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Reagan’s Nazis

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. (The flash dri­ve includes the anti-fas­cist books avail­able on this site.)

COMMENT: With the pass­ing of Mar­garet Thatch­er, we’ve been treat­ed to pre­dictable hagiogra­phies of her ally Ronald Rea­gan. A recent poll found that 58% of respon­dents would vote for Rea­gan over Barack Oba­ma.

We, on the oth­er hand, are tak­ing the occa­sion to high­light some of the fun­da­men­tals of The Gip­per’s regime.

Long sto­ry made short: Ronald Rea­gan was a fas­cist and a trai­tor, whose reign imple­ment­ed Nazi con­trol over Amer­i­ca.

A few points to con­sid­er, before delv­ing into Helene von Damm, Rea­gan’s direc­tor of per­son­nel and pro­tege of Otto von Bolschwing, Adolf Eich­man­n’s supe­ri­or in admin­is­ter­ing “Jew­ish mat­ters” for Hitler:

  • As dis­cussed in Seth Rosen­feld’s Sub­ver­sives, Mr. “Gov­ern­ment is not the solu­tion; gov­ern­ment is the prob­lem” spent decades as a red-bait­ing informer for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, fre­quent­ly “snitch­ing” on fel­low Hol­ly­wood pro­fes­sion­als. His rise in the polit­i­cal ranks was deriv­a­tive of his work as a paid informer. (Rosen­feld relates inci­dents in which Rea­gan informed on peo­ple whom he sim­ply dis­liked and who were not “Sovi­et agents” or any­thing of the kind.)
  • In addi­tion to work­ing as a paid polit­i­cal informer, Rea­gan fur­thered his career through a long asso­ci­a­tion with orga­nized crime, as set forth in Dan Mold­ea’s Dark Vic­to­ry. (The first chap­ter of this impor­tant book can be read online. ” . . . These records show that Rea­gan, the pres­i­dent of SAG and an FBI infor­mant against Hol­ly­wood com­mu­nists, was the sub­ject of a fed­er­al grand jury inves­ti­ga­tion whose focus was Rea­gan’s pos­si­ble role in a sus­pect­ed con­spir­a­cy between MCA and the actors’ union.  Accord­ing to Jus­tice Depart­ment doc­u­ments, gov­ern­ment pros­e­cu­tors had con­clud­ed that deci­sions made by SAG while under Rea­gan’s lead­er­ship became “the cen­tral fact of MCA’s whole rise to pow­er.”  
  • Rea­gan helped cov­er-up the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy–first by refus­ing to extra­dite Edgar Eugene Bradley to New Orleans as request­ed by Jim Gar­ri­son and then through his work on the Rock­e­feller Com­mis­sion, which found no involve­ment by the CIA in JFK’s mur­der. (Ele­ments of CIA, includ­ing George H.W. Bush were deeply involved in Kennedy’s mur­der.
  • Rea­gan’s fis­cal program–seen as arche­typ­al by the “austerians”–increased the U.S. nation­al debt by 350%!
  • Rea­gan’s finan­cial deregulation–also seen as arche­typ­al by con­ser­v­a­tives and presided over by George H.W. Bush–resulted in, among oth­er things, the loot­ing of the S & L’s. Stan­ford Law Review put the tax­pay­er-fund­ed bailout at 1.5 tril­lion dol­lars.
  • While insti­tut­ing a “war on drugs” that saw minor offend­ers sent to prison for first-time offens­es and swelled the prison pop­u­la­tion (also at tax­pay­er expense), the Reagan/Casey CIA import­ed mas­sive amounts of cocaine and oth­er drugs to help fund covert oper­a­tions.
  • As Paul Krug­man said when dis­cussing the dereg­u­la­tion mania that led to the finan­cial melt­down of 2008, “it start­ed with Rea­gan.”

 It would be impos­si­ble to exag­ger­ate the dam­age Rea­gan inflict­ed on this coun­try. Nor should that be sur­pris­ing to one famil­iar with the real­i­ties of his admin­is­tra­tion, which was a front for the Under­ground Reich

For decades, the GOP incor­po­rat­ed Third Reich alum­ni into its eth­nic out­reach orga­ni­za­tion. This polit­i­cal alliance cul­mi­nat­ed in the Rea­gan regime. The lists of per­son­nel from which Rea­gan made his appoint­ments was drawn up by Helene von Damm, a pro­tege of Otto von Bolschwing. (Mr. Emory played a small role in the break­ing of the orig­i­nal San Jose Mer­cury sto­ry in 1981, along with his late, dear friend Mae Brus­sell.)

Von Damm’s career arc is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty and runs as fol­lows:

  • She enters the U.S. by mar­ry­ing a mem­ber of the same mil­i­tary intel­li­gence unit in which William Clark served. (Clark went on to become one of Rea­gan’s nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­ers.) After enter­ing the coun­try, she divorced her hus­band. This is a com­mon method used by intel­li­gence ser­vices to move some­one across bor­ders.
  • She then mar­ried Ger­man-born banker Chris­t­ian von Damm, who became the head of Bank of Amer­i­ca’s branch in La Paz, Bolivia in the ear­ly 1980’s. (This was at time  when vast amounts of cocaine were being import­ed into the Unit­ed States to sup­port the Con­tras, fol­low­ing the “Cocaine Coup” of 1980. As dis­cussed in AFA #27, that CIA coup was imple­ment­ed using for­mer Gestapo offi­cer Klaus Bar­bie, as well as Sun Myung Moon’s Uni­fi­ca­tion Church.)
  • After her work as the per­son­nel direc­tor for Rea­gan’s White House, Von Damm was appoint­ed U.S. ambas­sador to Aus­tria, where she mar­ried a hote­lier named Goertler. Fol­low­ing their divorce Goertler (also Gurtler) alleged­ly shot him­self to death.

Rea­gan’s 1980 elec­tion brought to pow­er the ele­ments incu­bat­ed in the Naz­i­fied GOP eth­nic milieu: William Casey orches­trat­ed the State Depart­ment machi­na­tions to bring the GOP Nazi “eth­nics” into the coun­try, after which he became Rea­gan’s cam­paign man­ag­er and then head of the CIA. Rea­gan’s Vice Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush had installed the Nazis as a per­ma­nent branch of the GOP while serv­ing as chair­man of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee. Rea­gan had served as the chief spokesper­son for the Cru­sade For Free­dom, the ille­gal covert oper­a­tion that brought the Nazis into the U.S. in the first place.

Some of the peo­ple with whom Von Damm staffed the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, sourced below:

  • Yka­te­ri­na Chu­machenko of the OUN/B–Deputy Direc­tor of Pres­i­den­tial Liai­son.
  • Bob Whitaker–Aryan Nations asso­ciate and Spe­cial Assis­tant to the Direc­tor of the Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment.
  • John O. Koehler–selected to replace Pat Buchanan as White House Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor, he resigned after it was revealed that he had been a back­ground in the Hitler Youth. 
  • Todd Blodgett–White House aide, who went on to man­age Resis­tance Records for the neo-Nazi Lib­er­ty Lob­by.

Old Nazis, The New Right, and the Repub­li­can Par­ty by Russ Bel­lant; South End Press [HC]; Copy­right 1988, 1989, 1991 by Russ Bel­lant; ISBN 0–89608–419–1; pp. 76–77.

EXCERPT: . . . On July 20, 1988, George [H.W.] Bush reaf­firmed the ties between the Repub­li­can Par­ty and the ABN by mak­ing a cam­paign stop at Fedorak’s Ukrain­ian Cul­tural Cen­ter in War­ren, Michi­gan. Bush deliv­ered a hard-line for­eign pol­icy speech to those attend­ing the annu­al Cap­tive Nations ban­quet spon­sored joint­ly by the Cap­tive Natins Com­mit­tee and the ABN. Shar­ing the dais with Fedo­rak and Bush was Kather­ine Chu­machenko, for­merly the direc­tor of the UCCA’s Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee and cur­rently the Deputy Direc­tor for Pub­lic Liai­son at the White House. [Empha­sis added.] Ignatius M. Billinsky, Pres­i­dent of UCCA, had already been named Hon­orary Chair of Ukraini­ans for Bush, and Bohdan Fedo­rak named Nation­al vice-chair of Ukraini­ans for Bush. . . .

“A White Future is Com­ing: an Inter­view with Bob Whitak­er” by Kevin Alfred Strom; Amer­i­can Dis­si­dent Voic­es; 7/3/2004.

EXCERPT: . . . KAS: When we intro­duced you for the first time to our read­ers in Nation­al Van­guard, we gave a cap­sule biog­ra­phy of you as fol­lows:

‘Mr. Whitak­er was born and raised in South Car­olina, and attend­ed the Uni­ver­sity of South Car­olina and the Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia Grad­u­ate School. He has been a col­lege pro­fes­sor, an inter­na­tional avi­a­tion nego­tia­tor, a Capi­tol Hill senior staffer, a Rea­gan Admin­is­tra­tion appointee, and a writer for the Voice of Amer­i­ca.”

So you’re a Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion appointee — what’s the sto­ry behind that?

BW: I was Spe­cial Assis­tant to the Direc­tor of the Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment, in charge of secu­rity clear­ances, staffing, and that sort of thing.

KAS: Why is some­one with such excel­lent estab­lish­ment cre­den­tials defend­ing the White race, as you do in your work, with­out apol­ogy or regret? Isn’t that some­thing that sim­ply ‘isn’t done’ these days by any­one who wants to retain his posi­tion in pri­vate or pub­lic life?

BW: Well, I did it. And they cleared me at the high­est pos­si­ble lev­els, so if you do it right, you can do it. And I’m good at it. . . .

“Bak­er Breaks the Fever” by Ed Mag­nu­son; Time; 3/16/1987.

EXCERPT: . . . Bak­er swift­ly dis­posed of one inher­ited per­son­nel prob­lem. He dis­missed John O. Koehler, who had replaced Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor Pat Buchanan last month. Koehler’s mem­ber­ship in a Nazi youth orga­ni­za­tion at the age of ten had embar­rassed the Admin­is­tra­tion, but what sealed his fate was his arro­gance, illus­trated by a refusal to move out of Buchanan’s office to make way for Can­non. . . .

­­“Holo­caust Muse­um Shoot­ing Sus­pect Had Been Grow­ing More Hate­ful and Des­per­ate”; Fox News; 6/11/2009.

EXCERPT: . . . Todd Blod­gett, a for­mer White House aide to Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan who lat­er became affil­i­ated with extrem­ist groups, said he spent a lot of time with Von Brunn in the 1990s and ear­ly 2000s.

Von Brunn is obsessed with Jew­ish peo­ple, Blod­gett told the Post. He had equal con­tempt for both Jews and blacks, but if he had to pick one group to wipe out, he’d always say it would be Jews.

Von Brunn went so far as to say he fought on the wrong side of World War II, accord­ing to Blod­gett. . . .

For The Record #211: Fas­cism and the Black Met­al Music Scene

This broad­cast details the grow­ing fas­cist influ­ence with­in the “black met­al” music genre.

A hard-core, icon­o­clas­tic, pagan-influ­enced form of rock music, black met­als employs the lex­i­con and iconog­ra­phy of fas­cism and Nazism as a vehi­cle for shock­ing the estab­lish­ment. With­in the black met­al milieu is a grow­ing fas­cist, Nazi and satan­ic ele­ment that is con­sciously attempt­ing to manip­u­late the genre in order to win alien­ated youth over to the fas­cist cause.

Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of a recent book about the sub­ject, the pro­gram details the explic­it fas­cist, Nazi and satan­ic con­nec­tions of some of the lead­ing fig­ures involved with the black met­al scene. The pro­gram details the occult and fas­cist con­nec­tions of fig­ures like Boyd Rice. Michael Moyni­han and oth­ers. (As repeat­edly not­ed in the pro­gram, the black met­al scene is not fas­cist. Ele­ments with­in it are.) It should be not­ed that fas­cism and Nazism have (in the past) uti­lized mar­ginal and alien­ated ele­ments of soci­ety as street sol­diers.

As was the case with the Strasserite wing of the NSDAP (the Ger­man Nazi par­ty under Hitler), these ele­ments are fre­quently liq­ui­dated after they have served their pur­pose. It should be not­ed that William Pierce (the head of the Nation­al Alliance, the most impor­tant Amer­i­can Nazi orga­ni­za­tion) has pur­chased Resis­tance Records, a Nazi-skin­head music com­pa­ny.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Boyd Rice’s back­ground in the Amer­i­can Front (a domes­tic Nazi orga­ni­za­tion); Rice’s sta­tus as a mem­ber of the Coun­cil of Nine (the gov­ern­ing body of the Church of Satan); Rice’s ivolve­ment with the Abraxas Foun­da­tion (an indus­trial music milieu); the involve­ment of Fer­al House pub­lish­ing guru Adam Par­frey with Abraxas; Parfrey’s close friend­ship with Boyd Rice; Parfrey’s close asso­ci­a­tion with Michael Moyni­han; Parfrey’s asso­ci­a­tion with Nazi, Holo­caust-denier and Lib­erty Lob­by asso­ciate Kei­th Stime­ly; Moynihan’s explic­itly satan­ic ori­en­ta­tion; an evi­den­tiary trib­u­tary con­nect­ing Moyni­han to the milieu of the neo-Nazi ter­ror­ist group the Order (inspired by The Turn­er Diaries, authored by William Pierce); the Abraxas Foundation’s embrace of Charles Man­son; Moynihan’s fas­cist activism; Moynihan’s Holo­caust revi­sion­ism; the asso­ci­a­tion between the Lib­erty Lob­by and Resis­tance Records; the involve­ment of for­mer Rea­gan White House Staffer Todd Blod­gett in the Lib­erty Lobby’s financ­ing of Resis­tance Records; William Pierce’s stat­ed inten­tion to use Resis­tance Records to mar­ket black met­al music; the Scan­di­na­vian black met­al scene; the church burn­ings and oth­er vio­lence per­pe­trated by Scan­di­na­vian black met­al activists; the Odin­ist and Satan­ic ori­en­ta­tion of some black met­al activists; the fas­cist and occult activism of New Zealand pub­lisher Ker­ry Bolton (the pub­lisher of, among oth­er zines, Nexus). (Record­ed on 3/11/2000.)

 

Discussion

12 comments for “Reagan’s Nazis”

  1. There is a new doc­u­men­tary com­ing out about Rea­gan and Wasser­man of MCA — This arti­cle does not cred­it the work that Dan Mold­ea did in “Dark Vic­to­ry”, but it’s good to see the main­stream press chip­ping away at Rea­gan’s facade:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2635094/EXCLUSIVE-Revealed-MAFIA-helped-Ronald-Reagan-White-House-Shocking-documentary-reveals-Mob-connections-catapulted-presidency-probe-thwarted-highest-levels.html

    EXCLUSIVE: Revealed, how the MAFIA helped Ronald Rea­gan get to the White House.

    Shock­ing doc­u­men­tary reveals Mob con­nec­tions that cat­a­pult­ed him to the pres­i­den­cy — and how a probe was thwart­ed at ‘the high­est lev­els’
    •Pres­i­dent Rea­gan owed his act­ing and polit­i­cal career to Hol­ly­wood mogul Lew Wasser­man, chief of enter­tain­ment behe­moth MCA, who was in bed with the Mob

    •An inves­ti­ga­tion into the rela­tion­ship between MCA and the Mafia was halt­ed and Fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors believe it was one of the ‘polit­i­cal favors’ that can be traced back to Rea­gan’s White House

    •‘Ronald Rea­gan is a com­plete slave of MCA who would do their bid­ding on any­thing,’ one secret Jus­tice Depart­ment doc­u­ment revealed

    •Accord­ing to the pro­duc­er of the doc­u­men­tary, Wages of Spin II: Bring Down The Wall, one MCA exec­u­tive had ties to Mob boss John Got­ti
    •‘Rea­gan’s whole career in pol­i­tics was sub­si­dized by MCA,’ he asserts, and helped him finan­cial­ly because for a long time he was liv­ing above his means
    •The Mob was prob­a­bly work­ing Nan­cy Rea­gan too, accord­ing to the pro­duc­er. ‘She was a dri­ving force behind Rea­gan’
    By Jer­ry Oppen­heimer
    Pub­lished: 13:22 EST, 21 May 2014

    A shock­ing new doc­u­men­tary screened exclu­sive­ly by MailOn­line expos­es the chill­ing con­ncec­tions between the Mafia, one of Hol­ly­wood’s most pow­er­ful enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies and its head hon­cho Lew Wasser­man and Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan and his Jus­tice Depart­ment.

