Many people are pointing out the gross disparities between the way DC police handled the “Stop the Steal” mob that attacked Congress and looted Congressional chambers this week, and the way police responded to Black Lives Matter demonstrations this past summer.
Of course, the Right-Wing media bubble will never talk about this disparity. They are too busy inventing stories about mythical “bus loads” of antifa infiltrators invading DC in order to give violent Trump supporters a bad name.
NowThisNews has compiled video clips illustrating the very different responses mustered by the DC authorities last summer and this week.
The Daily Poster has another good article by investigative journalist, David Sirota.
His piece, “The Insurrection Was Predictable,” makes the case for what any informed citizen should have known: the Right-Wing violence that occurred in the nation’s capitol this week was entirely predictable. In fact, it was a foregone conclusion.
And we can expect to see more of this violent behavior from The Right in the future.
I have excerpted Sirota’s article below. Or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the link above.
Two months ago, The Daily Poster published a series of reports on the growing threat of a coup attempt, wondering why it wasn’t being taken more seriously by Democrats and the media. We were scoffed at and eye-rolled, as if such things could never happen in America.
Nobody is scoffing or eye-rolling anymore after today’s events at the U.S. Capitol. There, insurrectionists stormed the building and halted the certification of the national election, as security forces allowed them to breach the Senate chamber and shut down the proceedings. There was a notable difference in the way federal security forces met last year’s Black Lives Matter protests with a show of force, and the way they allowed the Capitol to be overrun by right-wing authoritarians that they knew were coming.
About a decade ago, I wrote a book called “The Uprising,” which described how we were entering an era of chaos where right-wing groups would try to seize power under the guise of populism. Clearly, that has been happening — we saw it speed up during the Tea Party backlash and it was further accelerated by Donald Trump, who is a unique president in his willingness to use the White House megaphone to foment and destabilize.
Today’s events were the result of all that incitement. It was a culmination that happened inside a culture of total impunity — and it is worth considering five points of context to understand what we’re really dealing with here, because it will likely continue after Trump leaves the White House.
1. We have long known that the far-right — and specifically many Trump supporters — are hostile to democracy. 2019 polling data from Monmouth University found about a third of the strongest supporters of Trump scored in the highest ratings for authoritarian tendencies. In all, Democracy Fund data show that roughly a third of Americans “say that an authoritarian alternative to democracy would be favorable.” That’s what was on display today.
2. While Trump has tried to blame violence on the left, his administration has been trying to downplay the threat of right-wing authoritarianism and white supremacy. In a whistleblower complaint, a former top Homeland Security official alleged that Trump officials ordered him to modify an agency report’s section “on white supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe.” Politico reported earlier this year that Homeland Security officials have “waged a yearslong internal struggle to get the White House to pay attention to the threat of violent domestic extremists” — but they gave up because Trump wasn’t interested. Instead, federal security forces were focusing on deporting immigrants and investigating environmental activists.
3. The Capitol Police have a $460 million budget and 2,300 personnel to guard the U.S. Capitol complex. For comparison, that is twice the size of the budget of my own city’s police department, which is used to secure an entire metropolis. Somehow, this army of Capitol security forces was unable — or unwilling — to stop insurrectionists from breaching the building and taking over the floor of the U.S. Senate. And it’s not like they were caught by surprise — they had advance warning of the potential for unrest. So it’s almost as if they weren’t trying to stop the mayhem.
4. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s request to send National Guard reinforcements to the Capitol was initially rejected by the Defense Department — the same department whose leadership was recently purged and then replaced with Trump loyalists. That doesn’t seem like a coincidence, considering Trump initially refused to call for the insurrectionists to disperse.
5. The insurrection clearly fed off months of misinformation by Republican Party officials who continued to push the lie that the national election was plagued by fraud. Those lies spread: A survey last month found that three quarters of Republican voters believe the election was fraudulent. Even though nobody has produced evidence of systemic fraud, Republican lawmakers in Washington continued to fuel the conspiracy theories, ultimately pressing Congress to overturn the national election. One photo caught Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley raising a fist to the oncoming insurrectionists as he headed to the Capitol to try to halt the certification of the election.
