Republicans: continued

[Hermit]

"Traditional classic Americans"

Would that be the indigenous American Indians that were replaced by Caucasians?

[pErvinalia]

"Traditional classic Americans"

i.e. white.

[Sean Hayden]

It's bizarre innit. We're happy to be oblivious to the problems minorities face in the US right up till we imagine we might become one. I see this as an admission of sorts on their part about the advantages of white-privilege. Obviously they'll be in denial about that i.e. "traditional Americans" where tradition means something other than privilege.

--//--

The solution is probably just to talk more openly about how much less white we are becoming, and why that's not a bad thing.

[pErvinalia]

Not to mention that the Democrats don't actually want to replace current Americans (whether white or green or blue) with new "illegals".

[Hermit]

Not to mention that the Democrats don't actually want to replace current Americans (whether white or green or blue) with new "illegals".

Proven by the fact that June 2021 was the highest month of border apprehensions since March 2000. Clearly, President Biden is more determined to, does a much better job of keeping the non-Caucasian rapists and other criminals out of the US than Trump ever managed.

[Seabass]

Jeffrey Clark, Trump-appointed DOJ official, claimed Chinese thermostats changed votes in 2020 election, reports say

So Trump had another coup going, this one via the DOJ. At one point there were like two guys standing between the election and Trump's coup. That this isn't getting more coverage is insane. This country is primed and ready for fascism.

Top DOJ official drafted resignation email amid Trump election pressure

In early January 2021, one top Justice Department official was so concerned that then-President Donald Trump might fire his acting attorney general that he drafted an email announcing he and a second top official would resign in response.

The official, Patrick Hovakimian, prepared the email announcing his own resignation and that of the department's second-in-command, Richard Donoghue, as Trump considered axing acting attorney general Jeff Rosen. At the time, Hovakimian was an associate deputy attorney general and a senior adviser to Rosen.

But Trump didn’t fire Rosen, and Hovakimian's draft email — a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO — remained unsent. The fact that Trump-era DOJ officials went that far highlights the serious pressures they faced in the waning days of the administration as the former president tried to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

“This evening, after Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen over the course of the last week repeatedly refused the President’s direct instructions to utilize the Department of Justice’s law enforcement powers for improper ends, the President removed Jeff from the Department,” Hovakimian wrote in his never-sent email. “PADAG Rich Donoghue and I resign from the Department, effective immediately.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/0 ... ure-502413

[L'Emmerdeur]

Rotten shithead pandering to the anti-vaccination crowd by enhancing their paranoia. Fun stuff.

'Anti-Vaxxers Got Fooled by Fake "Snitch on Your Unvaccinated Friends" Site'

A website purportedly offering money to people willing to snitch on their unvaccinated family, friends, and neighbors for breaching vaccine mandates has gone viral in anti-vaxxer circles.

But just like so many other things shared in these groups, the “anonymous unvaccinated reporting system” is completely fake.

Not only that, the website was designed and built by David Bramante, a realtor and a Republican candidate running for governor in California’s recall election, who says the website was simply a piece of “political satire” designed to highlight what he views as unconstitutional vaccine mandates.

The website, which claimed to be run by two experts hoping to establish a database of anti-vaxxers for the government, launched last week. It quickly gained traction in the anti-vaxxer community, where it was taken at face value: many likened it to the Nazis asking people to inform on their family and friends.

“This is real,” one Twitter user said about AURS. “This is so #OldSovietBlock that it is difficult to believe it exists. Land of the Free? Apparently not.” Another said “this is quite literally the slide into a dystopian hell.”

...

Bramante says that he has “considered every day since launching the site to take the site down.” But despite his close family and friends pleading with him to take the site offline, or at least provide a popup on the landing page to explain it’s not real, he currently has no plans to take it down.

“Every day many people reach out to me to support what I'm doing, from all over the world, and they have applauded the courage a site like this takes because it's so controversial,” Bramante said.

[Brian Peacock]

[JimC]

Truth is of minor importance in comparison to the need to keep (white) America free from liberal pollutants...

[Seabass]

Authoritarianism relies on the obliteration of truth, and the billionaire funded right-wing media has been obliterating truth now for decades. They're winning. They keep gaining ground, and the American right keeps getting crazier and more extreme, and it has consumed an entire political party, and the reality based community doesn't seem to have what it takes to stem the tide. First there was Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, but now there's Breitbart, Infowars, Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, OAN, Pool, Crowder, and so on, and talk radio is pretty much entirely right-wing. I try so hard not to be a pessimist, but it looks like reality simply cannot compete with the sociopathy, greed, and resources of America's right-wing billionaires. A majority of Republicans believe that Trump won the election. A majority of Republicans believe that the attack on the capitol was a patriotic act. Fucking nuts!

[Seabass]

Trump called his wife ugly and said his dad killed JFK, and then he spent four years cupping Trump's balls.

