advised AT&T on the acquisition of Time Warner Inc. which own’s the CNN and HBO. CNN does not have the same type of favorable right wing bias as Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News. This transaction is reportedly going to be being challenged by Trump’s Justice Department. This is the same Law Firm that Employed former CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles used to send Cables with a Hiel Hitler Greeting and John Foster Dulles cried when Sullivan and Cromwell had to close their German Office in the late 1930’s.
https://www.sullcrom.com/news-sullivan-cromwell-advises-atandt-inc-acquisition-time-warner-inc-2016
S&C Advises AT&T Inc. in $108.7 Billion Acquisition of Time Warner Inc.
OCTOBER 22, 2016
S&C is advising AT&T Inc. in its definitive agreement to acquire Time Warner Inc. in a stock-and-cash transaction valued at $107.50 per share. This purchase price implies a total equity value of $85.4 billion and a total transaction value of $108.7 billion, including Time Warner’s net debt.
Time Warner is a global leader in creating premium content, has the largest film and TV studio in the world and an extensive library of entertainment. Time Warner owns HBO, Warner Brothers and Turner Networks, among others. AT&T has unmatched direct-to-customer distribution across television, mobile and broadband. The combined company will combine premium content with a distribution network capable of delivering it based on customer preferences.
The S&C team advising AT&T Inc. was led by Joseph Frumkin, Eric Krautheimer and Melissa Sawyer. Andrew Mason advised on tax matters; Matthew Friestedt advised on executive compensation and benefits matters; Nader Mousavi advised on intellectual property matters; Neal McKnight and Ari Blaut advised on financing matters; and Steven Peikin, Adam Paris and William Monahan advised on litigation matters.