As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican Party officials who fueled and abetted this insurrection did so because they assume they will feel no political, social or legal consequences for their behavior. On the contrary, they will likely be rewarded with higher approval ratings and support from many Republican voters. And if the Look Forward Not Backward™ crowd gets its way and makes sure there are no legal consequences for any of Trump’s many crimes, then these Republicans will know they have a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card for their own extremist behavior.
After all of this, if nothing changes, then I tend to agree with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s aide Dan Riffle, who today said that “it always — even in moments like this — can get worse. If recent history is any guide, it almost certainly will.”
But things can still change — and they must.
In “The Uprising,” I argued that the best way to counter the rise of right-wing populism and to prevent it from proliferating is for an opposition movement and party to not just issue vague paeans to democracy and the soul of the nation. The opposition must also deliver tangible, material gains for working people — rather than continuing to be an elite and effete caretaker of a let-them-eat-cake establishment that right-wing provocateurs can forever burn in effigy.
The New Deal delivering such gains to the working class helped tamp down the outbreak of right-wing fascism in America. Nearly a century later, the Georgia elections this week proved the same point. There, two right-wing Republican authoritarians were defeated by the Black reverend who runs Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church and by a Jewish guy — and the Democratic duo won by relentlessly campaigning on a simple promise to deliver $2,000 checks to millions of people in their state facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy.
Of course, no matter what Democrats might deliver — survival checks, a higher minimum wage, guaranteed medical care, massive investments in job creation, a crackdown on abusive corporations, etc. — there will always be a right-wing authoritarian movement in America willing to weaponize racism and illiberalism for its cause.
So it’s not simple: there is not a straightforward 1-to-1 relationship between enacting policies that improve people’s lives and instantly snuffing out the kind of fascism that reared its head at the Capitol today. But delivering for millions of people who’ve been economically pulverized for generations is the best and probably only way to try to halt fascism’s wider spread to more of the general population over the long haul.
Natasha Leonard has written an article at The Intercept analyzing Trump’s weaponization of the Right and its long-term effects. Below is an excerpt or your can read the entire article here:
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s craven loyalists in Congress plan to disrupt the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Whether cynical or delusional, their plan to reject swing-state electors will fail to overturn the election results. Meanwhile, Trump has called upon his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., that day to demand that Congress hand him a second term. The protest, he tweeted, “will be wild.”
Trump supporters gather for the “Stop the Steal” rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 2020. Photo: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA/AP
Under the auspices of Trump’s “last stand,” violence from his furious supporters seems all but inevitable. For Black communities and other communities of color in Washington, thousands of white supremacists amassing in their city is in itself a threat of violence. For far-right groups, the president’s call represents a follow-up to his earlier, perturbing suggestion that the Proud Boys “stand by.” Now, they are being activated.
Posts about Wednesday’s protests shared on Telegram and Parler, the social media platform preferred by the far right, include promises of “boots on the ground” and anonymous tips for smuggling guns into Washington, where gun laws are strict. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, posted that his group would turn up “in record numbers.” The last major “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington in December ended in four stabbings as Proud Boys attacked passersby and anti-fascist counterprotesters after dark.
Yet the “last stand” narrative surrounding Wednesday’s planned protests is no more than the rhetoric of escalation. There should be little doubt that Trump, desperate and wretched in defeat, will continue to call upon his base of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys, and other fascists to rally after the election is certified — perhaps long after Biden is inaugurated.
Even without Trump’s direct incitements, though, the far-right violence emboldened under his presidency is not going away. While the stated aim of die-hard Trump supporters may for the moment be to reverse a “stolen” election, these groups will continue to exist and spread violence as a central part of their ethos when they gather en masse. That ethos, of course, is white supremacy. It is no accident that in addition to the stabbings, December’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington saw members of the fascistic group vandalize two Black churches and tear down and burn Black Lives Matter flags — an act of destruction for which Tarrio was arrested in Washington on Monday.
An exclusive focus on far-right attacks in response to Trump’s loss risks overlooking the ways already extant white supremacist violence will remain the core extremist threat under Biden. Attacks might come from far-right vigilantes, but we should also be wary of violence perpetrated by government agencies, such as immigration authorities and police.
