The Little Führer

[American Dream]

http://insurgentnotes.com/2016/10/edito ... ent-trump/

OCT 9, ’16

President Trump?

It just might happen. What seemed, a year ago, like a laughingstock candidacy is now a plausible winner in the wildest political year (and there is still the forthcoming “October surprise”) since 1968. No matter what happens, the old US party system is broken. Donald Trump is like no major candidate in living memory. Just as one had to reach back to Eugene Debs to find a candidate as seemingly radical as Bernie Sanders, finding a serious precursor to Trump is even more difficult. The quiet eclipse of Sanders in August guaranteed that many of his ex-supporters will stay home or vote for the Green Party. Respectable official society, including a good swath of the Republican establishment and even the normally “apolitical” military, is either in withdrawal or openly supporting Clinton. Generals, diplomats, foreign policy wonks and the New York Times all agree that a Trump presidency will be a disaster. The Financial Times sheds tears over the possible demise of the “internationalist” (read: US-dominated) world order in place since 1945. Such declarations make no difference; if anything, they only add to Trump’s “anti-establishment” credentials and panache.

The situation shows important parallels to the Brexit vote in Britain in June; there, the entire political and academic establishment, “left” or “right,” came out to “remain” in the European Union, and something like a class vote (albeit mixed with other less savory elements) came back with a big middle finger. That is what is brewing in the United States. What is occurring is nothing less than a (very) skewed referendum on the past 45 years of American politics and society, and those who feel they got the short end of “free trade” and “globalization” think they have finally found a voice, even as Trump’s economic program, such as it is, is a chimera. Just as in France or in Britain, the new right-wing populism does not make its inroads in the wired yuppie metropolitan centers of Paris or London, but rather in the passed-over middle and small towns, including towns where gentrification has forced the former urban working class to relocate. So it is in the United States, where Trump does not play well in the San Francisco Bay Area or in New York City, but in the medium, small-town and rural preserves of the “unnecessariat.” We might also see the rise of Trump-style authoritarian populism in a disturbing global context, one that includes the ongoing advances of the far right in western Europe (France, Scandinavia, Austria and now Germany), in eastern Europe led by Hungary and Poland, along with Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey and, most recently, Duterte in the Philippines.

It is perhaps remarkable that, in America’s supposedly “middle class” society, the white working class is being discussed and catered to as the ultimate arbiter of this election. So unprecedented are the politics of 2016 that mainstream ideology suddenly feels the need to talk openly about the working class it previously disappeared or took for granted. UAW bureaucrats and AFL-CIO blowhard president Richard Trumka scurry hither and thither to convince the union rank and file not to vote for Trump.

Trump, for his part, when able to stay “on message,” has made disarmingly lucid speeches about what has happened to workers in the decimated former heartland of mass industry, the key “swing states” of the Midwest. The hard-scrabble white working class of the former mass furniture industry in Virginia and North Carolina is also easy pickings for Trump, not to mention the West Virginia miners and ex-miners turned off by Clinton’s “green” agenda. And why should we be surprised, when the main surprising thing is that for the first time a candidate of a major party has bothered to talk directly to such workers about what has happened to them in the past decades, in contrast to the feel-good rhetoric of the Walter Mondales and Bill Clintons and now of Hillary Clinton? Saying “America never stopped being great,” as Hillary Clinton and the Democrats do, is already ideology run amok, and is even colder comfort to ex-industrial workers in the heartland, to a large swath of black people north and south, or to poor whites in Appalachia and elsewhere, currently subject to the highest death rates in the country by suicide, drugs and alcohol. We should not overlook, when identifying the class fractures at work, the role of identity politics, so rife in the metropolitan centers, in fueling the rise of Trump. Identity politics always had and has an explicit or implicit “suspicion” of workers qua workers, just as they have been supremely indifferent to the dismantling of the old industrial heartlands, which ravaged communities of white, black and brown workers alike. The rise of Trump is in part payback for the decades of condescension and barely concealed contempt for, or at best indifference to, the fate of ordinary working people rife in elite academia, the corporate media and the higher-end publishing world of the New York Times and posh journals of the chattering classes. Trump is a racist, you say? A misogynist? An immigrant and China basher? Yes, he is all those things, but these accusations from the garden-variety left and liberals do not get to the heart of his appeal as an “anti-establishment” figure. His apparent base does also have the highest per capita income of the major candidates and ex-candidates (Clinton and Sanders), indicating that he has forged a coalition of middle-and upper-class whites with some white workers and poor whites, itself rather unprecedented. All these groups have in common a conviction that the older America they knew is being replaced by an America with a blacker and browner working class, and multiple immigrant groups from East and South Asia, and from Latin America. Last but not least, Trump has indeed brought many elements of the far right, the David Dukes and gun-show crowd, into broad daylight, allowing them to emerge from the dark corners of the alt-right, and “freed their tongues,” as one of them put it, from the dominant “politically correct” atmosphere. Whether Trump wins or loses, such forces will not be going quietly back into their previous relative obscurity. To conclude, these advances of the far right and authoritarian populism around the world are the mirror of the failure of the moderate “left” which has collapsed into the happy family of center-right/center-left consensus of the past 45 years, led by the Tony Blairs, Francois Mitterands and Gerhard Schroeders in Europe and by the Jimmy Carters, Bill Clintons and Barack Obamas in the United States, and now joined by Hillary Clinton. Such forces are no stop-gap barrier, as many “lesser evil” theorists would have us believe, to the ascending right, but rather feed it, making it and not a serious left, of the type Insurgent Notes aims to help bring into existence, the apparent “anti-establishment” alternative to the status quo.