    From the mid-1950’s to the ear­ly 1960’s, Sun­day evenings were reserved for mil­lions of fam­i­lies to sit in front of the tube and watch the Gen­er­al Elec­tricThe­atre on CBS host­ed by genial Ronald Rea­gan, whose movie career had since dried up.

    Tele­vi­sion had offered him anoth­er chance.

    What view­ers did­n’t know was that Rea­gan was giv­en this new oppor­tu­ni­ty of vis­i­bil­i­ty and star­dom in a high­ly lucra­tive and rare deal. Along with a big pay­check, he was made part-own­er of the pop­u­lar pro­gram that he host­ed for eight years, mak­ing him extreme­ly wealthy.

    His men­tor, close friend and the pow­er behind the deal was Lew Wasser­man, the very pri­vate head of the Music Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca, bet­ter known as MCA, a Hol­ly­wood enter­tain­ment behe­moth.

    Under Lew Wasser­man’s bril­liant and often bru­tal lead­er­ship, MCA’s huge­ly finan­cial­ly suc­cess­ful forms of mass enter­tain­ment have been pop­u­lar for gen­er­a­tions of couch pota­toes and movie-goers: from Leave It to Beaver to Mia­mi Vice on tele­vi­sion; from Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti to Jaws on the big screen.

    As a tal­ent agency in the begin­ning, its rich act­ing sta­ble had includ­ed Errol Fly­nn, Gre­ta Gar­bo, Fred Astaire, Joan Craw­ford and Hen­ry Fon­da and Bette Davis. Wasser­man had per­son­al­ly signed and rep­re­sent­ed many of them. Charl­ton Hes­ton once described Wasser­man as the ‘God­fa­ther of the film indus­try.’

    Ronald Rea­gan, how­ev­er, was the bright­est star in Wasser­man’s per­son­al fir­ma­ment.

    But there was a dark side to Wasser­man — and to Rea­gan — all of which is revealed in a shock­ing new doc­u­men­tary, Wages of Spin II: Bring Down The Wall, that, accord­ing to the film’s pro­duc­er and those inter­viewed, links both of them in dark­ly shad­owed ways to the Mafia, and the killing of a U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice orga­nized crime Strike Force inves­ti­ga­tion into Mob influ­ence and infil­tra­tion at the high­est lev­els of MCA.

    It’s a case that one par­tic­i­pant in the film declares ‘dwarfs the Water­gate scan­dal’.

    Nei­ther Rea­gan nor Wasser­man were ever pros­e­cut­ed, let alone inter­ro­gat­ed as a result of the events pre­sent­ed in the film because both were so well-insu­lat­ed.

    Rea­gan died in 2004 at 93 after suf­fer­ing from Alzheimer’s for a decade, and Wasser­man died in 2002 at 89. He was said to be one of the largest con­trib­u­tors to the Ronald Rea­gan Pres­i­den­tial Library and Cen­ter for Pub­lic Affairs in Simi Val­ley, Cal­i­for­nia.

    Sev­en years before Wasserman’s death, Pres­i­dent Clin­ton — who like Rea­gan got a lot of cam­paign and finan­cial sup­port from Hol­ly­wood pow­er bro­kers — pre­sent­ed Wasser­man with the nation’s high­est civil­ian hon­or in a cer­e­mo­ny at the White House, the Pres­i­den­tial Medal of Free­dom.

    Wages of Spin II: Bring Down The Wall, pro­duced and direct­ed by Philadel­phia film­mak­er Shawn Swords, whose pre­vi­ous high­ly acclaimed doc­u­men­tary revealed the shady busi­ness prac­tices of pop­u­lar TV icon Dick Clark, will soon have it’s world pre­mier.

    But MailOn­line has been giv­en an exclu­sive screen­ing of the com­plex film which includes can­did inter­views with, among oth­ers, two for­mer top Jus­tice Depart­ment pros­e­cu­tors and an ex-FBI agent who were spear­head­ing the ill-fat­ed top-secret probe of MCA. These men lost or left their jobs when their inves­ti­ga­tion was sud­den­ly ordered shut down at ‘the high­est lev­els in Wash­ing­ton,’ accord­ing to Swords and those he inter­viewed on cam­era over a two to three year peri­od.

    Richard Stavin, a for­mer vet­er­an fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor who was assigned to the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s Orga­nized Crime Strike Force in Los Ange­les and was an inte­gral mem­ber of the MCA-Mafia probe team, declared in the film for the first time:

    ‘It’s my belief that MCA and its’ involve­ment with Mafia indi­vid­u­als, Mafia-dom­i­nat­ed com­pa­nies and our inabil­i­ty to pur­sue those was not hap­pen­stance. I believe it was an orga­nized, orches­trat­ed effort on the part of cer­tain indi­vid­u­als with­in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. to keep a hands-off pol­i­cy towards MCA.

    ‘At the time, Ronald Rea­gan was the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States and Edwin Meese was the Attor­ney Gen­er­al of the Unit­ed States [Stavin’s ulti­mate boss]. A lit­tle known fact was MCA and Lew Wasser­man sup­port­ed Ronald Rea­gan when he want­ed to become pres­i­dent of the Screen Actors Guild, which was the launch of Mr. Rea­gan’s polit­i­cal career.

    ‘I would like to think that the peo­ple in the high­est lev­els of this gov­ern­ment were not pro­tec­tive of MCA...But I’m not so sure about that.’

    Stavin left his Mafia crime-fight­ing career to which he was ded­i­cat­ed because, as he said on cam­era,

    ‘I was unable to ful­fill the duties for which I took my sworn oath.’

    Anoth­er vet­er­an fed­er­al Strike Force pros­e­cu­tor involved in the probe of orga­nized crime infil­tra­tion at MCA, Mar­vin Rud­nick, known for his bull­dog tenac­i­ty, was shock­ing­ly fired by the Jus­tice Depart­ment and con­sid­ered ‘rogue’ because he want­ed to con­tin­ue to pur­sue the sus­pect­ed MCA bad guys, even if the trail led to 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue.

    But the inves­ti­ga­tion was mys­te­ri­ous­ly ordered closed. He was lat­er rein­stat­ed.

    ‘For the Jus­tice Depart­ment to kill the case was a lit­tle extra­or­di­nary,’ Rud­nick declared on cam­era.

    ‘You won­der where it starts and where it ends. We did not get the inves­ti­ga­tion done because of interef­er­ence from high up.’

    Spe­cial Agent Thomas G. Gates, who was head­ing up the FBI end of the inves­ti­ga­tion, declared in the film: “The pow­ers trumped what we were try­ing to to do. The play­ers with­in MCA tried to stay as low-key as they could. I don’t know how much influ­ence Wasser­man was able to put on Pres­i­dent

    Rea­gan when he was in office because he [Wasser­man] was always a back­door par­tic­i­pant, but we knew who he was asso­ci­at­ing with.”

    Gates stat­ed that infor­ma­tion about the probe ‘was leak­ing out that should­n’t have hap­pened’ from the Jus­tice Depart­ment in Wash­ing­ton.

    The film’s direc­tor, Shawn Swords, assert­ed to MailOn­line that the Mob or MCA actu­al­ly had a mole in the Jus­tice Depart­ment. “It was some­body who was feed­ing infor­ma­tion to the Mob and MCA. The FBI knew it was one of twelve peo­ple, but they could­n’t fin­ger the guilty one.’

    Along with Rud­nick­’s fir­ing, and Stavin’s quit­ing after his part of the MCA probe was shut down, all of the sealed files and wire­tap doc­u­ments were said to have mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared from a sup­pos­ed­ly secure fed­er­al gov­ern­ment ware­house in Mary­land.

    Who was pulling the strings behind all of these ques­tion­able events, the more than two-hour doc­u­men­tary essen­tial­ly asks.

    As an unnamed Hol­ly­wood source was once quot­ed in a Jus­tice Depart­ment doc­u­ment: “Ronald Rea­gan is a com­plete slave of MCA who would do their bid­ding on any­thing.’

    In an exclu­sive inter­view with MailOn­line, Shawn Swords said about Rea­gan and MCA, ‘One hand washed the oth­er. That rela­tion­ship was so inces­tu­ous, and Ed Meese, who was the attor­ney gen­er­al [appoint­ed by Pres­i­dent Rea­gan] who head­ed the Jus­tice Depart­ment was real­ly good friends with the board of direc­tors at MCA.

    ‘Rea­gan’s whole career in pol­i­tics was sub­si­dized by them and helped him finan­cial­ly because for a long time he was liv­ing above his means. MCA backed every polit­i­cal cam­paign he ran. That’s the shock­ing his­to­ry — that MCA was preva­lent in his career and that they did so much quid pro quo for each oth­er.’

    ‘Ronald Rea­gan was an oppor­tunist. His whole career was guid­ed by MCA — by Wasser­man and [MCA founder] Jules Stein who bragged that Rea­gan was mal­leable, that they could do what they want­ed with him.

    ‘That thing about Rea­gan being tough on [orga­nized] crime — that’s a fal­la­cy.’

    When Rea­gan’s movie career was fad­ing and Wasser­man had dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting him star­ring roles, a deci­sion was made that would launch his polit­i­cal career. In 1947, with the aggres­sive sup­port and back­ing of the God­fa­ther at MCA, Rea­gan was elect­ed pres­i­dent of the pow­er­ful Screen Actors Guild, known as SAG, a posi­tion in which he would serve for some sev­en terms.

    SAG’s bylaws had always banned tal­ent agen­cies like MCA from pro­duc­ing any form of enter­tain­ment, such as TV pro­grams and movies. But dur­ing Rea­gan’s fifth year as the guild’s pres­i­dent a secret blan­ket waiv­er was nego­ti­at­ed with SAG, and it gave MCA and Wasser­man the plat­inum oppor­tu­ni­ty to not only mar­ket tal­ent as agents but also to move into TV and film mak­ing.

    After the waiv­er was grant­ed, MCA formed MCA Tele­vi­sion Lim­it­ed that han­dled syn­di­ca­tion, and then Review Pro­duc­tions to make TV and films, and got the jump on any com­peti­ti­tion, mak­ing it a Hol­ly­wood pow­er­house.

    When Rea­gan ran into finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties it was MCA under Wasser­man that got him lucra­tive land deals that made him even wealth­i­er. The Gen­er­al Elec­tric The­ater that Rea­gan host­ed and for which he even pro­duced pro­grams was an MCA-Review prop­er­ty.

    After Rea­gan was elect­ed gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia in 1966, with sup­port and cam­paign financ­ing from MCA and asso­ciates, some with shady ties, MCA ben­e­fit­ed from some of his exec­u­tive deci­sions.
    Fast for­ward to the mid-1980s when Rea­gan was in the Oval Office. MCA was then in nego­ti­a­tions to sell out to the giant Japan­ese com­pa­ny Mat­sushi­ta Elec­tric Indus­tri­al for bil­lions of dol­lars. From that deal Wasser­man report­ed­ly was to ben­e­fit to the tune of $500 mil­lion.

    But the big dan­ger for him and his com­pa­ny, dubbed the ‘Octo­pus,’ because its ten­ta­cles were in vir­tu­al­ly all aspects of the enter­tain­ment busi­ness, was an ongo­ing U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment probe into sus­pect­ed orga­nized crime influ­ence at MCA and in par­tic­u­lar Wasser­man’s long pur­port­ed ties to Mafia fig­ures.

    If the probe became pub­lic, it would most like­ly have impact­ed Wall Street and MCA’s pub­licly held stock, and pos­si­bly dri­ven away the Japan­ese buy­ers and the lucra­tive pur­chase. Wasser­man, accord­ing to the doc­u­men­tary, was­n’t going to let that hap­pen.

    The Jus­tice Depart­ment-FBI inves­ti­ga­tion into Mob ties with­in MCA start­ed by chance when orga­nized crime strike force pros­e­cu­tor Mar­vin Rud­nick came across intel­li­gence that a man by the name of Sal­va­tore Pisel­lo was in the hier­ar­chy of MCA.

    A red flag instant­ly went up. How and why, Rud­nick won­dered, was a high-rank­ing sol­dier in the Gam­bi­no Mafia fam­i­ly of New York who was known to his asso­ciates as ‘Sal The Banker’, ‘Sal the Swindler,’ and ‘Big Sal,’ doing busi­nesss in MCA’s offices in Uni­ver­sal City.

    Pisel­lo had just been sen­tenced to four years in prison on tax eva­sion charges, and Rud­nick at a hear­ing in U.S. Dis­trict Court in L.A. stat­ed that evi­dence had been uncov­ered link­ing him to ‘crim­i­nal activ­i­ty in the record indus­try.’

    Pisel­lo had denied any involve­ment in orga­nized crime, and declared, ‘I’ll go to prison for 20 years if any­one can prove that. I go to church every Sun­day and the only orga­ni­za­tion I ever belonged to was the Holy Name Soci­ety.’ Regard­ing his MCA con­nec­tion, he declared, ‘I’m in the record busi­ness for one year and I’m sup­posed to have destroyed the indus­try.’

    But his con­nec­tions and deal­ings became the tar­get of sev­er­al fed­er­al grand jury probes. MCA denied know­ing any­thing about his alleged orga­nized crime links, and claimed to have no idea how he got in the door.

    The inves­ti­ga­tion though led to oth­er crime fig­ures involved with MCA before it got shut down.
    Anoth­er source inter­viewed on cam­era in the doc­u­men­tary, inves­tiga­tive reporter William K. Knoedelseder, Jr., author of Stiffed: A True Sto­ry of MCA, the Music Busi­ness and the Mafia, pub­lished in 1993, had for a dozen years been cov­er­ing orga­nized crime and oth­er cor­rup­tion in the enter­tain­ment indus­try for The Los Ange­les Times.

    He began writ­ing rev­e­la­to­ry sto­ries for the paper about Rud­nick and Stavin’s inves­ti­ga­tion, and was the first to report that Pisel­lo ‘wound up in high-lev­el meet­ings with MCA offi­cers’ nego­ti­at­ing lucra­tive record deals ‘that would place him among the best-paid exec­u­tives in the indus­try.’

    But like Rud­nick and Stavin, the series of sto­ries was a news­pa­per career-ender for Knoedelseder. He was ordered by edi­tors to stop writ­ing about MCA, and he quit his job, accord­ing to a 2006 book called ‘Super­mob’ that also dealt with Rea­gan, Wasser­man and the Mafia, and it not­ed that the pub­lish­er of the LA Times at the time had got­ten his job ‘thanks to Lew Wasser­man’s kind inter­ces­sion.’

    Rud­nick had also been ordered to drop his end of the inves­ti­ga­tion.

    ‘I was told by my boss not to intro­duce evi­dence that was embar­rass­ing to MCA,’ he stat­ed in the doc­u­men­tary. ‘My office was being told by some­body high­er up to stop the inves­ti­ga­tion to show how Pisel­lo got into MCA which was the most impor­tant part of the case. MCA exec­u­tives weren’t coop­er­at­ing because some­body high up in MCA was try­ing to kill the deal.

    ‘For MCA to be doing busi­ness so close­ly with Pisel­lo was a pri­ma­ry exam­ple of what the Strike Force should be doing, and when the Strike Force looked the oth­er way and turned it down, then you know darn well inter­fer­ence took place. As a pros­e­cu­tor we should be inves­ti­gat­ing the peo­ple who are inter­fer­ing, not just walk­ing away from it and this is what I tried to do.’

    At one point, Rud­nick real­ized he was being fol­lowed as he made his inves­tiga­tive rounds. When he told his supe­ri­ors in Wash­ing­ton, their response was, ‘We got your back.’

    Accord­ing to Rud­nick, ‘MCA decid­ed to reach out and try to kill our case which they even­tu­al­ly did. MCA sent peo­ple out to fol­low me while I was dri­ving, they stopped a wire­tap that was legal. They were able to inter­fere with all kinds of offi­cial acts, but nobody at the high­est lev­els of the Jus­tice Depart­ment seemed to care or want­ed to stop it. It went all the way to the top.’

    Dur­ing the course of the inves­ti­ga­tion before it was shut down by pow­ers in Wash­ing­ton the probers found anoth­er alleged Mob con­nec­tion at MCA — Eugene Giaquin­to, who was the head of MCA Home Video. Wire­taps had caught Giaquin­to talk­ing to ‘La Cosa Nos­tra peo­ple in the East,’ and the FBI agent Gates stat­ed on cam­era that ‘Wasser­man was Giaquin­to’s men­tor and pro­mot­ed in the MCA’s Home Enter­tain­ment Group which was very pow­er­ful.’