Armed militia members watch members of antifa during a “Stop the Steal” protest at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Dec. 12, 2020. Photo: Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images
It’s clear that white supremacy undergirds the commitment to restoring Trump as president. While the fight to overturn the election could well dissipate, the racist, fascistic ideology driving the effort will remain intact.
I like Glenn because he is an independent thinker. He does not follow the current of established media but offers “out of step” insights and analysis that we should all take seriously.
I have excerpted the article below. It is a bit long, but well worth your time:
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator. . .
. . . The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ). . .
. . .Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The real political powers in America today.
. . . But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
. . . The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
“The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.”
. . . Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants which are thriving, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
. . . These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
. . . The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
The Daily Poster is the blog of investigative journalist David Sirota. A few
David Sirota
days ago he posted an article reminding his readers of the gross economic inequities that characterize the US. Inequities that have only gotten worse during the pandemic.
For the Old Testament prophets, long-term disparities between the haves and the have-nots — that were ignored or caused by the rich — was a primary identifying trait of a wicked society.
Truly righteous rulers worked to close such economic chasms.
By Old Testament, prophetic standards, the United States (including the majority of its leaders) is an extraordinarily wicked place, heaping more and
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate elites; enemy of the American people
more guilt upon itself while racing towards divine judgment.
I have excerpted Sirota’s article below:
As the fight to provide one-time $2,000 survival checks crescendos in Washington, it can be difficult to grasp the size of the figures being thrown around. Can our country afford the proposal? Is the cost worth it?
Let’s look at the economic and social devastation unfolding throughout the country. Even before the pandemic, 40 percent of Americans were struggling to afford at least one basic necessity and a stunning 78 percent of full-time workers were living paycheck-to-paycheck according to figures from 2017. Half a million people were counted as homeless in 2018 alone.
The pandemic has made things worse: In the spring, 22 million jobs were lost which could take as long as four years to recover without significant relief. As of June, roughly 14 million workers and their dependents had lost employer-based health insurance. The number of Americans impacted by food insecurity is now projected to hit 54 million — up from 35 million pre-pandemic. More than 14 million American households are at risk of eviction and more than 336,000 Americans have died from the virus. . .
. . .So, with all of this in mind, can the world’s richest nation afford one-time $2,000 survival checks? Should Congress filibuster the defense bill for as long as it takes to force Mitch McConnell to allow a vote on the aid? Is there a double standard at play when it comes to government largesse for rich people and support for everyone else? Are $2,000 checks good policy? Is Congress even listening to the public?
Read these ten stats and then you decide.
1. The total cost of $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount that American billionaires have made during the pandemic ($1 trillion). The total cost of the checks is less than the amount that just 16 American billionaires increased their net worth by during the pandemic ($471 billion).
2. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk gained more wealth during the pandemic ($158 billion) than Congress just authorized for additional unemployment benefits for millions of Americans ($120 billion).
3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).
4. Congressional lawmakers are being paid $3,300 of government money every week to come up with ways to block $2,000 checks to millions of Americans.
5. It took Congress less than a month to pass legislation giving a $700 billion bailout to bank executives during the financial crisis. It has taken Congress more than 8 months to even seriously consider a far less expensive bill to give $2,000 checks to millions of Americans during this economic crisis.
6. A $2,000 survival check would give the average soldier more money than the proposed 3 percent military pay increase that is included in defense legislation that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey are filibustering in order to force a vote on the survival checks.
7. The richest 5 percent of Americans received more in Trump tax cuts in 2020 ($145 billion) than Congress is spending on increased unemployment benefits for millions of Americans during the economic crisis ($120 billion).
8. In 2016, “children, elderly, disabled people, and students made up around 70 percent of the poor,” according to the People’s Policy Project. Unlike unemployment benefits, $2,000 checks would help them.
9. About 60 percent of Georgia households make less than $75,000, meaning Georgia Republican senators allowing $2,000 checks to be blocked would deny aid to roughly 2 million of their state’s households as they run for reelection.
10. As Republicans try to block the $2,000 check legislation, a new national survey found that 78 percent of Americans support it, even as some pundits insist that the proposal is “divisive.”
[This is the second in a series looking at the growing carnality of American evangelicalism through its assimilation to right-wing politics. You can read the first post here.]