[American Dream]

http://mystical-politics.blogspot.com/2 ... tates.html

Ethnic fundamentalism in the United States

From The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz, pages 273-274.

Nazism offered all ethnic Germans, whether or not they joined the party, a comprehensive system of meaning that was transmitted through powerful symbols and renewed in communal celebrations. It told them how to differentiate between friend and enemy, true believer and heretic, non-Jew and Jew. In offering the faithful a vision of sanctified life in the Volk, it resembled a religion. Its condemnation of egoism and celebration of self-denial had much in common with ethical postulates elsewhere. But in contrast to the optimistic language of international covenants guaranteeing universal rights to all people, Nazi public culture was constructed on the mantra: "Not every being with a human face is human."

Until late in the twentieth century, Nazism appeared to have been a retrograde political faith that lacked the potential to outlive its founder. While the idiosyncratic racial fantasies of Nazism seem as outdated as the goose-step, the ideology that drove it was the first example of a new and ominous kind of doctrine that based the civil right of citizens, including the right to live, on ethnic identity as determined by the state. Hitler founded a consensual dictatorship that was "neither right nor left" on the political spectrum but occupied an entirely different political terrain. Like other fundamentalisms, it began with a powerful leader and drew on populist rage against corrupt elites who had betrayed the "common man."

On the basis of a shabby doctrine of racial struggle, Nazi functionaries and academics innovated a political strategy that did not perish with the Führer. In the second half of the twentieth century, the outbreak of ethnic strife and the emergence of populist regionalism during the breakup of colonial empires and the collapse of Soviet power made it clear that Nazism had not been a final atavistic outcropping of tribalism but a harbinger of ethnic fundamentalism, a creed that gathers force when modernizing societies are convulsed by dislocations which threaten conventional systems of meaning. The potential for racial hatred lurks whenever political leaders appeal to the exalted virtue of their own ethnic community. Against a growing commitment to universal human rights, ethnic fundamentalists broadcast alarms about ethnic danger. Evil presents itself as unalloyed ethnic good. Reforging bonds that may be religious, cultural, racial, or linguistic, ethnic fundamentalism merges politics and religion within a crusade to defend values and authentic traditions that appear to be endangered.

Donald Trump, it seems to me, is an example of the powerful leader appealing to populist rage, which he is exploiting to try to become president. His movement, if it can be called a movement, is a kind of ethnic fundamentalism, where the ethnos or Volk is identified by him as white people who don't belong to urban elites, people who are not black or Hispanic, Asian, or Jewish. There have certainly been white supremacist political movements in the past in the US, but I think that what we have today in the US is something new. It has definite fascist and antisemitic features: the accusation that Clinton is conspiring with international bankers against Trump, for example and attacks upon the lying media, which again can be an antisemitic trope. At the moment it appears that Trump is on his way to losing the election, but I don't think that the fascist tendencies he has introduced into American politics will go away, including the introduction of political antisemitism into the public discourse,

[American Dream]

Notes on a Future Politics—Part I

AUTHOR
John Garvey

But what galvanized the Buchanan supporters was his fervent opposition to trade. Not long before, he had been a regular garden-variety free trader. But, and I think this is a real but, he saw the devastation being left behind by the abandonment of American industries (especially in the cities), and he seized upon it like a dog upon a bone. His nostalgia for a lost America is, I think, genuine and blinded—black folks never appear in his remembrance of things past; only the hard-working white folks count. But, and this is another real but, his version of what has been destroyed and lost needs to be reckoned with. We’ll get back to Buchanan in a moment when he makes another appearance on the electoral stage in 2000.

