Political Sickos

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.

Philip Bump at WP:

Over the weekend, a group using the name America First held a conference in Florida. Led by a notorious white nationalist named Nick Fuentes, the group explored the explicitly racist and toxic applications of the phrase. No one did so with more eagerness than Fuentes.

“Tonight I say: We are going to rule this country,” he told the cheering audience, largely made up of young White men. After pronouncing that “the United States government has become the evil empire in the world,” he pledged that he and they would “build and raise up a parallel economy” to avoid the constraints otherwise placed on overt racists.

Fuentes, who was at the far-right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, repurposed one of its nationalist catchphrases as he railed against his group's enemies.

“To every RINO, every lying journalist, every carjacker, gangbanger, illegal immigrant, every OnlyFans whore, every mobbed-up politician and pundit on the payroll of some Middle Eastern country, to the people that have looted our wealth, addicted our youth to drugs, thrown open our borders to invaders from all over the world, to the corrupt that have sold out our country and our people: we are coming for you. ... You think you can replace us? You’re wrong. We will replace you.”

This is not subtle, certainly, but Fuentes at another point was more explicit.

“Our secret sauce here? It's these young White men,” he said. The audience cheered. “That's what we call the secret ingredient. America and the world has forgotten about them, but not us.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene now using her official USG congressional account to promote anti-Semitic, white supremacist, pro-Hitler, pro-Putin conference. This is a toxin in the bloodstream of America. It must stop.

House GOP Leaders: Have you lost all sense of decency? https://t.co/ywZhif4Vvb

— Rep. Liz Cheney (@RepLizCheney) February 28, 2022

 

"Morons, I've got morons on my team," he said of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, quoting a line from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." https://t.co/t2w4J8D1FN

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) February 27, 2022

 

 Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers:

This antisemitic lunatic should never hold a public office. @WendyRogersAZ is a dangerous person. She must be removed. This is sickening. pic.twitter.com/ttEywJQtJh

— thomas rayosun long 🛹 (@ACoupleOkooks) February 27, 2022

In her televised address, Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers advocates for building gallows to hang named enemies, then calls on the groypers to keep "pushing the Overton Window towards Christ" pic.twitter.com/5pvepExWru

— Ben Lorber (@BenLorber8) February 26, 2022

Dirty Trick in Iowa?

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, has begun.

Tyler Pager and Jennifer Epstein at Bloomberg:

Supporters of President Donald Trump flooded a hotline used by Iowa precinct chairs to report Democratic caucus results after the telephone number was posted online, worsening delays in the statewide tally, a top state Democrat told party leaders on a conference call Wednesday night.

According to two participants on the call, Ken Sagar, a state Democratic central committee member, was among those answering the hotline on caucus night and said people called in and expressed support for Trump. The phone number became public after people posted photos of caucus paperwork that included the hotline number, one of the people on the call said.

The phone call Wednesday night between the Iowa Democratic Party staff and state central committee, the party’s elected governing body, came as the party was still counting results.

Several glitches, including problems with a new phone application that was supposed to quickly send individual caucus results to the state party, plagued Iowa’s troubled caucuses, causing the outcome to be delayed for days. More than 48 hours after caucusing began, the party had reported results from 96% of precincts and the race was too close to call.

 Ben Collins, Maura Barrett and Vaughn Hillyard at NBC:

Users on a politics-focused section of the fringe 4chan message board repeatedly posted the phone number for the Iowa Democratic Party, which was found by a simple Google search, both as screenshots and in plain text, alongside instructions.

"They have to call in the results now. Very long hold times being reported. Phone line being clogged," one user posted at about 11 p.m. ET on Monday, three hours after the caucuses began.

"Uh oh how unfortunate it would be for a bunch of mischief makers to start clogging the lines," responded another anonymous user, sarcastically.

Some users chimed in, posting alleged wait times on hold, imploring others to “clog the lines [and] make the call lads.”

Nehlen

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's relationship to bigotry.

Paul Nehlen, the alt-right guy and Bannon pal running again in a primary against Paul Ryan, has gone full Nazi.

#ShallNotCensor pic.twitter.com/lIDrrd14wt

— Paul Nehlen (@pnehlen) December 27, 2017

1/ You Need This Red Pill:

There is a construct that you are either support Jews or you are an antisemite.

That is incorrect.

You need to know a new term: philosemite (someone who is extremely in love with Jews)

— Paul Nehlen (@pnehlen) December 26, 2017

Allison Kaplan Sommer  at Haaretz:

Several other examples of Nehlen’s increasingly combative rhetoric and quest for “white nationalist street cred” were detailed in a recent HuffPost article. Huffpost reported: “On Dec. 8, Nehlen used Gab, a micro-blogging platform used primarily by white nationalists, to repost a drawing another user had made for him. The drawing showed a puny Ryan, seen as the anti-Trump, next to a buff 'Chad' Nehlen. (Chad is an alt-right term for a fit alpha-male womanizer). In the accompanying text, Nehlen is described as having redpilled on globalism, RR and JQ.”