Politicians rarely if ever tell the you the bare-naked truth. They know that if they did, they probably would not get (re)elected. No, politics is not about honesty. It’s about power – gaining power, keeping power, using power, and accumulating more power.
Power and influence are the coin of the realm.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It all boils down to how is this power used, and who benefits from the use of this power?
The real beneficiaries of this political power are those who give power hungry politicians the most money. Because money wins elections. No, money is not “speech,” as the wealthy, powerful members of the Supreme Court have ruled (for their own partisan purposes).
No, money is power.
Those with the most money have the power to become the most influential. This is why the American political establishment works, not as a democratic body, but as a plutocratic oligarchy, which means the American people are ruled by an elite cabal of rich people (mainly CEOs and corporations).
One of the practical consequences of our political reality is the fact that most political discourse happens in code. Coded language hides the truth. Code talk lets a politician tell people what they want to hear while leaving him/her free to do something entirely different.
Some of the oldest political code language in this country has to do with race, specifically the place of African Americans in our society and how they are treated by the powers-that-be.
The murder of George Floyd sparked a racial upheaval in America, an upheaval that both the political status quoANDthe Religious Right are now working very hard to stamp out.
Future posts will examine the ongoing evangelical backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement.
For now, I want to explain the historical background to Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud and how it is actually another example of code language for “too many blacks have the right to vote.”
It’s one more train wreck that no Christian should be riding.
History:
Lee Atwater with Senator Strom Thurmond
Lee Atwater (1951-1991) was a cutthroat Republican party campaign strategist who got his start in North Carolina politics working with men like Sen. Strom Thurmond (who actively opposed all civil rights legislation in the US Congress).
He would eventually work for both presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,
Atwater with president Reagan
helping them to win their presidential campaigns with something called “The Southern Strategy.”
In 1981, when he worked in the Reagan administration, Atwater gave an anonymous (at the time) interview where he explained how he used coded language to divide voters along issues of race.
Below is the relevant excerpt from that interview. Take a listen:
Atwater explains how using “more abstract language” about taxes or forced busing or states’ rights will hit the same racial/racist nerves that are plucked by using the N word.
Atwater with George H. W. Bush
In this way, white Southern voters understood that the candidate who wanted their vote was as concerned as they were (i.e. were as racist as they were) about maintaining white privilege and keeping “uppity” black folk in check when they heard about policies that they knew would continue to undermine development in the black community.
Opposition to forced bussing was code talk for “we have to keep black people segregated and away from our white children.”
“The War on Drugs” is another example of political code talk deliberately used to fill in for openly racist strategies attacking the black community (and political protesters).
In 1971 president Richard Nixon first declared his “war on drugs.” Almost
John Ehrlichman with president Nixon
immediately, America’s prison population skyrocketed from 300,000 to over 2.3 million. Two-thirds of those new prisoners were African-Americans. (See this article from the Equal Justice Initiative).
Many people know that story. What fewer people realize is that the war on drugs was another instance of code language for “let’s disrupt and oppress the black community.”
John Ehlichman was president Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor. In 1994, Ehlichman gave a very candid interview to Harper’s Magazine. During that interview he had his own “Lee Atwater moment” where he admitted to the racist intent of Nixon’s war on drugs.
Here is Ehrlichman in his own words (all emphases are mine):
“You want to know what this [the war on drugs] was really all about?”
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Voila! The war on drugs became more code language for shutting down social protest movements and breaking up black communities.
Fast forward to 2020.
President Trump had a similarly candid moment setting up his intended code talk for subverting the 2020 election.
This past March (8 months prior to the election!) Trump gave an interview to Fox News where he loudly objected against the generous voting provisions that Democrats wanted to include in the COVID19 stimulus bill.
Provisions such as expanded mail-in voting, scheduling election day on a week-end, or making it a national holiday.
Why was Trump opposed to making it easier for more people to vote?
As he said (I have also listened to the original TV interview), “If you ever agreed to it [the expanded voting provisions], you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
One Democratic strategist noted, “The official position of the Republican Party for decades has been that they can’t win if people vote. Trump is just dumb enough to say it out loud.”
We will return to this issue of Republican voter suppression in future posts.