For the moment, though, let’s turn to David Duke—who believes he has been given a new lease on life by the success of the Trump campaign thus far; in 2016, he’s now running for Senator from Louisiana. His earlier efforts to win high-level offices (in 1990 and 1991) were beaten back only through an intense mobilization of those who opposed him but revealed the extent of support he had among white voters—at least in Louisiana. Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research on Education and Human Rights has described Duke this way:

David Duke has been an ideological national socialist all his adult life. (Remember that the real name of Hitler’s Nazis was the National Socialist German Workers Party.) Before he became a Klansman, he was a junior national socialist, even marching around the LSU campus wearing a brownshirt uniform with a swastika armband once. His Klan…was a “nazi” Klan. He quit his Klan in 1980 and it has been 36 years since David Duke was a Ku Klux Klan member.
….
Mr. Duke is no longer the premier white nationalist movement leader that he once was. Others have emerged to push him into the second-tier ranks. It is a mistake, however, to discount his campaign. In this year of the “angry white male,” a significant stratum of white voters could be available if he asks for it. With 24 candidates in the primary, Mr. Duke needs a relatively small number of voters to push him into the run-off.[6]

Of special importance in this sorry tale is the brief entry of none other than Donald Trump into the primary process of the Reform Party in 1999―2000. The Reform Party was the odd child of Ross Perot’s third party campaign in 1996. By 1999, the party had splintered and, after a long song and dance, there were two possible candidates—Trump and Pat Buchanan (again!). A decade and a half ago, Trump’s powers of political perception were much greater than now and he called Buchanan out for being an anti-Semite and an admirer of Hitler. Truth be known, the Reform Party of that year was a strange creature. Trump kind of got it right when he said: “The Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani.”[7]

Also worth noting in historical perspective is the sustained popularity of right-wing talk radio hosts (like Hannity, Limbaugh, Levin and—hard as it is to believe—the even more repulsive Michael Savage), Fox News and an array of social media news outlets (such as the Drudge Report established in 1995 and Breitbart established in 2007), the continued popularity of opinion makers like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter, the arrival of the conspiracy right (exemplified by Alex Jones’s infowars), and so on. My point is that the Trump moment is and continues to be the emergent result of a whole bunch of internally contradictory projects. But, we need to appreciate that they were all political projects—efforts intended to change the way that people thought and acted.

Ironically, perhaps no one can take more satisfaction with how things have worked out than Pat Buchanan—as was headlined in a recent op-ed, “Trump Stole My Playbook.” This turn of events reminds me of the fate of what were called the “anti-Semitic” parties that arose in Germany in the 1870s and gathered considerable support. Their electoral successes were short-lived and they all but disappeared as distinct organizations. At the time, some commentators thought that their views were little more than a brief hallucination. But it was no hallucination. The parties disappeared because there was no longer any need for them by the turn of the century—their views on the Jews had become all but completely accepted by all of the organized political parties, including the leaders of the Social Democrats (with the noteworthy exception of Rosa Luxemburg).[8] The proof of this powerful cultural absorption into the core assumptions of German political culture of what had been a political heresy, if not joke, was the relative ease with which the Nazis’ anti-Semitism became widely accepted after World War I. As I’ll get to below, there’s an even more dangerous version of Buchanan waiting in the wings of the Trump campaign today.


...There seems to be little evidence that Trump’s supporters are overwhelmingly people who have been victimized by industrial downsizing (although they exist).[14] There may very well be people who think that they should be doing better than they are—as do most of us. There also seems to be a lot of evidence that he has many more men backing him than women and that is a fact worth reckoning with.[15] And then, most important of all, there are the whites—cutting across virtually every other category of support for Trump. If nothing else, Trump is a white movement—notwithstanding his small assortment of black supporters.[16]

In the background of the Trump campaign, there are two developments related to the white character of his campaign worth recognition for the dangers they portend. On the one hand, there is the coalescence of a fairly broad variety of white nationalist leaders who have made common cause in their support of the Trump campaign. A main vehicle for that coalescence is the American Freedom Party. Its very up to date web page includes articles by a who’s who of white nationalists and re-postings of columns by Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter. At the same time, The Occidental Observer, a white nationalist intellectual site edited by Kevin McDonald, a retired professor from the California State University system, has emerged as a significant source of analysis of the influence of white nationalists on the Trump campaign and on the development of a self-conscious strategy to see beyond the election.

At the end of August, Clinton delivered a harsh attack on the involvement of the alt-right in Trump’s campaign; she didn’t go very far. Specifically, she completely left out any explanation for why it was that “fringe elements” were gaining a growing audience. She did not acknowledge the possibility or likelihood that steadily worsening material conditions, and the threats they appear to pose to lots of people, might have anything to do with the development of far-right movements. It’s not surprising since, after all is said and done, the economic policies advanced by Clinton I, Obama, or Clinton II are more or less the same—advance the advanced economy (meaning technology plus finance) and figure out how to control the rest (by carrot or stick). By way of comparison, Trump’s policies promise a return of good jobs for the millions of ordinary folks who can’t really touch high-paying job sectors.