    Accord­ing to Stavin, Giaquin­to, who was an exec­u­tive at MCA for some two decades, had ties to Mob boss John Got­ti, and it was learned by the inves­ti­ga­tors that when a pow­er strug­gle between two divi­sion heads at MCA had erupt­ed it was alleged­ly resolved by Got­ti, dubbed the ‘Teflon Don,’ and the ‘Dap­per Don,’ who was Boss of New York’s Gam­bi­no Fam­i­ly at the time. He died in prison in 2002.

    In one bizarre spin-off to the whole com­pli­cat­ed case, Got­ti was asked to kill a planned movie in which the actor James Caan, who starred in “The God­fa­ther” report­ed­ly was to play the role of Jew­ish mob­ster Mey­er Lan­sky.

    Giaquin­to, a tar­get of the MCA-Mafia probe, report­ed­ly was involved in try­ing to get the film blocked. Caan dropped the project.

    In the book Super­mob, Giaquin­to was iden­ti­fied as the source who went into action to get the MCA-Mafia probe brought to an end. The author quot­ed the source as recall­ing Giaquin­to going bal­lis­tic and declar­ing, ‘I’m call­ing [Attor­ney gen­er­al Ed] Meese and get­ting this thing stopped right now.’ The book also quot­ed an attor­ney for sev­er­al MCA exec­u­tives who had been coop­er­at­ing with Strike Force pros­e­cu­tor Mar­vin Rud­nick as say­ing, ‘There was [talk] about how Ed Meese want­ed cer­tain actions tak­en because Nan­cy Rea­gan had a friend in high places in the enter­tain­ment indus­try.’

    Accord­ing to Swords, ‘The Mob were prob­a­bly work­ing her, too. She was on the board of gov­er­nors for the Screen Actors Guild. She was a dri­ving force behind Rea­gan. Appar­ent­ly she was the one who was push­ing him into every­thing.’

    Mrs. Rea­gan turns 93 this com­ing July 6.

    While the once lib­er­al demo­c­rat Rea­gan became a pop­u­lar screen star and lat­er switched polit­i­cal alle­giance and became a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can polit­i­cal hero to mil­lions, Wasser­man was lit­tle known to the gen­er­al pub­lic. A tall and gaunt man of mys­tery who sport­ed over­size eye­glass­es and dressed like a mor­ti­cian — black suits, white shirts, black ties, Wasser­man made his army of under­ling agents dress sim­i­lar­ly. In the busi­ness of enter­tain­ment , they were con­sid­ered ‘the black-suit­ed Mafia.’

    Wasser­man was seen as fright­en­ing­ly ruth­less with a tem­per that made pow­er­ful men cringe.
    His men­tor in the begin­ing of his career was Jules Stein, an opthal­mol­o­gist from the Windy City who in the ear­ly years of the Roar­ing ’20s had found­ed the Music Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca, which booked bands in the mid­west, and had close ties to shady fig­ures, reput­ed­ly mem­bers of the Chica­go Mob.

    A poor boy from a Russ­ian immi­grant fam­i­ly, Wasser­man grew up in Cleve­land, worked as a movie house ush­er at night, and after get­ting his high school diplo­ma — he nev­er went to col­lege — joined up with what was known as the May­field Road Gang, an Ital­ian-led Mafia orga­ni­za­tion with ties to the Jew­ish mob — help­ing to run a casi­no.

    Mov­ing up the career lad­der in Chica­go, Wasser­man was recruit­ed by founder Jules Stein who saw him as a bright boy with good ideas and made him an MCA tal­ent agent. Stein was well-con­nect­ed: his MCA was book­ing bands for the flashy night­clubs and crooked gam­bling hous­es run by leg­endary crime boss Al Capone. By then, Wasser­man had tak­en a wife — his attor­ney father-in-law report­ed­ly was a reput­ed Mob mouth­piece.

    In the late ’30s, Stein and Wasser­man fol­lowed the adage of Horace Gree­ley and went west, set­ting up shop in the ritzy cen­ter of the enter­tain­ment indus­try — Bev­er­ly Hills, around the same time that the Chica­go Mob was putting down roots in the movie cap­i­tal.

    Of all the incred­i­ble act­ing tal­ent in the MCA sta­ble of clients, the first to ever receive a $1 mil­lion movie con­tract was Ronald Rea­gan– a deal Wasser­man nego­ti­at­ed for him with Warn­er Broth­ers Stu­dios in 1941.

    Wasser­man appar­ent­ly saw a future for Rea­gan far bey­ong the act­ing world. Wasser­man was just 36 when Stein anoint­ed him MCA’s pres­i­dent, the youngest to ever hold such a posi­tion of pow­er. It was in the late ’40s that Wasser­man saw MCA as a major play­er in the new tech­nol­o­gy known as tele­vi­sion.

    In Hol­ly­wood, where all movies and their char­ac­ters have an arc, Wasser­man’s rise to pow­er end­ed after the Jus­tice Depat­men­t’s orga­nized Crime Strike Force inves­ti­ga­tion was killed. The sale of MCA went through to the Japan­ese for $6.5 bil­lion in 1990. Wasser­man had a role in man­age­ment for a time. But when MCA was sold again to the Sea­gram Com­pa­ny in 1995 for $5.7 bil­lion,

    Wasser­man was­n’t even told. By then his pow­er was gone.

    Posted by Swamp | June 1, 2014, 10:00 am
  2. Amer­i­ca’s eter­nal faith in mod­er­ates: “Mr. Dulles believed ‘mod­er­ate’ Nazis might ‘be use­ful’ to Amer­i­ca” http://t.co/S8MZwpuDt8— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) Octo­ber 27, 2014

    The dream of the uni­corn-rid­ing mod­er­ate extrem­ists is an alarm­ing­ly potent force in human affairs:

    The New York Times
    In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agen­cies Used 1,000 Nazis

    By ERIC LICHTBLAUOCT. 26, 2014

    WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and oth­er Unit­ed States agen­cies employed at least a thou­sand Nazis as Cold War spies and infor­mants and, as recent­ly as the 1990s, con­cealed the government’s ties to some still liv­ing in Amer­i­ca, new­ly dis­closed records and inter­views show.

    At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforce­ment and intel­li­gence lead­ers like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggres­sive­ly recruit­ed one­time Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Sovi­et “assets,” declas­si­fied records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intel­li­gence val­ue against the Rus­sians out­weighed what one offi­cial called “moral laps­es” in their ser­vice to the Third Reich.

    The agency hired one for­mer SS offi­cer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after con­clud­ing he was prob­a­bly guilty of “minor war crimes.”

    And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pres­sured pros­e­cu­tors to drop an inves­ti­ga­tion into an ex-spy out­side Boston impli­cat­ed in the Nazis’ mas­sacre of tens of thou­sands of Jews in Lithua­nia, accord­ing to a gov­ern­ment offi­cial.

    Evi­dence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerg­ing pub­licly in the 1970s. But thou­sands of records from declas­si­fied files, Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act requests and oth­er sources, togeth­er with inter­views with scores of cur­rent and for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cials, show that the government’s recruit­ment of Nazis ran far deep­er than pre­vi­ous­ly known and that offi­cials sought to con­ceal those ties for at least a half-cen­tu­ry after the war.

    In 1980, F.B.I. offi­cials refused to tell even the Jus­tice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 sus­pect­ed Nazis liv­ing in the Unit­ed States.

    The bureau balked at a request from pros­e­cu­tors for inter­nal records on the Nazi sus­pects, mem­os show, because the 16 men had all worked as F.B.I. infor­mants, pro­vid­ing leads on Com­mu­nist “sym­pa­thiz­ers.” Five of the men were still active infor­mants.

    Refus­ing to turn over the records, a bureau offi­cial in a memo stressed the need for “pro­tect­ing the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of such sources of infor­ma­tion to the fullest pos­si­ble extent.”

    Some spies for the Unit­ed States had worked at the high­est lev­els for the Nazis.

    One SS offi­cer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a men­tor and top aide to Adolf Eich­mann, archi­tect of the “Final Solu­tion,” and wrote pol­i­cy papers on how to ter­ror­ize Jews.

    Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relo­cat­ed him and his fam­i­ly to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loy­al post­war ser­vice and in view of the innocu­ous­ness of his [Nazi] par­ty activ­i­ties,” the agency wrote.

    His son, Gus von Bolschwing, who learned many years lat­er of his father’s ties to the Nazis, sees the rela­tion­ship between the spy agency and his father as one of mutu­al con­ve­nience forged by the Cold War.

    “They used him, and he used them,” Gus von Bolschwing, now 75, said in an inter­view. “It shouldn’t have hap­pened. He nev­er should have been admit­ted to the Unit­ed States. It wasn’t con­sis­tent with our val­ues as a coun­try.”

    When Israeli agents cap­tured Eich­mann in Argenti­na in 1960, Otto von Bolschwing went to the C.I.A. for help because he wor­ried they might come after him, mem­os show.

    Agency offi­cials were wor­ried as well that Mr. von Bolschwing might be named as Eichmann’s “col­lab­o­ra­tor and fel­low con­spir­a­tor and that the result­ing pub­lic­i­ty may prove embar­rass­ing to the U.S.” a C.I.A. offi­cial wrote.

    After two agents met with Mr. von Bolschwing in 1961, the agency assured him it would not dis­close his ties to Eich­mann, records show. He lived freely for anoth­er 20 years before pros­e­cu­tors dis­cov­ered his wartime role and pros­e­cut­ed him. He agreed to give up his cit­i­zen­ship in 1981, dying months lat­er.

    In all, the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and oth­er agen­cies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and col­lab­o­ra­tors as spies and infor­mants after the war, accord­ing to Richard Bre­it­man, a Holo­caust schol­ar at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty who was on a gov­ern­ment-appoint­ed team that declas­si­fied war-crime records.

    The full tal­ly of Nazis-turned-spies is prob­a­bly much high­er, said Nor­man Goda, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da his­to­ri­an on the declas­si­fi­ca­tion team, but many records remain clas­si­fied even today, mak­ing a com­plete count impos­si­ble.

    “U.S. agen­cies direct­ly or indi­rect­ly hired numer­ous ex-Nazi police offi­cials and East Euro­pean col­lab­o­ra­tors who were man­i­fest­ly guilty of war crimes,” he said. “Infor­ma­tion was read­i­ly avail­able that these were com­pro­mised men.”

    None of the spies are known to be alive today.

    The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War men­tal­i­ty shared by two titans of intel­li­gence in the 1950s: Mr. Hoover, the long­time F.B.I. direc­tor, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. direc­tor.

    Mr. Dulles believed “mod­er­ate” Nazis might “be use­ful” to Amer­i­ca, records show. Mr. Hoover, for his part, per­son­al­ly approved some ex-Nazis as infor­mants and dis­missed accu­sa­tions of their wartime atroc­i­ties as Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da.

    In 1968, Mr. Hoover autho­rized the F.B.I. to wire­tap a left-wing jour­nal­ist who wrote crit­i­cal sto­ries about Nazis in Amer­i­ca, inter­nal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the jour­nal­ist, Charles Allen, a poten­tial threat to nation­al secu­ri­ty.

    John Fox, the bureau’s chief his­to­ri­an, said: “In hind­sight, it is clear that Hoover, and by exten­sion the F.B.I., was short­sight­ed in dis­miss­ing evi­dence of ties between recent Ger­man and East Euro­pean immi­grants and Nazi war crimes. It should be remem­bered, though, that this was at the peak of Cold War ten­sions.”

    The C.I.A. declined to com­ment for this arti­cle.

    The Nazi spies per­formed a range of tasks for Amer­i­can agen­cies in the 1950s and 1960s, from the haz­ardous to the triv­ial, the doc­u­ments show.

    In Mary­land, Army offi­cials trained sev­er­al Nazi offi­cers in para­mil­i­tary war­fare for a pos­si­ble inva­sion of Rus­sia. In Con­necti­cut, the C.I.A. used an ex-Nazi guard to study Sovi­et-bloc postage stamps for hid­den mean­ings.

    In Vir­ginia, a top advis­er to Hitler gave clas­si­fied brief­in­gs on Sovi­et affairs. And in Ger­many, SS offi­cers infil­trat­ed Russ­ian-con­trolled zones, lay­ing sur­veil­lance cables and mon­i­tor­ing trains.

    But many Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declas­si­fied secu­ri­ty reviews show. Some were deemed habit­u­al liars, con­fi­dence men or embez­zlers, and a few even turned out to be Sovi­et dou­ble agents, the records show.

    Mr. Bre­it­man said the moral­i­ty of recruit­ing ex-Nazis was rarely con­sid­ered. “This all stemmed from a kind of pan­ic, a fear that the Com­mu­nists were ter­ri­bly pow­er­ful and we had so few assets,” he said.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 27, 2014, 8:50 am
  3. It’s look­ing like move­ment con­ser­v­a­tives is expe­ri­enc­ing a peri­od of self dis­cov­ery. Uh oh:

    TPM Cafe
    Why Con­ser­v­a­tives Sud­den­ly Care About Rightwing Mail-Order Scams
    By Aman­da Mar­cotte
    Pub­lished Feb­ru­ary 18, 2015, 11:56 AM EST

    Any­one who fol­lows the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment care­ful­ly could tell you that it’s about 25 per­cent pol­i­tics and 75 per­cent mail-order scam. For more than half a cen­tu­ry now, char­la­tans pass­ing them­selves off as con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers have exploit­ed ordi­nary con­ser­v­a­tives’ anx­i­ety about a chang­ing Amer­i­ca to col­lect address­es and now email lists in order to sell snake oil and raise funds that fol­low­ers believe are going to polit­i­cal caus­es but fre­quent­ly just line the pock­ets of the con artists. The con­ser­v­a­tive ten­den­cy to con their own peo­ple occa­sion­al­ly piques the inter­est of the lib­er­al media. Media Mat­ters, for instance, has run expos­es on how con­ser­v­a­tive lumi­nar­ies like Mike Huck­abee and Scott Brown sold their mail­ing lists to con artists ped­dling fake “cures” for Alzheimer’s and can­cer. Rachel Mad­dow has been report­ing for years on how Newt Gin­grich scams mon­ey off his fol­low­ers through direct mail offers of “awards” and by try­ing to rope them into fraud­u­lent invest­ments.

    But, until recent­ly, even the more rep­utable con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets have remained mum about their fel­lows’ habit of bilk­ing their fol­low­ers. Fox News even keeps bring­ing one of the worst offend­ers, Mike Huck­abee, on air over and over, mak­ing it all the eas­i­er for him to earn the trust of view­ers and then to sell them out to snake-oil sales­men.

    But there are signs that some of the most rigid­ly con­ser­v­a­tive rightwing writ­ers out there are get­ting sick of it and are ready to speak out. On Tues­day, Jon­ah Gold­berg of the Nation­al Review high­light­ed a report from John Hawkins of Right Wing News that exposed how many of the Tea Par­ty-style PACs are basi­cal­ly tak­ing mon­ey gullible donors think is going to elect con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians and using it for basi­cal­ly any­thing but that. Ten of the 17 PACs exam­ined by Hawkins took in more than $50 mil­lion and only spent about $3.6 mil­lion of it on cam­paigns. Sarah­PAC, run by Sarah Palin, was a typ­i­cal offend­er, spend­ing only $205,000 of their $3 mil­lion, or about 7 per­cent of the funds.

    “I doubt the aver­age donor was under the impres­sion that only a nick­el out of every dol­lar he or she gave went to get­ting tea-par­ty-friend­ly can­di­dates elect­ed,” Gold­berg writes angri­ly.

    Why is there this sud­den inter­est on the right in shin­ing a light on the way that con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers see their fol­low­ers less as fel­low trav­el­ers and more as marks? Part of it is like­ly due to a major exposé of the same problem—scam PACs—run by Politi­co last month. “Since the tea par­ty burst onto the polit­i­cal land­scape in 2009, the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment has been plagued by an explo­sion of PACs that crit­ics say exist most­ly to pad the pock­ets of the con­sul­tants who run them,” Vogel wrote. That means, as Hawkins not­ed in his cov­er­age, that mon­ey that might oth­er­wise help sway elec­tions is instead just spin­ning down the drain.