Republicans well understand that the majority of African-American voters in this country vote for the Democratic candidate. Therefore, it is in their political interests to prevent black people from voting. They just can’t say it that bluntly, or honestly.
So they talk in code. Like Trump.
It is no accident that all of the contested states where Trump has called for repeated recounts and gone to court in order to overturn results are states with large African-American communities.States in which the black vote for Biden undoubtedly played a large role in defeating Trump.
Political code language is frequently and intentionally used to hide racist intent.
It has a long history in this country.
In a similar vein, the long-standing Christian, evangelical concern for such things as Law and Order and social stability — i.e. the conservative defense of the white, privileged status quo — has always hidden the latent racism of the white church and provided its members with a conveniently “safe way” to express their inherent distrust of black America.
It’s happening again, right now, as evangelical leaders applaud Trump’s damaging efforts to overturn this election and disenfranchise millions of voters (largely people of color). We see it in evangelical leaders who condemn the Black Lives Matter movement, and as entire denominations call damnation down onto “critical race theory.”
I will have a great deal more to say about all of these things. Stay tuned.
In previous posts I have mentioned that whenever I take a road trip I view it as an opportunity to imagine myself a social anthropologist conducting
Rush Limbaugh
primary research on what people are listening to out in the hinterlands.
Thus, when I am not listening to a favorite CD, I am tuned in to either conservative talk radio or local Christian programming (not for the music but the news, commentary, sermons, or call-in Bible answer man shows).
My most recent trip confirmed not just the close similarities, but the near
Shaun Hannity
identity of political-social views on secular and Christian broadcasting. There is no difference whatsoever. And that should send a chill down every disciples’ spiritual spine.
Of course, every talk show was a monolithic barrage of “Stop the Steal” nonstop — usually, asserted with ranting, anger, and fear-mongering, not to mention the repeated threats of looming violence if “the radical, leftist cabal” that stole the election from Trump didn’t move over and get out of the way.
I could not find a single instance of rational, evidence-based conversation or
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 24: Jay Sekulow, personal attorney for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference during the Senate impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
debate, much less analysis, about the presidential election, the recounts, the court challenges, or the future of this country on a secular radio station.
Worse yet, the Christian broadcasts were no different.
Whether the programming was syndicated or regional, Christian commentators were reading from the same hyper-partisan play book: anger, fear, threats of armed uprisings, calling hell fire onto the leftists, socialists, Marxists, antifa-ists, critical race theorists, and Black Lives Matters communists who are determined to destroy America by turning it into a totalitarian, anti-Christian nation.
The ignorance and misinformation spewed like sewage from a fire hose.
Pat Robertson
The Christians had no more interest in honest conversation, or an examination of the facts available, than the did the Rush Limbaugh crowd. I doubt if a single one of them had even a rudimentary understanding of what socialism really is or that the United States is already highly “socialist” in many ways – highly unjust ways that favor the rich and corporations almost exclusively.
Everyone is convinced that Joe and Kamala are raging socialists chomping at the bit to outlaw private property and confiscate everyone’s guns. Obviously, not a one of these people (broadcasters and callers both) knew the first thing about Biden’s or Harris’ careers.
The truth of the matter is that both Biden and Harris are dyed in the wool crony-capitalists, corporatists, center-right party stalwarts so heavily indebted to Wall Street that I’m surprised either of them has an independent thought in their head.
Jan Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcast Network, with Oral Roberts
Their souls are owned by the same brand of neoliberal economics that continues to fuel the gaping chasm of income inequality that curses sick Americans – especially people of color – to wait in bread lines longer than anything seen in this country since the Great Depression, and to die of covid19 at higher rates than any other country in the civilized world.
The American evangelical church has become nothing more than cheap, shallow reflection of the cultivated ignorance, narrow mindedness, and xenophobia that has always marked American conservatism.
That ghoulish political contortion has become the face of the Republican party AND the Religious Right (read: evangelicalism).
This post is my brief introduction to short series I will write in the next few weeks.
David Brody, political reporter for CBN, author of the book, “The Faith of Donald Trump”
In this series I will have a great deal more to say about the incestuous mánage à tois that has developed between evangelicalism, the Republican party, and American anti-intellectualism.