Redpilled, a reference to the Matrix movie trilogy, is used to describe an awakening to white supremacist teachings. RR stands for race realism, and JQ stands for the Jewish question, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews have undue influence over the media, banking and politics.

Sinister Agendas and Anti-Constitutional Impulses

In Defying the Odds, we explain that Trump has renounced the conservatism of Ronald Reagan.

He usually dismissed high ideals by reducing them to crude material terms. Consider for instance, America’s foundational proposition that all men are created equal. “The world is not fair,” Trump said in a 2006 video. [here] “You know they come with this statement `all men are created equal.’ Well, it sounds beautiful, and it was written by some very wonderful people and brilliant people, but it's not true because all people and all men [laughter] aren't created [equal] … you have to be born and blessed with something up here [pointing to his head]. On the assumption you are, you can become very rich.” Similarly, Trump did not think of “American exceptionalism” as a way of thinking about the nation’s role as a beacon for equality and liberty. As he said in 2015 [here] , it was all about the Benjamins.

I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much. On top of taking it back, I don’t want to say, “We’re exceptional, we’re more exceptional.” Because essentially we’re saying, “We’re more outstanding than you. By the way, you’ve been eating our lunch for the last 20 years, but we’re more exceptional than you.” I don’t like the term. I never liked it.

Trump’s disdain for these ideas put him at odds with a major strain of conservative thought that revered the Declaration. It surely set him apart from conservatives who loved to quote Reagan’s rhetoric of a “shining city on a hill” and who faulted President Obama for seeming to belittle American exceptionalism. Trump just did not care very much for conservative ideology. In May of 2016, he said: “This is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told a post-election conference: “One of the problems is many people tried to look at the Donald Trump phenomenon through the ideological lenses which had defined previous Republican presidential nominating contests. Donald Trump is post ideological. His movement transcends ideology.”

George F. Will:

With Trump turning and turning in a widening gyre, his crusade to make America great again is increasingly dominated by people who explicitly repudiate America’s premises. The faux nationalists of the “alt-right” and their fellow travelers such as Stephen K. Bannon, although fixated on protecting the United States from imported goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains the continental European right. In “Answering the Alt-Right” in National Affairs quarterly, Ramon Lopez, a University of Chicago PhD candidate in political philosophy, demonstrates how Trump’s election has brought back to the public stage ideas that a post-Lincoln America had slowly but determinedly expunged. They were rejected because they are incompatible with an open society that takes its bearing from the Declaration of Independence’s doctrine of natural rights.
...

Trump is, of course, innocent of this (or any other) systemic thinking. However, within the ambit of his vast, brutish carelessness are some people with sinister agendas and anti-constitutional impulses. Stephen Miller, Bannon’s White House residue and Trump’s enfant terrible, recently said that “in sending our [tax reform] proposal to the tax-writing committees, we will include instructions to ensure all low- and middle-income households are protected.” So, Congress will be instructed by Trump’s 32-year-old acolyte who also says the president’s national security powers “will not be questioned.” We await the response of congressional Republicans, who did so little to stop Trump’s ascent and then so much to normalize him.

Racists Cheer Trump

Rosie Gray at The Atlantic:

White nationalist and alt-right activists are cheering President Trump for defending white-nationalist protesters and placing equal blame on counterprotesters for the violence that ensued in Charlottesville this past weekend at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

“Really proud of him,” the alt-right leader Richard Spencer said in a text message. “He bucked the narrative of Alt-Right violence, and made a statement that is fair and down to earth. C’ville could have hosted a peaceful rally — just like our event in May — if the police and mayor had done their jobs. Charlottesville needed to police the streets and police the antifa, whose organizations are dedicated to violence.”

Spencer said he didn’t necessarily view Trump’s remarks as an endorsement of the protesters’ goal; the Unite the Right rally was held to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “He was calling it like he saw it,” Spencer, who was one of the leaders of the protest, said. “He endorsed nothing. He was being honest.” Spencer held a press conference in his office and home in Alexandria on Monday in which he said he did not believe Trump had condemned white nationalists in his comments on Monday, in which the president said “racism is evil” and specifically called out white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. Trump made those remarks after intense criticism for failing to specifically condemn white-nationalist groups in his initial response.

Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa https://t.co/tTESdV4LP0

— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) August 15, 2017

Trump's statement was fair and down to earth. #Charlottesville could have been peaceful, if police did its job. https://t.co/3FUgmWoiWi

— Richard ☝🏻Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) August 15, 2017

Left and Right Go Secular

Peter Beinart writes at The Atlantic:

Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.