    But don’t start wor­ry­ing that con­ser­v­a­tive lead­er­ship is grow­ing a con­science about steal­ing Grandma’s Social Secu­ri­ty check. Erick Erick­son was quot­ed in the Politi­co sto­ry as say­ing that “[t]hese groups have the pulse of the crowd, and they rec­og­nize that they can make a prof­it off the angst of the con­ser­v­a­tive base vot­ers who are look­ing for out­siders.” But Erick­son him­self is one of those peo­ple who prof­its off scams run, to use his own words, “by con men liv­ing well off oth­er people’s mon­ey.” As Media Mat­ters detailed last month, Erick­son sells his email list to not just the scam PACs that Erick­son crit­i­cizes, but to even sketch­i­er char­la­tans. Erickson’s email list has host­ed pitch­es that claim to have a “secret can­cer cure,” that they need to stock­pile food to avoid being thrown in “FEMA camps,” and try­ing to sell “a real and unusu­al retire­ment option that no bank will tell you about” with the alarmist claim that the gov­ern­ment is shut­ting down ATMs.

    ...

    The prob­lem is only going to become more vis­i­ble in the next year or so, as Repub­li­cans gear up for anoth­er pri­ma­ry sea­son. In 2012, some Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates such as Her­man Cain and Newt Gin­grich ran cam­paigns that seemed to be less about actu­al­ly try­ing to win the White House and more about get­ting more email sub­scribers to hit with the fake can­cer cures and fraud­u­lent invest­ment schemes. Already Mike Huck­abee and Ben Car­son have been mak­ing noise about run­ning for pres­i­dent in 2016, which is just more the same: A feint whose real pur­pose is get­ting the email address­es of peo­ple gullible enough to think that Mike Huck­abee is a legit­i­mate can­di­date so that you can sell them sur­vival­ist gear and inef­fec­tive erec­tile dys­func­tion pills.

    It’s tempt­ing to write off this prob­lem, say­ing it’s hard to care if a bunch rightwingers are stu­pid enough to let Mike Huck­abee con them out of their mon­ey. But just because the marks are often less than sym­pa­thet­ic doesn’t mean that con­ning them is any less deplorable. Hope­ful­ly, this will­ing­ness to talk about shady PACs sug­gests that con­ser­v­a­tive pun­dits will grow bold­er about tack­ling the wider prob­lem of flim­flam in the ranks. The only way this prob­lem is going to get bet­ter is if con­ser­v­a­tives them­selves start speak­ing out about it.

    “Hope­ful­ly, this will­ing­ness to talk about shady PACs sug­gests that con­ser­v­a­tive pun­dits will grow bold­er about tack­ling the wider prob­lem of flim­flam in the ranks. The only way this prob­lem is going to get bet­ter is if con­ser­v­a­tives them­selves start speak­ing out about it.” Yep, and it’s not just rab­ble’s mon­ey that’s being har­vest­ed by The Long Con. For the activist rab­ble, it’s also har­vest­ing their hopes and dreams:

    Politi­co
    Tea Par­ty News Net­work staffers resign
    By HADAS GOLD |
    2/19/15 4:48 PM EST

    Staffers of the Tea Par­ty News Net­work resigned on Thurs­day after a Dai­ly Beast report showed how the three-year-old con­ser­v­a­tive news site fell into post­ing click bait smut, like videos of fights and burn­ing cars.

    “Unfor­tu­nate­ly the ‘coali­tion’ of com­pa­nies and groups you col­lec­tive­ly run has not been oper­at­ing with the hon­or that peo­ple should be able to expect,” TeaParty.net chief strate­gist Dustin Stock­ton, oper­a­tions man­ag­er Kris Hall, TPNN Social Media Direc­tor Jen­nifer Burke, TPNN con­trib­u­tor and TPNN social media spe­cial­ist Matthew Burke and TPNN con­trib­u­tor Greg Camp­bell wrote in a let­ter to own­ers Todd Cefarat­ti and Kellen Gui­da, and post­ed by Wash­ing­ton Free Beacon’s CJ Cia­ramel­la.

    “TheTeaParty.net Face­book page was built using non-prof­it dol­lars and resources and yet the hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars a month being gen­er­at­ed from traf­fic deriv­ing from the non-prof­it Face­book page are being fun­neled to a for prof­it com­pa­ny with no trans­paren­cy. Even if you could find a way to make that legal, it’s immoral and uneth­i­cal,” the let­ter con­tin­ues. “We rep­re­sent our­selves as ‘The Tea Par­ty’ on Face­book and take no action to hold our­selves to the high­er stan­dards of that des­ig­na­tion. Posts by fights.buzz and viral.buzz have become increas­ing­ly vile and unac­cept­able. The Tea Par­ty is not TMZ and TPNN is not World­Star.”

    ...

    Accord­ing to the Dai­ly Beast, Cefaratti’s non-prof­it TeaParty.net which is con­nect­ed to TPNN took in close to $6 mil­lion in dona­tions in this last elec­tion cycle.

    “You reg­u­lar­ly show con­tempt for the peo­ple who make all your finan­cial suc­cess pos­si­ble. The staff who work around the clock t pro­duce time­ly and break­ing con­tent is reg­u­lar­ly remind­ed that ‘writ­ers are cheap,’” the staffers wrote in the let­ter. “The audi­ence is regard­ed as unso­phis­ti­cat­ed sim­ple­tons. The activism that built all the infra­struc­ture is con­sid­ered a ‘pain in the ass’ not as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to save the coun­try. As a group we can no longer tol­er­ate being asso­ci­at­ed with these despi­ca­ble prac­tices. Effec­tive imme­di­ate­ly we resign from all posi­tions with Glen­Gary and Stop This Insan­i­ty. Pleas update all web­sites to reflect our depar­ture.”

    “You reg­u­lar­ly show con­tempt for the peo­ple who make all your finan­cial suc­cess pos­si­ble. The staff who work around the clock t pro­duce time­ly and break­ing con­tent is reg­u­lar­ly remind­ed that ‘writ­ers are cheap,’...The audi­ence is regard­ed as unso­phis­ti­cat­ed sim­ple­tons.” The sit­u­a­tion is def­i­nite­ly look­ing dicey.

    Part of what makes the cri­sis of con­fi­dence in The Long Con is that fact that the GOP does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need its small donor mon­ey. The bil­lion­aires can han­dle that part just fine. But they still need the rab­ble to vote for The Long Con, and all those small dona­tions are undoubt­ed­ly part of the psy­cho­log­i­cal bond that keeps the activist base active and vot­ing.

    At the same time, in a strange way the scam­my nature of these net­works real­ly does helps get GOP elect­ed. Why? Because the extreme ease with which you can appar­ent­ly prof­it from scam­ming the right-wing rab­ble guar­an­tees a steady stream of new con artists into the move­ment. So there’s also going to new grifters to replace the old ones once they get out­ted as a scam or grow stale. After all, one of the key sources of GOP suc­cess is a hyper-active base and the Grifter Cir­cus makes its mon­ey by ril­ing up the base into hyper-activ­i­ty. So even though the mon­ey may not be spent on out­reach, the fact that these groups are pro­duc­ing con­tent that moti­vates peo­ple to donate is indeed a sign that they are suc­ceed­ing in that key area of freak­ing out the base and keep­ing them engaged and ready for more grift­ing. That’s how the GOP gets out the vote and cre­ates and army of activists...but that only works if scam­my nature of it all isn’t rubbed so deeply in the faces of the rab­ble that they sour on the whole expe­ri­ence.

    One or two grifters get­ting out­ed every now and then is sus­tain­able. But if it becomes known that pret­ty much the entire right-wing polit­i­cal infra­struc­ture is either a bil­lion­aire front group or small-time scam out­fit, all the mon­ey in the world isn’t going to help the oli­garchs on elec­tion day. Demor­al­ized rab­ble don’t vote.

    And oth­er than the scams and oli­garch agen­das, what’s the Amer­i­can right-wing fight­ing for these days that could keep the rab­ble in the fold? Oh yeah. Moral val­ues.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 21, 2015, 6:48 pm
  4. Relat­ed to this is that pub­lic opin­ion is being pushed in a more racist direc­tion that sub­stan­tial­ly can lead to civic ten­sion result­ing in race war such as a ver­sion of what hap­pened in Bal­ti­more. The recent ille­gal pur­chase of a gun and relat­ed death caused by an ille­gal alien will be used to sup­port can­di­dates such as Bob Whitak­er.

    The ille­gal alien mur­der of a young woman in San Fran­cis­co is the 1988 “Willie Hor­ton” politi­ciza­tion of a sen­sa­tion­al crime all over again. Parolees like Willie Hor­ton do some­times kill again. That’s an accept­able risk we are will­ing to take. The alter­na­tive is to grant no parole to any vio­lent offend­er and to keep 5 mil­lion Amer­i­cans, instead of 2.3 mil­lion, in prison indef­i­nite­ly.

    Those who would blame all 11,300,000 undoc­u­ment­ed aliens for the actions of one ille­gal alien, would do well to recall the noto­ri­ous anti-Semit­ic Drey­fus case in 1880s France.

    Kristall­nacht (Nov. 9, 1938) was jus­ti­fied by the Nazis because a sin­gle Jew­ish “ter­ror­ist” had assas­si­nat­ed the Ger­man ambas­sador in Paris the day before.

    See the arti­cle “Obser­va­tion San Fran­cis­co shoot­ing: a game-chang­er for immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy?”

    http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0710/San-Francisco-shooting-a-game-changer-for-immigration-policy?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Weekend_Best_of_Web&utm_campaign=20150711_Newsletter%3AWeekend%20%28UMP%29&cmpid=ema%3Anws%3AWeekly%2520Newsletter%2520%2807–11-2015%29

    Posted by "Freedom Fighter" | July 11, 2015, 3:26 pm
  5. Kevin Williamson, the right-wing colum­nist know for such clas­sics as call­ing for the exe­cu­tion of both the doc­tors that per­form abor­tions and the women that get them and has hailed the con­tem­po­rary GOP as today’s true cham­pi­on of civ­il rights in Amer­i­ca, had a thought brand new thought of sim­i­lar cal­iber that he decid­ed to share with the world in his Nation­al Review col­umn recent­ly: Bernie Sanders is a Nazi. Now you know:

    TPM Livewire
    Nation­al Review’s 4 Zani­est Claims For Why Bernie Sanders Is Like A Nazi

    By Caitlin Mac­Neal
    Pub­lished July 21, 2015, 11:52 AM EDT

    In a Nation­al Review Online piece pub­lished on Mon­day, con­ser­v­a­tive writer Kevin D. Williamson tried to make the point that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑VT), who is cur­rent­ly run­ning to be the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee, is actu­al­ly a nation­al social­ist.

    Through­out the piece, Williamson sug­gests that Sanders’ ide­olo­gies are sim­i­lar to those of the Nazis and that the sen­a­tor holds racist and xeno­pho­bic beliefs. He also claims that Sanders is a ruth­less politi­cian hell-bent on destroy­ing his com­pe­ti­tion and Amer­i­cans’ free­doms.

    The piece is rem­i­nis­cent of the Nation­al Review senior edi­tor Jon­ah Gold­berg’s book “Lib­er­al Fas­cism,” which Gold­berg described as a piece “about how con­tem­po­rary pro­gres­sivism is a polit­i­cal reli­gion with its roots in Ger­man state the­o­ry, shar­ing a close fam­i­ly resem­blance to fas­cism.”

    Here are some of the low­lights from Williamson’s piece titled “Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nation­al­ism and Social­ism”:

    Bernie is a nation­al social­ist, like the Nazis

    At the start of his piece, Williams ref­er­ences the Nazi par­ty while intro­duc­ing his the­sis that Sanders is a nation­al social­ist:

    In the Berniev­erse, there’s a whole lot of nation­al­ism mixed up in the social­ism. He is, in fact, lead­ing a nation­al-social­ist move­ment, which is a queasy and uncom­fort­able thing to write about a man who is the son of Jew­ish immi­grants from Poland and whose fam­i­ly was mur­dered in the Holo­caust. But there is no oth­er way to char­ac­ter­ize his views and his pol­i­tics.

    Sanders is sim­i­lar to Hugo Chavez

    Fur­ther along in the piece, Williamson com­pares Sanders to deceased Venezue­lan pres­i­dent Hugo Chávez:

    There are many kinds of Us-and-Them pol­i­tics, and Bernie Sanders, to be sure, is not a nation­al social­ist in the mode of Alfred Rosen­berg or Julius Stre­ich­er. He is a nation­al social­ist in the mode of Hugo Chávez. He isn’t dri­ven by racial hatred; he’s dri­ven by polit­i­cal hatred. And that’s bad enough.

    Sanders is a xeno­phobe and a racist

    Williamson paints Sanders as xeno­pho­bic based on the sen­a­tor’s views on trade pol­i­cy and Chi­na:

    The inces­sant reliance on xeno­pho­bic (and large­ly untrue) tropes hold­ing that the cur­rent eco­nom­ic woes of the Unit­ed States are the result of schem­ing for­eign­ers, espe­cial­ly the wicked Chi­nese, “steal­ing our jobs” and vic­tim­iz­ing his class allies is noth­ing more than an updat­ed ver­sion of Kaiser Wil­helm II’s “yel­low per­il” rhetoric, and though the kaiser had a more poet­i­cal imag­i­na­tion — he said he had a vision of the Bud­dha rid­ing a drag­on across Europe, lay­ing waste to all — Bernie’s take is sub­stan­tial­ly sim­i­lar. He describes the nor­mal­iza­tion of trade rela­tions with Chi­na as “cat­a­stroph­ic” — Sanders and Jesse Helms both vot­ed against the Clin­ton-backed Chi­na-trade leg­is­la­tion — and heaps scorn on every oth­er trade-lib­er­al­iza­tion pact. That eco­nom­ic inter­ac­tions with for­eign­ers are inher­ent­ly hurt­ful and exploita­tive is cen­tral to his view of how the world works.

    The con­ser­v­a­tive writer con­tin­ued to rail against Sanders’ views on trade, accus­ing the pres­i­den­tial can­di­date of being racist:

    Like most of these advo­cates of “eco­nom­ic patri­o­tism” (Barack Obama’s once-favored phrase) Bernie wor­ries a great deal about trade with brown peo­ple — Asians, Latin Amer­i­cans — but has nev­er, so far as pub­lic records show, made so much as a peep about our very large trade deficit with Swe­den, which as a share of bilat­er­al trade vol­ume is not much dif­fer­ent from our trade deficit with Chi­na, or about the size of our trade deficit with Cana­da, our largest trad­ing part­ner. Sanders doesn’t rail about the Cana­di­ans and Ger­mans steal­ing our jobs — his ire is reserved almost exclu­sive­ly for the Chi­nese and the Latin Amer­i­cans ...

    Bernie wants to crim­i­nal­ize polit­i­cal dis­sent

    After estab­lish­ing that Sanders har­bors racist beliefs, Williamson moved on to paint the sen­a­tor as a ruth­less leader ready to “sti­fle his ene­mies’ abil­i­ty to par­tic­i­pate in the polit­i­cal process”:

    And crim­i­nal­iz­ing things is very much on Bernie’s agen­da, begin­ning with the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of polit­i­cal dis­sent. At every event he swears to intro­duce a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment revers­ing Supreme Court deci­sions that affirmed the free-speech pro­tec­tions of peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions film­ing doc­u­men­taries, orga­niz­ing Web cam­paigns, and air­ing tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials in the hopes of influ­enc­ing elec­tions or pub­lic atti­tudes toward pub­lic issues. That this would amount to a repeal of the First Amend­ment does not trou­ble Bernie at all. If the First Amend­ment enables Them, then the First Amend­ment has got to go.

    Fol­low­ing crit­i­cism that Williamson com­pared Sanders to Nazis in his Mon­day piece, the Nation­al Review writer defend­ed the arti­cle and claimed that he did not inten­tion­al­ly paint Sanders as a Nazi.

    ...

    Well, this would be a clear case of God­win’s Law if Williamson did­n’t pro­ceed to deny what he just did.

    No, some­thing else just hap­pened: God­win’s Allu­sion Elu­sion strikes again.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | July 21, 2015, 3:00 pm
  6. With near­ly two-thirds of like­ly GOP vot­ers respond­ing pos­i­tive­ly to Don­ald Trump’s pro­posed ban on all Mus­lims enter­ing the US, it’s prob­a­bly not too soon to engage in the fol­low­ing analy­sis

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Edi­tor’s Blog
    Know Your Fas­cist Dic­ta­tors

    By Josh Mar­shall
    Pub­lished Decem­ber 9, 2015, 9:45 AM EST

    As long as we’re on to the sub­ject of fas­cist dic­ta­tors and Don­ald Trump is now being being com­pared to Adolf Hitler in major urban news­pa­pers, I thought I should speak up on behalf of fas­cist dic­ta­tor Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni as the true pro­to-Trump.