I will begin by focusing on the role that virulent, Republican racism has to play in both (1) the Republican demonization of the Black Lives Matter movement and (2) Donald Trump’s campaign to persuade his base that this election was stolen.
With the exception of president-elect Biden’s verbal commitment to rejoin the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — the nuclear arms agreement president Obama signed with Iran — I see little reason to be optimistic about Biden’s approach to foreign policy and America’s endless wars.
Joe has predictably stacked his cabinet picks with corporate war-mongers who never saw a new weapons system or a foreign intervention they didn’t love.
Below you can watch Abby Martin’s survey (about 10 min.) of these individual’s resumes. Even if they all do not all survive the Senate approval process, their selection already tells us everything we need to know about Biden.
As Abby notes, “You just couldn’t find a nicer gang of war criminals.”
Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson
For a more wide-ranging analysis, listen to Aaron Mate’s interview with retired Army colonel, Lawrence Wilkerson (22 min.) below or click here:
Today’s Opinion piece from journalist Chris Hedges is entitled “The Great Delusion.”
Personally, I do not fear the end of the world.
I do fear the increasing magnitude of human suffering that will inexorably pave the way for the final Apocalypse.
And I deeply lament the sinister role now played by the evangelical church in advancing Satan’s goals.
By only reading the book of Revelation as if it were a human history horoscope, the evangelical church (in league with the Religious Right) remains blind to the fact that it has long been conquered by the Beast.
John the Seer warns God’s people that only those “who overcome” will stand victorious in the end.
And that charge ain’t describin’ much of evangelicalism today.
Below are a few excerpts from Hedges. You can read the entire piece here:
Joe Biden and the systems managers of the deep state and empire are returning to power. Trump and his coterie of buffoons, racists, con artists and Christian fascists are sullenly preparing to leave office. U.S. pharmaceutical corporations are starting to disseminate vaccines to mitigate the globe’s worst outbreak of COVID-19 that has resulted in more than 2,600 deaths per day. America, as Biden says, is back, ready to take its place at the head of the table. In the battle for the soul of America, he assures us, democracy has prevailed. Progress, prosperity, civility and a reassertion of American prestige and power are, we are promised, weeks away.
But the real lesson we should learn from the rise of a demagogue such as Trump, who received 74 million votes, and a pandemic that our for-profit health care industry proved unable to contain, is that we are losing control as a nation and as a species. Far more dangerous demagogues will arise from the imperial and neoliberal policies the Biden administration will embrace. Far worse pandemics will sweep the globe with higher rates of infections and mortality, an inevitable result of our continued consumption of animals and animal products, and the wanton destruction of the ecosystem on which we and other species depend for life.
“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.”
Biden’s appointments are drawn almost exclusively from the circles of the Democratic Party and corporate elite, those responsible for the massive social inequality, trade deals, de-industrialization, militarized police, world’s largest prison system, austerity programs that abolished social programs such as welfare, the revived Cold War with Russia, wholesale government surveillance, endless wars in the Middle East and the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the working class. The Washington Post writes that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.” Bernie Sanders, apparently rebuffed in his efforts to become secretary of labor in the Biden administration, has expressed frustration with the Biden nominations. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat by House Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee because of her support for the Green New Deal. The message of the Biden administration to progressives and left-wing populists is very clear – “Drop dead”. . .
. . . The perpetuation of the deeply unpopular wars and onerous neoliberal policies by the Biden administration will be accompanied by a fevered demonization of Russia, most recently blamed for cyber-attacks. A new Cold War with Russia will be used by the corporate Democrats to discredit domestic and foreign critics and deflect attention from the political stagnation and the corporate pillaging of the country. It will allow MSNBC and The New York Times, which spent two years slogging empty Russiagate conspiracies, to disseminate a daily stream of emotionally charged rumors and shady accusations about Russia. Cable celebrities such as Rachel Maddow will hyperventilate night after night about Russia while ignoring the corruption of the Biden administration. The only reason Russia is not blamed for rigging the election in 2020, as opposed to 2016, by the Democratic Party is because Trump was defeated. . .