So is the alt-right. Read Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari’s famous Breitbart.com essay, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” It contains five references to “tribe,” seven to “race,” 13 to “the west” and “western” and only one to “Christianity.” That’s no coincidence. The alt-right is ultra-conservatism for a more secular age. Its leaders like Christendom, an old-fashioned word for the West. But they’re suspicious of Christianity itself, because it crosses boundaries of blood and soil. As a college student, the alt-right leader Richard Spencer was deeply influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously hated Christianity. Radix, the journal Spencer founded, publishes articles with titles like “Why I Am a Pagan.” One essay notes that “critics of Christianity on the Alternative Right usually blame it for its universalism.”

Secularization is transforming the left, too. In 1990, according to PRRI, slightly more than half of white liberals seldom or never attended religious services. Today the proportion is 73 percent. And if conservative nonattenders fueled Trump’s revolt inside the GOP, liberal nonattenders fueled Bernie Sanders’s insurgency against Hillary Clinton: While white Democrats who went to religious services at least once a week backed Clinton by 26 points, according to an April 2016 PRRI survey, white Democrats who rarely attended services backed Sanders by 13 points.

Anne Frank Center on Antisemitism and Trump

From the Anne Frank Center:

MR. PRESIDENT, YOUR TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE ACKNOWLEGMENT OF #Antisemitism TODAY IS NOT ENOUGH.

Statement of Steven Goldstein, Executive Director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, on President Trump's acknowledgment of Antisemitism today:
“The President’s sudden acknowledgement is a Band-Aid on the cancer of Antisemitism that has infected his own Administration. His statement today is a pathetic asterisk of condescension after weeks in which he and his staff have committed grotesque acts and omissions reflecting Antisemitism, yet day after day have refused to apologize and correct the record. Make no mistake: The Antisemitism coming out of this Administration is the worst we have ever seen from any Administration. The White House repeatedly refused to mention Jews in its Holocaust remembrance, and had the audacity to take offense when the world pointed out the ramifications of Holocaust denial. And it was only yesterday, President’s Day, that Jewish Community Centers across the nation received bomb threats, and the President said absolutely nothing. When President Trump responds to Antisemitism proactively and in real time, and without pleas and pressure, that’s when we’ll be able to say this President has turned a corner. This is not that moment.”

Scary Trump Supporters

Joseph Goldstein reports at The New York Times:

By the time Richard B. Spencer, the leading ideologue of the alt-right movement and the final speaker of the night, rose to address a gathering of his followers on Saturday, the crowd was restless.

In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.

Katie Glueck reports at Politico:

“I would say Steve Bannon’s comment that [Breitbart is] a platform of the alt-right is probably something I could agree with, say 90 percent, just in the sense that it’s clearly moved away from the conservative movement,” Spencer said. “It was pro-Trump, it was also a site that tons of people on the alt-right [go] to get their news from, they share [it]. I don’t think Breitbart is really ideologically alt-right, no, but it’s interesting and very hopeful for me that Bannon is at least open to these things.”

Spencer was perhaps more unsparing in his criticism of conservatives than of the left, cracking disparaging jokes about the “freedom fries” of the George W. Bush era and railing against the “neocons” who push, in his view, overly muscular foreign policy proposals. He said he would strongly oppose the appointment of the hawkish former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton to a potential Trump administration cabinet position, like secretary of state, and he blasted a Bush-inspired, interventionist-oriented foreign policy.

Another Neo-Nazi Trump Tweet

Tina Nguyen reports at Vanity Fair:

Just two months after the Trump campaign got into trouble for tweeting an image that was widely seen as anti-Semitic, a member of the Republican nominee’s family is at it again. On Sunday,Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of Donald Trump, proudly promoted the above Instagram post, which includes a meme frequently shared by white supremacists. “Apparently I made the cut as one of the Deplorables,” he wrote, referring to a series of controversial comments Hillary Clintonrecently made about Trump’s supporters. “All kidding aside I am honored to be grouped with the hard working men and women of this great nation that have supported@realdonaldtrump [sic] and know that he can fix the mess created by politicians in Washington.”

The image, which plays off Sylvester Stallone’s geriatric action movie The Expendables, shows Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his sons alongside such “hard working men” as prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Breitbart commentator Milo Yiannopoulos—who was banned from Twitter for inciting hateful rhetoric—and Pepe the Frog, an amphibian meme that has been appropriated by Trump’s “alt-right” followers, some of whom use the image to peddle racism, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism.

Many People Are Thinking that "Dave" Was a Documentary

Brian Flood writes at The Wrap:

The hashtag #HillarysBodyDouble took off on social media Monday morning as conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton having a body double spread quickly on Twitter the day after the Democratic nominee’s health issues dominated news coverage.

Clinton was forced to leave a Sept. 11 memorial service early on Sunday after she felt overheated and was captured on camera wobbling as she entered a van. It was later revealed that Clinton was diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday.

Clinton canceled a campaign fundraising trip to California scheduled for Monday and Tuesday in order to rest and recover, but when she appeared smiling and healthy following a visit to her daughter Chelsea’s apartment to rest up on Sunday. Online sleuths found it odd that she was not surrounded by secret service to both protect her and help her in case she fell ill again.