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1424903418057953305

[Brian Peacock]

Authoritarianism relies on the obliteration of truth, and the billionaire funded right-wing media has been obliterating truth now for decades. They're winning. They keep gaining ground, and the American right keeps getting crazier and more extreme, and it has consumed an entire political party, and the reality based community doesn't seem to have what it takes to stem the tide. First there was Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, but now there's Breitbart, Infowars, Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, OAN, Pool, Crowder, and so on, and talk radio is pretty much entirely right-wing. I try so hard not to be a pessimist, but it looks like reality simply cannot compete with the sociopathy, greed, and resources of America's right-wing billionaires. A majority of Republicans believe that Trump won the election. A majority of Republicans believe that the attack on the capitol was a patriotic act. Fucking nuts!

I don't disagree with any of that, indeed far from it, but we also have to acknowledge that authoritarianism also relies on people inclined to believe that it will work for them; people who are not only susceptible to the authoritarian narratives they're exposed to but who are also unable to, or disinclined to, consider that the politics they favour (or champion) might actually work against their best interests. It's as much a bottom-up thing as a top-down one, and while authoritarianism isn't a mode exclusive to the Right that the Right seem to have a monopoly on it at the moment speaks to the prevailing power structure and the interests which it can be brought to serve.

If you have iPlayer access and 30 mins try this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000y7sq

[Seabass]

Authoritarianism relies on the obliteration of truth, and the billionaire funded right-wing media has been obliterating truth now for decades. They're winning. They keep gaining ground, and the American right keeps getting crazier and more extreme, and it has consumed an entire political party, and the reality based community doesn't seem to have what it takes to stem the tide. First there was Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, but now there's Breitbart, Infowars, Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, OAN, Pool, Crowder, and so on, and talk radio is pretty much entirely right-wing. I try so hard not to be a pessimist, but it looks like reality simply cannot compete with the sociopathy, greed, and resources of America's right-wing billionaires. A majority of Republicans believe that Trump won the election. A majority of Republicans believe that the attack on the capitol was a patriotic act. Fucking nuts!

I don't disagree with any of that, indeed far from it, but we also have to acknowledge that authoritarianism also relies on people inclined to believe that it will work for them; people who are not only susceptible to the authoritarian narratives they're exposed to but who are also unable to, or disinclined to, consider that the politics they favour (or champion) might actually work against their best interests. It's as much a bottom-up thing as a top-down one, and while authoritarianism isn't a mode exclusive to the Right that the Right seem to have a monopoly on it at the moment speaks to the prevailing power structure and the interests which it can be brought to serve.

If you have iPlayer access and 30 mins try this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000y7sq

I liked the part where an authoritarian being interviewed by two black people loses 5 grades of reading comprehension level and is more likely to mention all the guns they have in their house.

[Seabass]

"Drifts" my ass. "Has drifted" more like.


https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-frau ... rd-fascism

The Trumpist right drifts toward fascism

It’s frustratingly typical for conservatives to fraudulently cloak themselves in the mantle of Abraham Lincoln and the Union. But what Fox News host Ben Domenech did on Tuesday night -- describing the progressive left as “the inheritor” of “slave power” with its “fixation on the hierarchy of race and caste” and his viewers as ideological descendants of the paramilitary pro-Lincoln “Wide Awakes” of 1860 -- wandered perilously close to a call for a new Civil War.

Domenech presented U.S. politics as an existential fight between “the enemies of everything this nation has ever been” and “the patriots, the Americans, the men and women who will do anything to preserve it, because they know what civilization requires.”

The host closed by directly addressing his millions of viewers. “You are the heart of a nation that has slept for so long,” he said. “But now at last, you are wide awake. So now I ask you again: What are you willing to do?” Domenech didn’t give an answer to the question -- but his rhetoric suggests that it isn’t casting votes for candidates who share your values.

Domenech is not alone. Donald Trump’s propagandists warned last year that his supporters would face apocalyptic consequences if he was not reelected. Since he left office, they have increasingly preached the benefits of living under an authoritarian strongman. Only such a figure, they suggest, can defeat their leftist foes and protect “the patriots” from the threats of multiculturalism, globalism, and the immigrant “invasion.” If the verdict of multiracial democracy results in their defeat, their solution is an end to multiracial democracy.

Tucker Carlson is broadcasting his prime-time Fox show this week from Hungary, which became a case study for how a democracy backslides toward authoritarian rule after Viktor Orbán, a Christian traditionalist and ethnonationalist, was elected prime minister in 2010. Orbán used his party’s strong majority that year to lock it into power, rewriting Hungary’s constitution, aggressively gerrymandering its parliamentary districts, and expanding its constitutional court with party loyalists. He has since taken a hammer to its civil society, persecuting universities, journalists, and dissidents while stoking fears about Muslim immigration and LGBTQ people.