. . . The belief that we can maintain current levels of consumption, especially of animal products, capitalist expansion, imperial wars, a reliance on fossil fuels and abject subservience to unfettered corporate power, which has solidified the worst income inequality in human history, is not a form of hope but suicidal self-delusion. We are not headed under the policies of the Biden administration and the global ruling elite for the broad sunlit uplands of a new and glorious future, but economic misery, vast climate migrations, waves of new and more virulent pandemics, of which COVID-19 is a mild precursor, along with irreversible ecological systems collapse and frightening forms of societal breakdown, authoritarianism and neofascism.
Global warming is inevitable. It cannot be stopped. At best, it can be slowed. Over the next 50 years the earth will most likely heat up to levels that will make whole parts of the planet uninhabitable. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people will be displaced. Millions of species will go extinct. Cities on or near a coast, including New York and London, will be submerged. . .
. . . One of the lessons I learned from covering wars and revolutions as a foreign correspondent is that the political, economic and cultural systems that are erected by any society are very fragile. The façade of power remains in place, as I saw in Eastern Europe during the 1989 revolutions and later in Yugoslavia, long after terminal rot has consumed the foundations. This façade fools a society into thinking the structures of authority remain solid, impervious to collapse. So, when collapse comes, which should have been long predicted, it appears sudden and incomprehensible. The ensuing chaos is disorienting and frightening. The cognitive dissonance between the perception of power and its rapid dissolution feeds self-delusion. It creates, as I witnessed in the former Yugoslavia, what anthropologists call crisis cults, as well as bizarre conspiracy theories, fascism and the embrace of inchoate violence to purge society of the demons blamed for the national debacle. Hatred becomes the highest form of patriotism. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Intellectuals, journalists and scientists rooted in a fact-based world are despised. Ruling elites and ruling structures lose all credibility. This collapse is often a portal to a world of nihilism and blood-drenched fantasy.
After four years of lies, the stoking of racist violence, stunning ineptitude, rampant corruption and an abject failure to cope with a national health crisis, Trump expanded his base by 11 million votes. This should be a huge, flashing red light. Worse, 70 percent of Trump voters, 51 million Americans, believe that “radical Left Democrats” and the deep state rigged the elections through “voter fraud,” including the importation of Venezuelan voting software, illegitimate mail-in ballots and the wholesale destruction of Trump ballots by election officials. One hundred and twenty-six Republican House members joined a lawsuit filed by 18 Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s victory. The vast majority of Republican senators refused to acknowledge the election results following the November vote. Electors from the Electoral College were forced in several states to deliver their votes to state legislatures under armed guard. Some two dozen armed protesters carrying American flags and chanting “Stop the Steal” descended on the home of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Seven hundred members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys took over streets in Washington last weekend to protest the alleged theft of the election, leading to more than three dozen arrests, four stabbings, the vandalizing of four Black churches, and Black Lives Matter banners and signs ripped down and burned.
Trump may be gone soon, but he leaves behind a party that is openly authoritarian, dismissive of democratic norms, an enemy to science and fact-based discourse and which attempted a coup d’état. The next time around they won’t be so disorganized and inept. This hostility to democracy by one of the two ruling parties, supported by millions of Americans, many of whom were betrayed by Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party, will not dissipate but grow, especially as the hammer of economic dislocation, including the looming evictions of millions of Americans, pummels the country. . .
. . . The decades-long corporate assault on culture, journalism, education, the arts, universities and critical thinking has left those who speak this truth marginalized and ignored. These Cassandras, locked out of the national debate, are dismissed as unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic. The country is consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth. It is this delusional hope that will doom us. . .
. . . We cannot use the word hope if we refuse to face the truth. All hope rooted in self-delusion is fantasy. We must lift the filter from our eyes to see the danger before us. We must heed the warnings of our own prophets. We must destroy the centers of power that lure us and our children, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, to certain doom. The walls, daily, are closing in around us. The radical evil we face is as real under Trump as it will be under Biden. And if this radical evil is not smashed, then the world ahead will be one of torment and mass death.
interview he had his own “Lee Atwater moment” where he admitted to the racist intent of Nixon’s war on drugs.
individual’s resumes. Even if they all do not all survive the Senate approval process, their selection already tells us everything we need to know about Biden.