    Mus­soli­ni was­n’t just a fas­cist dic­ta­tor. He was the fas­cist dic­ta­tor. Indeed, he’s the only fas­cist dic­ta­tor. As I not­ed a few days ago, “fas­cism” — for main­ly decent rea­sons — became a catch-all phrase used to refer to var­i­ous right­ist author­i­tar­i­an move­ments and regimes, in some cas­es explic­it­ly draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from each oth­er, of the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Lat­er the term evolved into an ever vaguer phrase which high­ly agi­tat­ed peo­ple on the far left and far right used to yell at peo­ple about. But fas­cism was a specif­i­cal­ly Ital­ian polit­i­cal move­ment. And Mus­soli­ni was its cre­ator and leader.

    Mus­soli­ni nev­er real­ly held a can­dle to Adolf Hitler in terms of bar­bar­i­ty and killing. Indeed, after con­sol­i­dat­ing pow­er through a mix of con­sti­tu­tion­al revi­sions, extra-legal vio­lence and secret police, Mus­soli­ni made some effort to rebrand him­self as a respectable world states­man in the late 20s and ear­ly 30s, going in for suits rather than para­mil­i­tary uni­forms. (Lat­er, for a mix of rea­sons includ­ing the eco­nom­ic chal­lenges of the Great Depres­sion and the rise of Adolf Hitler he swerved back in the oth­er direc­tion.) But what real­ly makes the Trump com­par­i­son in my mind is the mix of per­son­al man­ner, cyn­i­cism and nar­cis­sism.

    We’ve all seen the videos of Adolf Hitler’s speech­es. To many Ger­mans at the time, his speech­es were sim­ply spell­bind­ing and irre­sistible. Eighty years lat­er, liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent era and with full knowl­edge of what was to come, they seem a mix of chill­ing, bizarre or demon­ic. But they are unde­ni­ably intense, phys­i­cal and dri­ven by some chill­ing but pow­er­ful and rav­en­ous inter­nal ener­gy. While Mus­soli­ni pro­vid­ed many of the mod­els for Nazi regime (col­or-shirt­ed para­mil­i­taries, var­i­ous trap­pings of pow­er and even the title of ‘leader’) he was an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter.

    Mus­solin­i’s speech­es have a mix of melo­dra­mat­ic chest-puff­ing, hands at the waist swag­ger, hints of humor, hands to the crowd to calm them­selves no mat­ter how excit­ed they are. Frankly, they’re almost oper­at­ic in nature. The mix of vio­lent rhetoric with folksy hypo­thet­i­cals and humor­ous jabs unites the two men quite nice­ly.

    The prob­lem of course is that Trump has trend­ed in an increas­ing­ly racist and xeno­pho­bic direc­tion as his cam­paign has gone on. But that was nev­er real­ly Mus­solin­i’s thing. The Nazi fetishiza­tion of race was basi­cal­ly for­eign to fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy. And Ital­ian fas­cism was not at all anti-Semit­ic ... except after 1938. That’s when Mus­soli­ni moved into full alliance with Nazi Ger­many, a move­ment he had once seen as a pro­tege and then a rival, and remade much of his move­ment (which had by then been in pow­er for fif­teen years) on the Nazi mod­el, import­ing its own ver­sion of Nazi anti-Semit­ic laws and var­i­ous new racial­ist poli­cies. Mus­solin­i’s regime was explic­it­ly anti-Semit­ic from 1938 to its fall in 1943, though there’s a fair of amount of his­tor­i­cal debate about how active­ly it pur­sued those poli­cies. When he nom­i­nal­ly ruled a Nazi pup­pet state in North­ern Italy after the col­lapse of the fas­cist regime, the Final Solu­tion was giv­en full rein.

    In oth­er words, Mus­solin­i’s embrace of racism and anti-Semi­tism appears to have been cyn­i­cal and oppor­tunis­tic. But this works as an ana­log to Trump since I con­tin­ue to believe that Trump’s embrace of racism, anti-Mex­i­can immi­grant big­otry and Islam­o­pho­bia is large­ly oppor­tunis­tic. My only hes­i­ta­tion in call­ing it cyn­i­cal is that I think Trump may be the type who once he finds some­thing con­ve­nient to say, he then starts to believe it. Once Trump says some­thing it car­ries the Trump brand. And to Trump every­thing with the Trump brand is right and amaz­ing. So pos­si­bly his mix of arro­gance and nar­cis­sism, by an alchem­i­cal process, make it gen­uine rather than cyn­i­cal. I’m out of my depth in ana­lyz­ing that par­tic­u­lar ques­tion. But how­ev­er that may be, let’s look to Mus­soli­ni as our Trump prog­en­i­tor of choice.

    “In oth­er words, Mus­solin­i’s embrace of racism and anti-Semi­tism appears to have been cyn­i­cal and oppor­tunis­tic. But this works as an ana­log to Trump since I con­tin­ue to believe that Trump’s embrace of racism, anti-Mex­i­can immi­grant big­otry and Islam­o­pho­bia is large­ly oppor­tunis­tic. My only hes­i­ta­tion in call­ing it cyn­i­cal is that I think Trump may be the type who once he finds some­thing con­ve­nient to say, he then starts to believe it. Once Trump says some­thing it car­ries the Trump brand. And to Trump every­thing with the Trump brand is right and amaz­ing. So pos­si­bly his mix of arro­gance and nar­cis­sism, by an alchem­i­cal process, make it gen­uine rather than cyn­i­cal. I’m out of my depth in ana­lyz­ing that par­tic­u­lar ques­tion. But how­ev­er that may be, let’s look to Mus­soli­ni as our Trump prog­en­i­tor of choice.”

    Did Don­ald Trump start out an oppor­tunist who, due to some sort of nar­cis­sis­tic per­son­al­i­ty defect, came to actu­al­ly believ­ing his own oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly cho­sen rhetoric? Seems pos­si­ble.

    Then again, if we lis­ten to Jeb Bush, Trump’s entire can­di­da­cy is in real­i­ty a pro-Hillary Clin­ton giant psy­op, and while that seems high­ly unlike­ly all things con­sid­ered, you got­ta dream.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 9, 2015, 3:58 pm
  7. @Pterrafractyl–

    Note­wor­thy in this con­text is the fact that the Mus­lim Brotherhood–parent of al-Qae­da, Hamas, Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad, and ISIS enjoy the favor they enjoy in the transna­tion­al cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ty because of their “cor­po­ratist” eco­nom­ics.

    This was pre­cise­ly the foun­da­tion of their ado­ra­tion of, and sup­port for, Mus­soli­ni.

    The util­i­ty of Islamists as proxy war­riors against Rus­sia and Chi­na is obvi­ous­ly impor­tant and of imme­di­ate rel­e­vance.

    How­ev­er, going for­ward, for all the rhetoric about ISIS, ban­ning Mus­lims from the U.S., nuk­ing Islamists to see if sand glows (Ted Cruz’s lat­est), the transna­tion­als and their asso­ci­at­ed polit­i­cal lumi­nar­ies and elites want to see the Arab and Mus­lim world (upwards of a bil­lion peo­ple) man­i­fest­ing eco­nom­ic gov­er­nance that cor­re­sponds to the doc­trines of M’u Sah-lini and his Cor­po­rate State.

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | December 9, 2015, 5:24 pm
  8. @Dave: Along those line, it’s going to be inter­est­ing to see what Don­ald Trump has to say to reporters should they start bring­ing up his exten­sive invest­ments in the Mid­dle East and all the praise he’s has for slave-wage par­adis­es like Dubai:

    Vice
    I Con­front­ed Don­ald Trump in Dubai

    June 2, 2014

    By Mol­ly Crabap­ple

    Don­ald Trump’s hair should not be.

    It sits on his head like a souf­flé, both airy and sol­id, as improb­a­ble as any build­ing to which he’s giv­en his name. In Dubai, I get to inspect Trump from all angles. His hair is oth­er­world­ly, but his face is more eas­i­ly dis­sect­ed. It’s tan­ger­ine, save two pale cir­cles around his eyes.

    Ivan­ka looks per­fect, how­ev­er. Even when her mouth is a moue of hate.

    I am sit­ting two scant yards from Trump père et fille at a media brief­ing for the Trump Inter­na­tion­al Golf Course, which is being built by the Emi­rati firm DAMAC Prop­er­ties in con­junc­tion with Don­ald Trump Town­hous­es and Vil­las. Trump has promised it will be the great­est golf course in the world.

    Ivan­ka is angry because I asked a real ques­tion. In Dubai, this can land you in jail.

    ***

    This May, I researched labor issues in the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates. I inter­viewed con­struc­tion work­ers build­ing muse­ums on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiy­at Island. In the rich­est city in the world, the work­ers we spoke to were lit­tle more than inden­tured ser­vants. For between $150 and $300 a month, they worked 13 hours a day, six days a week. Their boss­es kept their pass­ports. They land­ed in the UAE owing more than a year’s salary to recruiters back home. They could be deport­ed for strik­ing.

    In Pak­istan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, they had fam­i­lies depen­dent on their wages. How­ev­er bru­tal it was, the Gulf dream was their one shot out of pover­ty. They could not fu ck this up.

    The UAE is not unique­ly guilty. Migrants through­out the world, in the US as well as the UAE, do the worst work and suf­fer the worst state vio­lence. While my research focused on Abu Dhabi, poor con­di­tions are typ­i­cal through­out the Gulf. Thou­sands of work­ers could die build­ing the World Cup sta­dia in Qatar. Fig­u­ra­tive blood stains the gleam­ing steel of Earth­’s tallest build­ing, Dubai’s Burj Khal­i­fa.

    The day before Trump’s press con­fer­ence, A source inter­viewed work­ers build­ing the lux­u­ry vil­las bear­ing Trump’s name. They told him they made less than $200 a month.

    ***

    These work­ers would nev­er bask in the air con­di­tion­ing with me in the AKOYA by DAMAC Sales Cen­ter. Like so many of Dubai’s inte­ri­ors, the sales cen­ter is as cold and shin­ing as top-shelf gin. TVs play ads for Trump’s vil­las. On screen, white women plunge into swim­ming pools. Their hair bil­lows in vast bed­rooms. These vil­las are dreams for the world’s win­ners. Like the con­struc­tion work­ers who built them, they are place­less. They could be any­where. Cap­i­tal is con­text free.

    “Who are you here for?” one of the pub­li­cists asks me.

    “VICE.”

    The pub­li­cist asks how I know about the event. I say I heard about it from a friend.

    “Behave your­self,” he smiles. “Don’t embar­rass them.”

    ...

    At this type of par­ty, I always tell myself I won’t eat the food. Jour­nal­ists are either shills or sit­u­a­tion­al sociopaths. When you cov­er the pow­er­ful, they serve great canapés. The pow­er­ful can seem so nice. Your lizard brain tells you to be nice back. But to be nice is to sell out those work­ers sweat­ing it out for $200 a month.

    I swipe a flute of orange juice.

    Trump enters with Ivan­ka and DAMAC CEO Hus­sain Sajwani. Cam­era­men bash into one anoth­er to film them. Trump is lit­tle more than a mov­ing stat­ue to be sucked into their devices. He gives a prac­ticed thumbs up.

    On stage, Trump prais­es his Dubai. He is effusive—and sin­cere. Trump is one sort of West­ern­er who loves the UAE. They find here a throw­back to colo­nial­is­m’s hey­day. No mat­ter how much you’ve shat the bed at home, here your white­ness will get you a job, mon­ey, ser­vants from the Glob­al South. Help is so afford­able when migrant work­ers make $200 a month. In police states, there is lit­tle crime.

    “The world has so many prob­lems and so many fail­ures, and you come here and it’s so beau­ti­ful,” Trump says. “Why can’t we have that in New York?”

    Trump does not men­tion that, like Dubai, New York is mor­ph­ing into the no-place of mul­ti-nation­al cap­i­tal­ism. He does not men­tion that this is par­tial­ly his fault.

    The floor opens to ques­tions.

    I stand up.

    “Mr. Trump,” I ask, “the work­ers who build your vil­las make less than $200 a month. Are you sat­is­fied?”

    The room gasps, then goes silent. The secu­ri­ty tens­es towards me. In two hours I am sched­uled to inter­view Ahmed Man­soor, who spent eight months in jail for sign­ing a pro-democ­ra­cy peti­tion. I think about Nick McGee­han, a researcher from Human Rights Watch who was deport­ed a few months ago for inves­ti­gat­ing the same migrant issues I am.

    I think about the web of pro­fes­sion­al coer­cion that keeps jour­nal­ists in the US from ask­ing real ques­tions at press con­fer­ences. I won­der if the rules in Dubai are the same.

    Trump says noth­ing.

    “That’s not an appro­pri­ate ques­tion,” the pub­li­cist barks.

    When the next jour­nal­ist says, “Dubai is syn­ony­mous with the big, bold, and beau­ti­ful,” the room un-tens­es. “Is that where your affin­i­ty comes from?” the jour­nal­ist asks.

    “I think Dubai has a tremen­dous future,” Trump replies.

    ***

    The secu­ri­ty guards are still star­ing a hole into me when we file out. “Nice ques­tion,” says one reporter from a local news­pa­per.

    “Why did­n’t you ask him some­thing like that?” I ask.

    “It’s just not done here. You don’t do it because you know you won’t get an answer.”

    Implied: I live here. I might suf­fer con­se­quences. You’re leav­ing in a few days. It thrills the soul to con­front pow­er­ful bas­tards, but does that alone change any­thing? The whole Gulf is built on exploita­tion. Local jour­nal­ists must be can­ny and patient, applaud­ing small improve­ments as they come.

    ...

    “The world has so many prob­lems and so many fail­ures, and you come here and it’s so beautiful...Why can’t we have that in New York?”
    And that was in ref­er­ence to Dubai, where Sharia law is the law.

    So now we get to see how soon Trump makes any more trips back to Dubai or any of the oth­er many Mus­lim coun­tries that he’s invest­ed in. The new Trump Inter­na­tion­al Golf Club in Dubai sched­uled to be fin­ished next year and pre­sum­ably there’s going to be some sort grand open­ing cel­e­bra­tion. His busi­ness part­ners there sure seem to be tak­ing this lat­est Trumptro­ver­sy in stride.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 9, 2015, 6:26 pm
  9. It looks like Don­ald Trump’s busi­ness part­ners in Dubai who were ini­tial­ly stand­ing by him fol­low­ing out­rage across the Mid­dle East over Trump’s “ban all Mus­lims from enter­ing the US” pro­pos­al have decid­ed that their own busi­ness self-inter­erests trump pleas­ing Trump:

    Reuters
    Trump’s Dubai real estate part­ner strips his image, name from lux­u­ry golf project site

    Thu Dec 10, 2015 12:04pm EST

    DUBAI

    A Dubai real estate firm build­ing a $6 bil­lion golf com­plex with Don­ald Trump on Thurs­day stripped the prop­er­ty of his name and image amid a back­lash over the U.S. pres­i­den­tial can­di­date’s pro­pos­al to ban all Mus­lims from enter­ing the Unit­ed States.

    ...

    DAMAC Prop­er­ties had ini­tial­ly said it would stand by Trump, even as anoth­er of the bil­lion­aire’ s Mid­dle East part­ners, the Lifestyle chain of depart­ment stores, halt­ed sales of his “Trump Home” line on Wednes­day in protest at his com­ments.

    A spokesman for DAMAC Prop­er­ties, Niall McLough­lin, declined to com­ment on why Trump’s image had been removed from a bill­board out­side the project con­struc­tion site, along with that of his daugh­ter, Ivan­ka Trump.

    The AKOYA by DAMAC project will include a Trump-brand­ed golf course, gat­ed island com­mu­ni­ty and spa. Trump is also build­ing a sec­ond golf course, the Tiger Woods-designed Trump World Golf Club, at anoth­er DAMAC prop­er­ty in Dubai, AKOYA Oxy­gen.

    An adver­tis­ing bill­board out­side the AKOYA by DAMAC devel­op­ment had shown Trump in a red hat swing­ing a golf club against a back­drop of a lush green golf course.

    By Thurs­day, the image had gone, a Reuters pho­tog­ra­ph­er said.

    An adja­cent pho­to of Trump’s daugh­ter Ivan­ka, an exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent for his Trump Orga­ni­za­tion firm, was also removed from the bill­board.