Fox’s viewers are getting a glowing presentation of Hungary’s authoritarian nationalism. Carlson, who previously touted Orbán’s leadership, said on Monday, “If you care about western civilization and democracy and families and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions, you should know what is happening here, right now.” On Wednesday, he called Hungary a “powerful” example and defended it from “lies” that its government is authoritarian.

In addition to airing his show from the country, Carlson is meeting with Orbán, speaking at a far-right conference in its capital of Budapest, and joining other U.S. conservatives who applaud Hungary’s illiberal governance as a potential model.

It’s chilling to see perhaps the most powerful figure in the right-wing media talking up the benefits of a state that is slipping out of the democratic orbit. But Carlson actually represents the moderate strain of the right’s antidemocratic discourse, praising a country whose authoritarian drift came through constitutional means while blaming the U.S. left for pushing the right toward fascism by “undermining the system that kept extremism at bay.” Further out on the fringes, discussion has turned to the merits of military coups.

Earlier this week, the Trumpist commentary site American Greatness published a piece by Christopher Roach contemplating the merits of “The Salazar Option,” a reference to António de Oliveira Salazar, the repressive Portuguese dictator who ruled for decades following a military coup that crushed Portugal’s nascent republic.

Roach praised Salazar for taking “necessary steps to preserve the economic freedom, national sovereignty, and family life on which a civilization depends.” He acknowledged that Salazar’s regime was “undoubtedly authoritarian,” but excused that as “less damaging to society than the alternative,” i.e., a republic in which the left won elections, and seemed to applaud Salazar for hurting the right people. After ominously explaining that Trump’s presidency shows the limitations of mere “electoral success,” Roach wrote that one lesson for the U.S. right is that Salazar’s movement “did not treat its enemies with kid gloves”:

They were not limited by self-defeating notions of “principle.” Hostile and revolutionary elements—whether domestic Communists, fascist syndicalists, internal political factions, or international high finance—were treated as equal potential dangers.

Roach concluded: “To survive, we need to be committed to acquiring and using power in the service of a counterrevolution.”

This is not the first time American Greatness has published a piece lauding foreign coups and their implications for U.S. governance. In May, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a Carlson favorite appointed as a senior adviser to the acting secretary of defense in the waning days of the Trump administration, also wrote for the site. In the piece, he highlighted the possibility that a French military coup might force President Emmanuel Macron from office to protect the nation from “globalists” who want a “Marxist dystopia” and increased immigration. Macgregor described the French army -- rather than France’s elected leaders -- as “the last, true repository of national identity and French values.”

Macgregor concluded that the U.S. will face similar circumstances soon and that while U.S. senior military leaders “are committed to globalism and multiculturalism,” service members and first responders may rise up and overthrow the government to halt “chaos and disorder.”

Michael Anton, who authored the influential September 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election” and served in Trump’s National Security Council, is also coup-curious. The Week’s Damon Linker wrote up a late May podcast Anton hosted for the Trumpist Claremont Institute with self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin “about why the United States needs an ‘American Caesar’ to seize control of the federal government, and precisely how such a would-be dictator could accomplish the task.” (It involves federalizing the National Guard and deploying supporters to coerce recalcitrant federal agencies.)

Linker concluded, “On the starboard side of American politics, the Overton window has now shifted far beyond the boundaries of democratic self-government to a place broadly coterminous with fascism.”

These antidemocratic sentiments are unnervingly popular among the Republican base.

The context for this right-wing shift against democracy is an election cycle that concluded with the right’s presidential candidate using the lie that the election had been rigged to try to remain in power after his defeat -- as his media supporters and his party largely cheered him on.

Trump’s strategy included not just court fights, but efforts to subvert election results in state legislatures and in Congress. He contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military to rerun the election and tried to get the Justice Department to weigh in on his behalf and declare the election “corrupt.”

While much of the conspiracy occurred in broad daylight, we are still learning new details about its full contours. Just this week, ABC News reported that in late December, the then-acting head of DOJ's civil division, Jeffrey Clark, tried to get his superiors to sign on to a draft letter “urging Georgia's governor and other top officials to convene the state legislature into a special session so lawmakers could investigate claims of voter fraud.”

In the end, Trump incited a mob of his supporters to violently breach the U.S. Capitol and try to stop Congress from formally counting the electoral votes that made Joe Biden president. But while the January 6 insurrection led to Trump’s second impeachment, it did not cause his supporters to abandon him. Instead, Trump continues to lead the party, which is purging his critics, changing voting laws to suppress Democratic votes, and preparing an alternative path to overturn unfavorable results. And his loyal propagandists have backed those efforts while keeping the party base in a frenzy over the prospect of losing the country to a population that is changing against their will.

Domenech asks the right question of his viewers: To fight the left, “what are you willing to do?” The answer he and his colleagues increasingly want to hear is that they are willing to break U.S. democracy rather than allow “the enemies of everything this nation has ever been” to win elections.

[Sean Hayden]

We're going to be dealing with more frequent violence from these guys.