    Gold let­ters spelling out “Trump Inter­na­tion­al Gold Club,” affixed to a land­scaped stone wall at the entrance to the project site, were also removed lat­er in the day, accord­ing to the Reuters pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

    Trump on Thurs­day post­poned a planned trip to Israel amid the glob­al back­lash over his pro­pos­al. Israeli politi­cians and more than 370,000 Britons urged their gov­ern­ments on Wednes­day to bar Don­ald Trump from their coun­tries.

    “A spokesman for DAMAC Prop­er­ties, Niall McLough­lin, declined to com­ment on why Trump’s image had been removed from a bill­board out­side the project con­struc­tion site, along with that of his daugh­ter, Ivan­ka Trump.”
    Who knows why they did what they did? What a mys­tery.

    But DAMAC Prop­er­ties was­n’t the only enti­ty to sud­den­ly decide to dis­as­so­ci­ate them­selves with The Don­ald in recent days, although unlike DAMAC Prop­er­ties, who is pre­sum­ably a some­what inno­cent bystander in all this (if you ignore its abu­sive labor poli­cies), this oth­er enti­ty was­n’t a vic­tim of guilt by asso­ci­a­tion but rather guilt by alarm­ing resem­b­lence:

    Vox
    Don­ald Trump has gone too far for French far-right leader Marine Le Pen

    Updat­ed by Matthew Ygle­sias on Decem­ber 11, 2015, 10:40 a.m. ET

    Don­ald Trump has been fre­quent­ly com­pared (includ­ing by me) to “far-right” pop­ulist move­ments in Europe. Indeed, schol­ar­ly experts on fas­cism say that this — rather than fas­cism — is the cor­rect com­par­i­son to make about Trump.

    But as David Kirk­patrick writes in the New York Times, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s very suc­cess­ful pop­ulist right par­ty Front Nation­al, actu­al­ly thinks Trump has gone too far:

    Mr. Trump on Mon­day evoked com­par­isons to Ms. Le Pen and her Euro­pean coun­ter­parts with his call to close Amer­i­can bor­ders to all Mus­lims “until our country’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives can fig­ure out what the hell is going on.”

    Ms. Le Pen said that was too much for her, per­haps in part because she feared jeop­ar­diz­ing the progress she had made in shed­ding her party’s pre­vi­ous image as racist and anti-Semit­ic.

    “Seri­ous­ly, have you ever heard me say some­thing like that?” she asked on Thurs­day when ques­tioned about Mr. Trump’s com­ments dur­ing a tele­vi­sion inter­view. “I defend all the French peo­ple in France, regard­less of their ori­gin, regard­less of their reli­gion.”

    You are see­ing here the basic dif­fer­ence between a legit­i­mate pro­fes­sion­al politi­cian who hap­pens to run an anti-immi­grant, anti-Mus­lim par­ty, and a real­i­ty tele­vi­sion star. Propos­ing for­mal dis­crim­i­na­tion on reli­gious grounds just does­n’t fly under the French con­sti­tu­tion any more than it does under the Amer­i­can Con­sti­tu­tion. The way you’re sup­posed to play the game is with for­mal­ly neu­tral pol­i­cy ini­tia­tives — some­thing like a ban on Syr­i­an refugees or on wear­ing reli­gious attire in school — that hap­pen to tar­get Mus­lim pop­u­la­tions. Trump’s more straight­for­ward bom­bast is get­ting him head­lines, but it’s mak­ing trou­ble for fun­da­men­tal­ly like-mind­ed peo­ple else­where.

    “You are see­ing here the basic dif­fer­ence between a legit­i­mate pro­fes­sion­al politi­cian who hap­pens to run an anti-immi­grant, anti-Mus­lim par­ty, and a real­i­ty tele­vi­sion star.”
    It must be hard being a pro­fes­sion­al far-right politi­cians who has spent years try­ing to white­wash away decades of xeno­pho­bia into a mere dog whis­tles only to see some rab­ble rous­ing real­i­ty TV star grab glob­al head­lines and then pro­ceed to drop not only his mask but the masks of pro­fes­sion far-right politi­cians every­where. Poor Marine. But at least she’s not alone. Plen­ty of oth­ers no doubt feel her pain.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 11, 2015, 7:30 pm
  10. The Wash­ing­ton Post had a recent piece on the fran­tic search among evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers to find an alter­na­tive to Don­ald Trump who, in a recent Quin­nip­i­ac poll, was tied with Ted Cruz, at 24 per­cent, among white evan­gel­i­cal reg­is­tered Repub­li­cans (Ben Car­son got 19 per­cent). And just who are these lead­ers start­ing to coa­lesce behind in an attempt to pre­vent Trump’s tox­i­c­i­ty from poi­son­ing the GOP’s brand more than it already is? They’re get­ting behind the one can­di­date that’s basi­cal­ly as tox­ic as Trump on all pol­i­cy posi­tion and pos­si­bly even more tox­ic:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post
    Evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers are fran­ti­cal­ly look­ing for ways to defeat Don­ald Trump

    By Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley
    Decem­ber 10

    Evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers are sig­nal­ing an urgency to find some­one oth­er than busi­ness­man Don­ald Trump to win the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion, releas­ing endorse­ments and talk­ing behind closed doors.

    Evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers, who are an impor­tant vot­ing bloc for the Repub­li­can Par­ty and are not eas­i­ly led by their lead­ers, are all over the map in polls lead­ing up to the pri­maries in key states. And many evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers are strug­gling to coa­lesce around one can­di­date who they believe could beat Trump.

    The Repub­li­can field is full of can­di­dates who could appeal to evan­gel­i­cals because of their social con­ser­v­a­tive posi­tions, includ­ing Ben Car­son, for­mer Arkansas gov­er­nor Mike Huck­abee or for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia sen­a­tor Rick San­to­rum. But inter­views with sev­er­al evan­gel­i­cal insid­ers this week sug­gest that lead­ers are debat­ing whether to sup­port Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) or Sen. Mar­co Rubio (Fla.).

    The lat­est nation­al poll by Quin­nip­i­ac Uni­ver­si­ty had Trump tied with Cruz for first, at 24 per­cent, among white evan­gel­i­cal reg­is­tered Repub­li­can vot­ers. The poll, done Nov. 23–30, has Car­son at 19 per­cent and every­one else with 4 per­cent or less.

    How­ev­er in Iowa, where evan­gel­i­cals can have the biggest ear­ly impact, evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers are mov­ing behind Cruz. Accord­ing to a Mon­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty sur­vey released Mon­day, Cruz has 30 per­cent sup­port from Iowa evan­gel­i­cals, fol­lowed by Trump (18 per­cent), Rubio (16 per­cent) and Car­son (15 per­cent).

    There are no rep­re­sen­ta­tive sur­veys of all evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers, but infor­mal indi­ca­tors sug­gest lit­tle sup­port for Trump among elites. Rubio led an Octo­ber sur­vey of board mem­bers of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals ask­ing which can­di­date they sup­port — includ­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates. Rubio also led an infor­mal sur­vey of 103 evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers and “insid­ers” by WORLD mag­a­zine, with Cruz and Car­ly Fio­r­i­na also receiv­ing sup­port. Only 1 per­cent picked Trump.

    Cruz has also seen a hand­ful of high-pro­file endorse­ments and is expect­ed to win among evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers in Iowa. James Dob­son, founder of Focus on the Fam­i­ly and an influ­en­tial leader among some evan­gel­i­cals, told The Wash­ing­ton Post that he is endors­ing Cruz.

    “It does appear that evan­gel­i­cal [vot­ers] are coa­lesc­ing around Sen­a­tor Cruz, along with sev­er­al oth­er coali­tions with­in the Repub­li­can field,” Dob­son said in an email. “While things can change over time, right now Sen­a­tor Cruz’s strong record on reli­gious lib­er­ty, life and mar­riage seems to be steadi­ly attract­ing evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers — a trend I don’t see end­ing any time soon.”

    Dob­son said that although he is friends with can­di­dates such as Huck­abee, he believes Cruz is the right choice because he is “bril­liant, artic­u­late, and well estab­lished in his moral and spir­i­tu­al con­vic­tions.”

    “I am very wary of Don­ald Trump,” Dob­son said in his email, cit­ing Trump’s busi­ness in gam­bling. “I would nev­er vote for a king pin with­in that enter­prise. Trump’s ten­den­cy to shoot from the hip and attack those with whom he dis­agrees would be an embar­rass­ment to the nation if he should become our Chief Exec­u­tive. I don’t real­ly believe Trump is a con­ser­v­a­tive. Final­ly, I would nev­er under any cir­cum­stance vote for Hillary Clin­ton.”

    Dobson’s posi­tion char­ac­ter­izes the point of view of many evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers who are seek­ing ways to defeat Trump. Many dis­like his involve­ment in gam­bling and are uncom­fort­able with his state­ments. For instance, some lead­ers cit­ed his report­ed com­ments about his daughter’s fig­ure, includ­ing: “I’ve said if Ivan­ka weren’t my daugh­ter, per­haps I’d be dat­ing her.”

    The sense of urgency among many evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers to defeat Trump became clear this week after he pro­posed that Mus­lims be tem­porar­i­ly halt­ed from immi­grat­ing to the Unit­ed States.

    Rus­sell Moore, pres­i­dent of the South­ern Bap­tist Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion, said Trump’s com­ments this week “pro­vid­ed a sense of clar­i­ty” and sparked a back­lash among evan­gel­i­cals.

    “Any­one who is famil­iar with the First Amend­ment and basic rights of due process in this coun­try would revolt at the idea of what Trump was propos­ing,” Moore said.

    Moore, who said he will not endorse a can­di­date, believes that evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers and vot­ers are keep­ing an open mind but that many assumed that Trump would be out of the race by now.

    “It’s sud­den­ly becom­ing seri­ous for a lot of peo­ple,” Moore said. “I know evan­gel­i­cals and oth­ers who laughed along the Trump clown­ish­ness in the sum­mer and into the fall who are now tak­ing this seri­ous­ly because they can’t believe this is hap­pen­ing in our coun­try.”

    Not all evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers were opposed to Trump’s remarks. Famed evan­ge­list Bil­ly Graham’s son Franklin Gra­ham has been urg­ing a halt on Mus­lim immi­gra­tion since this sum­mer and reit­er­at­ed his sup­port for the idea in a Face­book post on Wednes­day. “Politi­cians in Wash­ing­ton seem to be total­ly dis­con­nect­ed with real­i­ty,” he said after House Speak­er Paul Ryan crit­i­cized Trump.

    Tony Perkins, pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, has yet to endorse a can­di­date. He declined to speak about a group of con­ser­v­a­tives he has con­vened behind closed doors and said he is still weigh­ing the pres­i­den­tial field. But he said Trump has tapped into the fear that peo­ple have over secu­ri­ty.

    “I give Don­ald Trump a lot more cred­it than some do. I don’t think he mis­s­peaks as much as peo­ple think,” Perkins said. “I think in this age of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, in which peo­ple refuse to speak with clar­i­ty, he is seen as very attrac­tive. I think it’s a mis­take to write off Don­ald Trump. He has tapped some­thing that’s very real across the spec­trum, includ­ing [among] evan­gel­i­cals.”

    Perkins said a con­gres­sion­al mea­sure that would lim­it Syr­i­an refugees is “a rea­son­able approach,” but he added that “I would not talk about it in a way that we should pro­hib­it peo­ple of any par­tic­u­lar reli­gion.” He said Trump’s com­ments about Mus­lims were too broad.

    “There are many peo­ple in parts of the world who are born into Mus­lim fam­i­lies, but they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly hold to the faith. It’s not a reli­gious test. It’s an ide­o­log­i­cal test,” Perkins said. “I would avoid mak­ing sweep­ing state­ments about what our pol­i­cy should be for a par­tic­u­lar class or set of peo­ple.”

    Evan­gel­i­cals make up the largest reli­gious group in the coun­try, and they heav­i­ly lean Repub­li­can. Near­ly 70 per­cent of white evan­gel­i­cals either iden­ti­fy as Repub­li­cans or lean Repub­li­can, while 22 per­cent affil­i­ate with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty or lean Demo­c­ra­t­ic, accord­ing to the Pew Research Cen­ter.

    San­to­rum and Huck­abee have drawn sup­port from social con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cals in the past, but this time around, evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers have been espe­cial­ly divid­ed over which can­di­date to sup­port.

    “The key is, will evan­gel­i­cals find a can­di­date that most of them can agree on?” said John Green, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Akron. “If they all unit­ed behind a par­tic­u­lar can­di­date, it would make it dif­fi­cult for Trump to win.”

    Ohio con­ser­v­a­tive leader Phil Bur­ress said lead­ers in his coali­tion are still decid­ing whom they will endorse, but he believes there’s a 95 per­cent chance that they will go with Cruz.

    “We’re scared to death right now. This admin­is­tra­tion is let­ting these rad­i­cal Mus­lims into the coun­try,” Bur­ress said. “This isn’t a war on ter­ror­ism. This is a war against rad­i­cal Islam. We need some­one to speak plain­ly and clear­ly, and the pres­i­dent refus­es to do that. Ted Cruz will call it what it is.”

    But Bur­ress also sup­ports Rubio and would back him if he became a front-run­ner. Some believe Rubio could pull ahead if oth­er lead­ers drop out of the race, but tea par­ty-lean­ing evan­gel­i­cals are ner­vous about his past work on immi­gra­tion reform.

    Many lead­ers believe Cruz has a chance to beat Trump, since he has raised the most mon­ey after for­mer Flori­da gov­er­nor Jeb Bush. Bur­ress said lead­ers are espe­cial­ly eager to find a way to defeat Trump.

    “He is scary. He’ll lead us into World War III in a heart­beat,” Bur­ress said. “He thinks he’s such a great nego­tia­tor, but he’s a bul­ly.”

    John Stem­berg­er, pres­i­dent of Flori­da Fam­i­ly Action, has yet to back a can­di­date and said Cruz has the advan­tage of receiv­ing sup­port from influ­en­tial lead­ers in Texas.

    “Cruz is fear­less. He is undaunt­ed by con­fronta­tion. He is will­ing to take very unpop­u­lar posi­tions and stand alone if nec­es­sary,” Stem­berg­er said. “Rubio has an almost iden­ti­cal vot­ing record. He’s extreme­ly win­some, the finest com­mu­ni­ca­tor in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics today.”

    The Nation­al Orga­ni­za­tion for Mar­riage, a group that believes mar­riage should be between a man and a woman, announced its sup­port for Cruz on Wednes­day. “Unless con­ser­v­a­tives come togeth­er behind a full-spec­trum can­di­date — pro-mar­riage, pro-life, strong nation­al defense, etc. — there is a real risk that some­one like Don­ald Trump could win the nom­i­na­tion, which would be dis­as­trous,” the group said in a state­ment.

    Richard Viguerie, chair­man of Con­ser­v­a­tive Head­quar­ters and a pio­neer in polit­i­cal direct mail, which has been effec­tive with evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers in the past, urged vot­ers to sup­port Cruz, ask­ing on Wednes­day:: “What are we con­ser­v­a­tives wait­ing for?”

    “Along with Ted Cruz’s tal­ent and zest for polit­i­cal com­bat, and con­sis­tent record of sup­port­ing con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­cy solu­tions, goes a method­i­cal self-dis­ci­pline and self-con­trol that dis­tin­guish him from the long­time front run­ner who has been the oth­er mes­sage-car­ri­er for the con­ser­v­a­tive grass­roots and their demand for change in Wash­ing­ton — Don­ald Trump,” Viguerie wrote.

    ...

    “Along with Ted Cruz’s tal­ent and zest for polit­i­cal com­bat, and con­sis­tent record of sup­port­ing con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­cy solu­tions, goes a method­i­cal self-dis­ci­pline and self-con­trol that dis­tin­guish him from the long­time front run­ner who has been the oth­er mes­sage-car­ri­er for the con­ser­v­a­tive grass­roots and their demand for change in Wash­ing­ton — Don­ald Trump.”
    Those are the words of Richard Viguerie, one of the most influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive strate­gists for the past half a cen­tu­ry and a key fig­ure in the rise of the New Right. And as we just saw, his pro-Cruz sen­ti­ments appear to be shared by a grow­ing num­ber of con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers. It all rais­es the obvi­ous ques­tion of why a Ted Cruz nom­i­na­tion isn’t also going to be a night­mare for the GOP:

    The Hill
    Night­mare sce­nario for estab­lish­ment: Trump or Cruz

    By Niall Stan­age — 12/10/15 06:05 AM EST

    Three can­di­dates for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion have bro­ken away from the rest of the pack, and two of them — busi­ness­man Don­ald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — give the GOP estab­lish­ment night­mares.

    That leaves the third mem­ber of the trio, Flori­da Sen. Mar­co Rubio, poten­tial­ly well placed to pick up the sup­port of cen­ter-right Repub­li­can vot­ers who are look­ing for some­one to stop Trump and Cruz at almost any cost.

    But Rubio is behind both of his top-tier rivals in nation­al polling aver­ages and is even fur­ther back in Iowa, home to the first-in-the-nation cau­cus­es, where he holds fourth place, albeit behind the fast-fad­ing Ben Car­son.

    An even deep­er prob­lem for the Flori­da sen­a­tor is that oth­er can­di­dates who are com­pet­ing for the same vot­ers are unlike­ly to drop out before the New Hamp­shire pri­ma­ry. That means votes that might oth­er­wise go to Rubio could instead be won by con­tenders such as for­mer Flori­da Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jer­sey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

    Add all these fac­tors togeth­er and it becomes clear why estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans are so con­cerned, espe­cial­ly in the wake of Trump’s inflam­ma­to­ry call to ban Mus­lims from enter­ing the Unit­ed States. Cruz, mean­while, has been enjoy­ing a rapid rise in the polls.

    “Lis­ten, I think both Cruz and Trump would have a sim­i­lar impact on the par­ty, nei­ther of which would be very good. I am actu­al­ly more con­cerned about Cruz than I am about Trump,” said GOP strate­gist John Fee­hery, a for­mer senior lead­er­ship aide who is a colum­nist for The Hill.

    Fee­hery added, “I think Cruz has made a rep­u­ta­tion of relent­less men­dac­i­ty ... I think he’s a dem­a­gogue and I think he’ll destroy the par­ty. I think Trump is much more of a blowhard. But there’s not real­ly a dime’s worth of dif­fer­ence between Trump and Cruz.”

    As of Wednes­day after­noon, Trump sat atop the Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics nation­al polling aver­age, with the back­ing of 29.3 per­cent of GOP vot­ers, with Cruz in sec­ond, at 15.5 per­cent. Rubio was just behind, with 14.8 per­cent. In Iowa, where the first cau­cus­es will be held on Feb. 1, Cruz runs much clos­er, with 22.3 per­cent aver­age sup­port to Trump’s 25.7 per­cent. Rubio is far­ther behind in the Hawk­eye State than nation­al­ly, draw­ing 13.7 per­cent back­ing.

    Trump’s com­ments call­ing for a “shut­down” of Mus­lims enter­ing the U.S. have been con­demned by many Repub­li­cans, as well as Democ­rats and unaligned observers. Includ­ed among his crit­ics are Speak­er Paul Ryan (R‑Wis.) and Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell (R‑Ky.), who both lam­bast­ed him on Tues­day. The con­dem­na­tion of a party’s pres­i­den­tial front-run­ner by that same party’s most senior mem­bers of Con­gress is with­out prece­dent, at least in mod­ern times.

    The oppro­bri­um from on high will not nec­es­sar­i­ly doom Trump. A Bloomberg Pol­i­tics poll released Wednes­day indi­cat­ed that 64 per­cent of like­ly Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry vot­ers sup­port­ed the idea of tem­porar­i­ly ban­ning Mus­lims from com­ing to Amer­i­ca.

    But Wash­ing­ton Repub­li­cans shake their heads at the dam­age they believe the real estate tycoon is inflict­ing on the party’s image. They are also enraged about his sug­ges­tion that he could mount a third-par­ty run if he is not treat­ed in a way that he deems fair dur­ing the GOP pri­ma­ry process.

    “Don­ald Trump says he might make a third-par­ty run if he is mis­treat­ed by the par­ty, but Don­ald Trump has severe­ly mis­treat­ed the Repub­li­can Par­ty with his out­landish and over-the-top state­ments against His­pan­ics, women and now against reli­gion in terms of Mus­lims,” said Ron Bon­jean, a GOP con­sul­tant and for­mer aide to House and Sen­ate Repub­li­can lead­ers.

    Bon­jean expressed less out­rage about Cruz per­son­al­ly, but just as much skep­ti­cism about his chances of pre­vail­ing in a gen­er­al elec­tion.

    Allud­ing to reports that Cruz and his advis­ers believe he can win the White House by boost­ing enthu­si­asm and turnout sole­ly among the con­ser­v­a­tive base, Bon­jean said, “If Cruz would fol­low through on his promise not to court the mid­dle, we would lose the gen­er­al elec­tion.”

    The Cruz camp has also made the case it can win over “Rea­gan Democ­rats” in the gen­er­al elec­tion, though some Repub­li­cans are skep­ti­cal.

    All of the GOP estab­lish­ment angst could be good news for Rubio. The fact that he has now achieved a degree of sep­a­ra­tion from oth­er estab­lish­ment-friend­ly choic­es such as Bush, Kasich and Christie could cre­ate a snow­ball effect where more vot­ers are drawn to his ban­ner.

    ...

    Cen­trist Repub­li­cans believe the par­ty needs to act soon in order to defeat Trump and Cruz.

    “There needs to be a con­sol­i­da­tion of can­di­dates that attract white-col­lar and estab­lish­ment vot­ers, and that will com­pete for the nom­i­na­tion,” said Bon­jean. “At this point, you are see­ing some move­ment in the estab­lish­ment toward Rubio — a lit­tle bit. It feels like a plate-shift­ing is hap­pen­ing.”

    “If Cruz would fol­low through on his promise not to court the mid­dle, we would lose the gen­er­al elec­tion.”
    Yep, Ted Cruz’s promise to his sup­port­ers is that he his attempt to appeal the broad­er Amer­i­can elec­torate is basi­cal­ly to be Ted Cruz and assume that the nation will be super inspired by that. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, some GOP ana­lysts that aren’t part and par­cel of the evan­gel­i­cal right aren’t so sure about that:

    ...
    “Lis­ten, I think both Cruz and Trump would have a sim­i­lar impact on the par­ty, nei­ther of which would be very good. I am actu­al­ly more con­cerned about Cruz than I am about Trump,” said GOP strate­gist John Fee­hery, a for­mer senior lead­er­ship aide who is a colum­nist for The Hill.

    Fee­hery added, “I think Cruz has made a rep­u­ta­tion of relent­less men­dac­i­ty ... I think he’s a dem­a­gogue and I think he’ll destroy the par­ty. I think Trump is much more of a blowhard. But there’s not real­ly a dime’s worth of dif­fer­ence between Trump and Cruz.”
    ...

    So not only is the GOP “estab­lish­ment” appar­ent­ly freak­ing out about the prospect of a Trump nom­i­na­tion, but the evan­gel­i­cal “estab­lish­ment” is too and yet the evan­gel­i­cal’s Trump-ter­na­tive of choice is the guy that freaks out “estab­lish­ment” ana­lysts like John Fee­hery even more than Trump.

    Giv­en all that, it’s going to be very inter­est­ing to see if the GOP “estab­lish­ment” adopts an “any­one but Trump or Cruz” atti­tude in com­ing months and what impact that’s going to have on the prospect of Trump actu­al­ly fol­low­ing through on his threat to wage a third par­ty bid. And why might an anti-Cruz cam­paign by the “estab­lish­ment” impact the like­li­hood of a Trump third par­ty bid? Well, keep in mind that the above piece was about con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers and also keep in mind what we saw above: the evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers love both Trump and Cruz more than any­one else:

    ...
    The lat­est nation­al poll by Quin­nip­i­ac Uni­ver­si­ty had Trump tied with Cruz for first, at 24 per­cent, among white evan­gel­i­cal reg­is­tered Repub­li­can vot­ers. The poll, done Nov. 23–30, has Car­son at 19 per­cent and every­one else with 4 per­cent or less.
    ...

    So what’s going to hap­pen if the “estab­lish­ment” wages an open cam­paign against not just the cur­rent GOP front run­ner but also the guy surg­ing into sec­ond place nation­al and who just took a sig­nif­i­cant lead over Trump in the most recent­ly Iowa poll? Isn’t that exact­ly the kind of behav­ior by the “estab­lish­ment” that makes “anti-estab­lish­ment” behav­ior like vot­ing third-par­ty far more like­ly? Trump will sure­ly be be well aware of the grow­ing antipa­thy towards the “estab­lish­ment”, so won’t an anti-Trump/Cruz cam­paign make a third par­ty Trump bid sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly?

    And if he does make that third par­ty bid fol­low­ing a joint “any­one but Trump or Cruz” cam­paign by the estab­lish­ment, you have to won­der who he’ll try to enlist as his run­ning mate.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 12, 2015, 7:02 pm
  11. French far-right leader Le Pen calls on Euro­peans to ‘wake up’
    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-farright-lepen-idUSKBN1550DD

    KOBLENZ, Ger­many French far-right leader Marine Le Pen urged Euro­pean vot­ers to fol­low the exam­ple of Amer­i­cans and the British and “wake up” in 2017, at a meet­ing of right-wing lead­ers aim­ing to oust estab­lished par­ties in elec­tions this year.

    Le Pen told sev­er­al hun­dred sup­port­ers in the Ger­man city of Koblenz that Britons’ vote last year to leave the Euro­pean Union would set in train a “domi­no effect”.

    A day after U.S. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump took office, Le Pen said his inau­gu­ra­tion speech includ­ed “accents in com­mon” with the mes­sage on reclaim­ing nation­al sov­er­eign­ty pro­claimed by the far-right lead­ers meet­ing in Koblenz.

    “2016 was the year the Anglo-Sax­on world woke up. I am sure 2017 will be the year the peo­ple of con­ti­nen­tal Europe wake up,” she said to loud applause on Sat­ur­day.

    Pop­ulist par­ties are on the rise across Europe. Unem­ploy­ment and aus­ter­i­ty, the arrival of record num­bers of refugees and mil­i­tant attacks in France, Bel­gium and Ger­many have left vot­ers dis­il­lu­sioned with con­ven­tion­al par­ties.

    Le Pen, head of the anti-Euro­pean Union, anti-immi­grant Nation­al Front (FN) and seen by poll­sters as high­ly like­ly to make a two-per­son runoff vote for the French pres­i­den­cy in May, has marked out Europe as a major plank in her pro­gramme.

    “The key fac­tor that is going to set in course all the domi­nos of Europe is Brex­it,” Le Pen said. “A sov­er­eign peo­ple chose ... to decide its des­tiny itself.”

    Of Trump, she added: “His posi­tion on Europe is clear: he does not sup­port a sys­tem of oppres­sion of peo­ples.”

    In a joint inter­view with the Times of Lon­don and the Ger­man news­pa­per Bild pub­lished on Mon­day, Trump said the EU had become “a vehi­cle for Ger­many” and pre­dict­ed that more EU mem­ber states would vote to leave the bloc, as Britain did last June.

    Le Pen said if elect­ed she would ask the EU to return sov­er­eign pow­ers to France and hold a ref­er­en­dum on the out­come of nego­ti­a­tions she expect­ed to fol­low. If the EU reject­ed her demands, she said: “I will sug­gest to the French peo­ple: exit!”

    “FREE FATHERLANDS”

    The far-right lead­ers met under the slo­gan “Free­dom for Europe” with the aim of strength­en­ing ties between their par­ties, whose nation­al­ist ten­den­cies have ham­pered close col­lab­o­ra­tion in the past.

    “Togeth­er with the par­ties rep­re­sent­ed here, we want a sub­sidiary Europe of free Father­lands,” said Frauke Petry, leader of Ger­many’s anti-immi­gra­tion Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD).

    Sev­er­al lead­ing Ger­man media were barred from the Koblenz meet­ing, which was organ­ised by the Europe of Nations and Free­dom (ENF), the small­est group in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment.

    Also at the meet­ing were Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch far-right Free­dom Par­ty (PVV), who was last month con­vict­ed of dis­crim­i­na­tion against Moroc­cans, and Mat­teo Salvi­ni of the North­ern League, who wants to take Italy out of the euro.

    In the Nether­lands, Wilders is lead­ing in all major polls before nation­al par­lia­men­tary elec­tions on March 15. Hail­ing Trump’s elec­tion, Wilders told the meet­ing: “Yes­ter­day, a free Amer­i­ca, today Koblenz, and tomor­row a new Europe.”

    “The genie will not go back into the bot­tle,” he added.

    Sig­mar Gabriel, the leader of Ger­many’s Social Democ­rats, junior part­ner in Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s rul­ing coali­tion, joined a protest out­side the venue. Police said the demon­stra­tion was peace­ful and about 5,000 peo­ple took part.

    Posted by Lam | January 21, 2017, 9:39 am
  12. The ques­tions about the depth of Pres­i­dent Trump’s racism is one of the sad­der fea­tures of the Trump era of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, large­ly because Trump keeps say­ing and doing racist things and palling around with racists which keeps rais­ing the ques­tion of whether or not he’s even more racist than peo­ple real­ized. And then there’s the fact that vir­tu­al­ly none of Trump’s racist antics turn off his vot­er base which prompts the larg­er sad ques­tion of just how racist is the Repub­li­can elec­torate in gen­er­al.

    Giv­en that sad back­drop of Trump’s open near-dai­ly racist-inspire out­burst and tweets, it’s worth not­ing that the Nixon Pres­i­den­tial Library just released a record­ed phone call between Nixon and Ronald Rea­gan from 1971 where Rea­gan goes on a racist tirade. It’s the kind of tirade that more or less makes it impos­si­ble to deny one is a racist. In 1971, the UN vot­ed to seat Bei­jing instead of Tai­wan. Fol­low­ing the vote, mem­bers of the Tan­zan­ian del­e­ga­tion, which was­n’t wear­ing shoes, start­ed danc­ing in the Gen­er­al Assem­bly. This shoe­less cel­e­bra­tion, which was tele­vised, appar­ent­ly deeply enraged Rea­gan. After the vote, Rea­gan called up Nixon to express his out­rage, say­ing, “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on tele­vi­sion as I did,”. “Yeah,” Nixon respond­ed. Then Rea­gan decried, “To see those, those mon­keys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncom­fort­able wear­ing shoes!” It was an even more overt­ly racist state­ment about African coun­tries than Trump’s now-infa­mous ‘shit­hole’ com­ment about African coun­tries.

    It turns out the tape of this con­ver­sa­tion was released in 2000, but the racist parts were edit­ed out, osten­si­bly to pro­tect Rea­gan’s pri­va­cy. Rea­gan’s death in 2004 end­ed those pri­va­cy con­cerns. The tape is only now being released unedit­ed.

    So Rea­gan made an unam­bigu­ous racist tirade on those tapes. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, Rea­gan’s racist sen­ti­ments was made abun­dant­ly clear lat­er that decade with his pas­sion­ate defens­es of the apartheid states of Rhode­sia and South Africa (not to men­tion his friend­li­ness with ex-Nazis when he was in office). But it’s Nixon’s response to Rea­gan’s tirade that high­light­ed his own racist sen­ti­ments.

    Nixon had already been angered at the African lead­ers over that UN vote when Rea­gan called. Despite being informed that British and French behind the scene maneu­ver­ing was respon­si­ble for the vote, Nixon con­tin­ued to blame the Africans.

    After Rea­gan’s call, Nixon called Sec­re­tary of State William Rogers and told him about Rea­gan’s anger over the vote. Nixon told Rogers, “As you can imag­ine, there’s strong feel­ing that we just shouldn’t, as [Rea­gan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these ...these, uh, these can­ni­bals on tele­vi­sion last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wear­ing shoes, and here the Unit­ed States is going to sub­mit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.” Nixon appar­ent­ly felt that Rea­gan’s anger at the Africans was sym­bol­ic of the anger a much larg­er swathe of racist white vot­ers would feel about the vote and that those sen­ti­ments need­ed to be tak­en into account. Nixon called Rogers two hours lat­er and told the exact same sto­ry about Rea­gan’s phone call to make the same point about the need for the Sec­re­tary of State to keep the anger of the racist vot­ing block in mind regard­ing the response to the UN vote.

    The arti­cle goes on to describe how Nixon appeared to gen­uine­ly feel that blacks are sim­ply infe­ri­or. Nixon was appar­ent­ly a fan of the ‘race sci­ence’ work of Arthur Jensen and Richard Her­rn­stein. Recall that Her­rn­stein co-authored The Bell Curve with Charles Mur­ray in 1994 and Arthur Jensen is well known as a pro­mot­er of racist pseu­do­science fund­ed by orga­ni­za­tions like the Pio­neer Fund. Nixon once told Daniel Patrick Moyni­han, who worked as a Nixon advis­er, “I have reluc­tant­ly con­clud­ed, based at least on the evi­dence present­ly before me … that what Her­rn­stein says, and what was said ear­li­er by Jensen, is prob­a­bly … very close to the truth.” So Nixon, in his own words, was a believ­er that blacks are infe­ri­or as a race.

    So thanks to Nixon’s deci­sion to record every­thing for pos­ter­i­ty, we can unam­bigu­ous­ly con­clude that both Nixon and Rea­gan had deeply held anti-Black sen­ti­ments. Of course, the actions of both pres­i­dents also made this abun­dant­ly clear if we look at their actu­al poli­cies and the polit­i­cal bat­tles they fought. The ‘South­ern Strat­e­gy’ of appeal­ing to white racists was crit­i­cal to the elec­toral suc­cess­es of both Nixon and Rea­gan, after all.

    And as the arti­cle also notes, while both Rea­gan and Nixon may have held these racist sen­ti­ments, they still weren’t near­ly as open about it as Trump is today:

    The Atlantic

    Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hid­den Racist Con­ver­sa­tion With Richard Nixon

    In new­ly unearthed audio, the then–California gov­er­nor dis­par­aged African del­e­gates to the Unit­ed Nations.

    Tim Naf­tali
    Clin­i­cal asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at NYU
    Jul 30, 2019

    The day after the Unit­ed Nations vot­ed to rec­og­nize the People’s Repub­lic of Chi­na, then–California Gov­er­nor Ronald Rea­gan phoned Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon at the White House and vent­ed his frus­tra­tion at the del­e­gates who had sided against the Unit­ed States. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on tele­vi­sion as I did,” Rea­gan said. “Yeah,” Nixon inter­ject­ed. Rea­gan forged ahead with his com­plaint: “To see those, those mon­keys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncom­fort­able wear­ing shoes!” Nixon gave a huge laugh.

    The past month has brought pres­i­den­tial racism back into the head­lines. This Octo­ber 1971 exchange between cur­rent and future pres­i­dents is a reminder that oth­er pres­i­dents have sub­scribed to the racist belief that Africans or African Amer­i­cans are some­how infe­ri­or. The most nov­el aspect of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in pub­lic.

    The exchange was taped by Nixon, and then lat­er became the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the Nixon Pres­i­den­tial Library, which I direct­ed from 2007 to 2011. When the Nation­al Archives orig­i­nal­ly released the tape of this con­ver­sa­tion, in 2000, the racist por­tion was appar­ent­ly with­held to pro­tect Reagan’s pri­va­cy. A court order stip­u­lat­ed that the tapes be reviewed chrono­log­i­cal­ly; the chrono­log­i­cal review was com­plet­ed in 2013. Not until 2017 or 2018 did the Nation­al Archives begin a gen­er­al rere­view of the ear­li­est Nixon tapes. Reagan’s death, in 2004, elim­i­nat­ed the pri­va­cy con­cerns. Last year, as a researcher, I request­ed that the con­ver­sa­tions involv­ing Ronald Rea­gan be rere­viewed, and two weeks ago, the Nation­al Archives released com­plete ver­sions of the Octo­ber 1971 con­ver­sa­tions involv­ing Rea­gan online.

    When the UN took its vote to seat a del­e­ga­tion from Bei­jing instead of from Tai­wan in 1971, mem­bers of the Tan­zan­ian del­e­ga­tion start­ed danc­ing in the Gen­er­al Assem­bly. Rea­gan, a devot­ed defend­er of Tai­wan, was incensed, and tried to reach Nixon the night of the vote. Rea­gan despised the Unit­ed Nations, which he described as a “kan­ga­roo court” filled with “bums,” and he want­ed the U.S. to with­draw from full par­tic­i­pa­tion imme­di­ate­ly. Nixon was asleep when Rea­gan called, so they spoke the next morn­ing.

    Reagan’s slur touched an already raw nerve. Ear­li­er that day, Nixon had called his deputy nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, Al Haig, to can­cel any future meet­ings with any African leader who had not vot­ed with the Unit­ed States on Tai­wan, even if they had already been sched­uled. “Don’t even sub­mit to me the prob­lem that it’s dif­fi­cult to turn it off since we have already accept­ed it,” Nixon exclaimed. “Just turn it off, on the ground that I will be out of town.”

    Nixon’s anger at the UN del­e­ga­tions from African nations for the loss was mis­placed. His own State Depart­ment blamed fac­tors oth­er than African vot­ing, includ­ing maneu­ver­ing by the British and French behind the scenes, for the loss. But Nixon would have none of it. The Africans were to blame.

    Had the sto­ry stopped there, it would have been bad enough. Racist vent­ing is still racist. But what hap­pened next showed the dynam­ic pow­er of racism when it finds enablers. Nixon used Reagan’s call as an excuse to adapt his lan­guage to make the same point to oth­ers. Right after hang­ing up with Rea­gan, Nixon sought out Sec­re­tary of State William Rogers.

    Even though Rea­gan had called Nixon to press him to with­draw from the Unit­ed Nations, in Nixon’s telling, Reagan’s com­plaints about Africans became the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of the call.

    “As you can imag­ine,” Nixon con­fid­ed in Rogers, “there’s strong feel­ing that we just shouldn’t, as [Rea­gan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these—” Nixon stam­mered, choos­ing his words carefully—“these, uh, these can­ni­bals on tele­vi­sion last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wear­ing shoes, and here the Unit­ed States is going to sub­mit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.”

    The pres­i­dent want­ed his patri­cian sec­re­tary of state to under­stand that Rea­gan spoke for racist Amer­i­cans, and they need­ed to be lis­tened to. “You know, but that’s typ­i­cal of a reac­tion, which is probably”—“That’s right,” Rogers interjected—“quite strong.”

    Nixon couldn’t stop retelling his ver­sion of what Rea­gan had said. Odd­ly unfo­cused, he spoke with Rogers again two hours lat­er and repeat­ed the sto­ry as if it would be new to the sec­re­tary.

    “Rea­gan called me last night,” Nixon said, “and I didn’t talk to him until this morn­ing, but he is, of course, out­raged. And I found out what out­raged him, and I find this is typ­i­cal of a lot of peo­ple: They saw it on tele­vi­sion and, he said, ‘These can­ni­bals jump­ing up and down and all that.’ And appar­ent­ly it was a pret­ty grotesque pic­ture.” Like Nixon, Rogers had not seen the tele­vised images. But Rogers agreed: “Appar­ent­ly, it was a ter­ri­ble scene.” Nixon added, “And they cheered.”

    Then Nixon said, “He prac­ti­cal­ly got sick at his stom­ach, and that’s why he called. And he said, ‘It was a ter­ri­ble scene.’ And that sort of thing will have an emo­tion­al effect on peo­ple … as [Rea­gan] said, ‘This bunch of peo­ple who don’t even wear shoes yet, to be kick­ing the Unit­ed States in the teeth’ … It was a ter­ri­ble thing, they thought.”

    Nixon didn’t think of him­self as a racist; per­haps that’s why it was so impor­tant to him to keep quot­ing Reagan’s racism, rather than own the sen­ti­ment him­self. But Reagan’s com­ment about African lead­ers res­onat­ed with Nixon, because it reflect­ed his warped think­ing about African Amer­i­cans.

    In the fall of 1971, the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion was engaged in a mas­sive wel­fare-reform effort, and was also fac­ing school bus­ing. These two issues appar­ent­ly inspired Nixon to exam­ine more deeply his own think­ing on whether African Amer­i­cans could make it in Amer­i­can soci­ety. Only three weeks before the call with Rea­gan, Nixon had revealed his opin­ions on Africans and African Amer­i­cans in a con­ver­sa­tion with the Har­vard pro­fes­sor Daniel Patrick Moyni­han, who had briefly served in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. Nixon was attract­ed to the the­o­ries of Richard Her­rn­stein and Arthur Jensen, which linked IQ to race, and won­dered what Moyni­han thought.

    “I have reluc­tant­ly con­clud­ed, based at least on the evi­dence present­ly before me … that what Her­rn­stein says, and what was said ear­li­er by Jensen, is prob­a­bly … very close to the truth,” Nixon explained to a qui­et Moyni­han. Nixon believed in a hier­ar­chy of races, with whites and Asians much high­er up than peo­ple of African descent and Lati­nos. And he had con­vinced him­self that it wasn’t racist to think black peo­ple, as a group, were infe­ri­or to whites, so long as he held them in pater­nal­is­tic regard. “With­in groups, there are genius­es,” Nixon said. “There are genius­es with­in black groups. There are more with­in Asian groups … This is knowl­edge that is bet­ter not to know.”

    Nixon’s analy­sis of African lead­er­ship reflect­ed his prej­u­dice toward America’s black cit­i­zens. This is, at least, what he told Moyni­han. “Have in mind one fact: Did you real­ize there is not, of the 40 or 45—you’re at the Unit­ed Nations—black coun­tries that are rep­re­sent­ed there, not one has a pres­i­dent or a prime min­is­ter who is there as a result of a con­test­ed elec­tion such as we were insist­ing upon in Viet­nam?” And, he con­tin­ued, a lit­tle lat­er in the con­ver­sa­tion: “I’m not say­ing that blacks can­not gov­ern; I am say­ing they have a hell of a time. Now, that must demon­strate some­thing.”

    Fifty years lat­er, the one fact that we should have in mind is that our nation’s chief exec­u­tive assumed that the non­white cit­i­zens of the Unit­ed States were some­how infe­ri­or. Nixon con­fid­ed in Moyni­han, who had been one of his house intel­lec­tu­als, about the nature of his inter­est in research on African Amer­i­can intel­li­gence: “The rea­son I have to know it is that as I go for pro­grams, I must know that they have basic weak­ness­es.”

    As these and oth­er tapes make clear, the 37th pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States was a racist: He believed in treat­ing peo­ple accord­ing to their race, and that race implied fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences in indi­vid­ual human beings. Nixon’s racism mat­ters to us because he allowed his views on race to shape U.S. policies—both for­eign and domes­tic. His poli­cies need to be viewed through that lens.

    The 40th pres­i­dent has not left as dra­mat­ic a record of his pri­vate thoughts. Reagan’s racism appears to be doc­u­ment­ed only once on the Nixon tapes, and nev­er in his own diaries. His com­ment on African lead­ers, how­ev­er, sheds new light on what lay behind the governor’s pas­sion­ate defense of the apartheid states of Rhode­sia and South Africa lat­er in the 1970s. Dur­ing his 1976 pri­ma­ry-chal­lenge run against Ger­ald Ford, Rea­gan pub­licly opposed the Ford administration’s rejec­tion of white-minor­i­ty rule in Rhode­sia. “We seem to be embark­ing on a pol­i­cy of dic­tat­ing to the peo­ple of south­ern Africa and run­ning the risk of increased vio­lence and blood­shed,” Rea­gan said at a ral­ly in Texas.

    ...

    Nixon nev­er changed his mind about the sup­posed inher­ent infe­ri­or­i­ty of Africans. At the end of Octo­ber 1971, he dis­cussed the UN vote with his best friend, Bebe Rebo­zo. Bebe delight­ed Nixon by echo­ing Rea­gan: “That reac­tion on tele­vi­sion was, it proves how they ought to be still hang­ing from the trees by their tails.” Nixon laughed.

    These days, though Trump’s imagery is less zoo­log­i­cal, it is pret­ty much the same in spir­it. And this pres­i­dent, unlike Nixon, doesn’t believe he needs to hide behind any­one else’s racism.

    ———

    “Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hid­den Racist Con­ver­sa­tion With Richard Nixon” by Tim Naf­tali; The Atlantic; 07/30/2019

    “The past month has brought pres­i­den­tial racism back into the head­lines. This Octo­ber 1971 exchange between cur­rent and future pres­i­dents is a reminder that oth­er pres­i­dents have sub­scribed to the racist belief that Africans or African Amer­i­cans are some­how infe­ri­or. The most nov­el aspect of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in pub­lic.

    That’s per­haps the sad­dest les­son in all of this: the cur­rent pres­i­dent is far more open­ly racist than either Nixon or Reagan...and Nixon and Rea­gan were clear­ly huge racists.

    At the same time, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that Nixon appar­ent­ly did­n’t think of him­self as a racist at the same he admit­ted to sub­scrib­ing to the racial­ist pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries of Richard Her­rn­stein and Arthur Jensen:

    ...
    Nixon didn’t think of him­self as a racist; per­haps that’s why it was so impor­tant to him to keep quot­ing Reagan’s racism, rather than own the sen­ti­ment him­self. But Reagan’s com­ment about African lead­ers res­onat­ed with Nixon, because it reflect­ed his warped think­ing about African Amer­i­cans.

    In the fall of 1971, the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion was engaged in a mas­sive wel­fare-reform effort, and was also fac­ing school bus­ing. These two issues appar­ent­ly inspired Nixon to exam­ine more deeply his own think­ing on whether African Amer­i­cans could make it in Amer­i­can soci­ety. Only three weeks before the call with Rea­gan, Nixon had revealed his opin­ions on Africans and African Amer­i­cans in a con­ver­sa­tion with the Har­vard pro­fes­sor Daniel Patrick Moyni­han, who had briefly served in the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion. Nixon was attract­ed to the the­o­ries of Richard Her­rn­stein and Arthur Jensen, which linked IQ to race, and won­dered what Moyni­han thought.

    “I have reluc­tant­ly con­clud­ed, based at least on the evi­dence present­ly before me … that what Her­rn­stein says, and what was said ear­li­er by Jensen, is prob­a­bly … very close to the truth,” Nixon explained to a qui­et Moyni­han. Nixon believed in a hier­ar­chy of races, with whites and Asians much high­er up than peo­ple of African descent and Lati­nos. And he had con­vinced him­self that it wasn’t racist to think black peo­ple, as a group, were infe­ri­or to whites, so long as he held them in pater­nal­is­tic regard. “With­in groups, there are genius­es,” Nixon said. “There are genius­es with­in black groups. There are more with­in Asian groups … This is knowl­edge that is bet­ter not to know.”

    ...

    Nixon nev­er changed his mind about the sup­posed inher­ent infe­ri­or­i­ty of Africans. At the end of Octo­ber 1971, he dis­cussed the UN vote with his best friend, Bebe Rebo­zo. Bebe delight­ed Nixon by echo­ing Rea­gan: “That reac­tion on tele­vi­sion was, it proves how they ought to be still hang­ing from the trees by their tails.” Nixon laughed.
    ...

    And note how Nixon took the obser­va­tion that the lead­ers of African coun­tries weren’t demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed at the time as some sort of exam­ple of how black nations can’t gov­ern­ment them­selves, com­plete­ly ignor­ing the lega­cy of colo­nial­ism and the impact that had on African soci­eties and gov­ern­ing struc­tures at that point. It seemed to be a gen­uine­ly clue­less racism:

    ...
    Nixon’s analy­sis of African lead­er­ship reflect­ed his prej­u­dice toward America’s black cit­i­zens. This is, at least, what he told Moyni­han. “Have in mind one fact: Did you real­ize there is not, of the 40 or 45—you’re at the Unit­ed Nations—black coun­tries that are rep­re­sent­ed there, not one has a pres­i­dent or a prime min­is­ter who is there as a result of a con­test­ed elec­tion such as we were insist­ing upon in Viet­nam?” And, he con­tin­ued, a lit­tle lat­er in the con­ver­sa­tion: “I’m not say­ing that blacks can­not gov­ern; I am say­ing they have a hell of a time. Now, that must demon­strate some­thing.

    Fifty years lat­er, the one fact that we should have in mind is that our nation’s chief exec­u­tive assumed that the non­white cit­i­zens of the Unit­ed States were some­how infe­ri­or. Nixon con­fid­ed in Moyni­han, who had been one of his house intel­lec­tu­als, about the nature of his inter­est in research on African Amer­i­can intel­li­gence: “The rea­son I have to know it is that as I go for pro­grams, I must know that they have basic weak­ness­es.”

    ...

    These days, though Trump’s imagery is less zoo­log­i­cal, it is pret­ty much the same in spir­it. And this pres­i­dent, unlike Nixon, doesn’t believe he needs to hide behind any­one else’s racism.
    ...

    So who knows, maybe Trump seri­ous­ly does­n’t think he’s a racist. Like Nixon.

    In relat­ed news, Trump’s sup­port­ers at his recent ral­ly in Cincin­nati made it clear to reporters that they are sick and tired of being called racist.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 2, 2019, 2:36 pm

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