Truth be known, neither Clinton nor Trump will be able to do terribly much to affect where investment capital goes or who will benefit. They can grease some wheels rather than other ones but they will not get to pick the wheels. On the other hand, either one of them will have a great deal of political and military power—power that is more or less awful for the people of the world. Those on the left who are enamored with Clinton’s more polished explanation of how she would wield that power, as opposed to Trump’s blundering, will all but certainly be terribly disappointed (but maybe not) with what she will do. She, like Obama, will launch murderous drone attacks across the global war-scape and continue his all too willing arming of Israel and other supposed allies in the Middle East. The results will very well be more Gaza’s and Syria’s, more deaths, more maimed children, and more refugees (who, like the European Jews of the late 1930s and 1940s, will search the world for places that will let them in).

More at: http://insurgentnotes.com/2016/10/notes ... cs-part-i/

[American Dream]

Trump’s White Nationalist Supporters Find Culprit For Sexual Assault Tape Release: “The Jews Did It”



Donald Trump’s supporters in the white nationalist movement have found who is to blame for the tape in which the Republican nominee brags about sexually assaulting women: “The Jews.” Trump’s racist supporters are claiming that Republican consultant Dan Senor leaked the tape, and are responding with anti-Semitic attacks.

Members of the “alt-right” and white nationalist movement have been heavily supporting Trump’s campaign, and the candidate and his team have been courting members of the movement, including by appearing in white nationalist media, refusing to denounce them, and retweeting their messages.

The Daily Stormer is a virulently anti-Semitic website that celebrates Nazism, purports to document the “Jewish Problem,” and attacks “kikes.” Editor Andrew Anglin wrote an October 11 post claiming that “we knew whoever leaked the tape was a Jew. And a #NeverTrump Jew advisor to Paul Ryan is currently being pointed at as being responsible. Dan Senor.” He called Senor “a #NeverTrump kike” and concluded (emphasis in original):

I hope it was this particular Jew, and I hope he gets nailed for it.

If we lose this election, it is going to be because of this pussy-grabbing tape. And having it be known that it was a Jew is extremely important. One of the GOP’s Jews being responsible makes it all the better.

Because if we lose, this country is going to enter a new age of anti-Semitism.

The 35% or so of the country that is hardcore pro-Trump is going to know that it wasn’t “liberals” that defeated Trump, but traitors within the party who abandoned him. And they are going to want to know why that happened.

And there is only one answer:

The Jews did it.

Continues at: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/11 ... ws-did-it/

[American Dream]

How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream

The full story of his connection with far-right extremists.

Sarah Posner and David Neiwert Oct. 14, 2016 6:00 AM


The first warning sign that something new was brewing came in June 2015, as Donald Trump joined the crowded field vying for the Republican presidential nomination. In the extravagant lobby of Trump Tower in New York City, he announced he would build a wall to keep out Mexican criminals and "rapists."

"I urge all readers of this site to do whatever they can to make Donald Trump President," wrote Andrew Anglin, publisher of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, 12 days later. Anglin, a 32-year-old skinhead who wears an Aryan "Black Sun" tattoo on his chest and riffs about the inferior "biological nature" of black people, hailed Trump as "the only candidate who is even talking about anything at all that matters."

This neo-Nazi seal of approval initially seemed like an aberration. But two months later, when Trump released his immigration policy, far-right extremists saw a clear signal that Trump understood their core anger and fear about America being taken over by minorities and foreigners. Trump's plan to deport masses of undocumented immigrants and end birthright citizenship was radical and thrilling—"a revolution," in the words of influential white nationalist author Kevin MacDonald, "to restore a White America."

Trump's move was a "game changer," said MacDonald, a 70-year-old silver-haired former academic who edits the Occidental Observer, which the Anti-Defamation League calls "online anti-Semitism's new voice." Trump, he wrote, "is saying what White Americans have been actually thinking for a very long time."

"Stunning," raved Peter Brimelow, editor of the anti-immigrant site VDare.com. "The thing that delighted us the most," he wrote, was Trump's plan to close "the 'Anchor Baby' loophole," denying citizenship to the American-born children of immigrants—a policy that Brimelow said he had been advocating for more than a decade.

Trump "may be the last hope for a president who would be good for white people," remarked Jared Taylor, who runs a white nationalist website called American Renaissance and once founded a think tank dedicated to "scientifically" proving white superiority. Taylor told us that Trump was the first presidential candidate from a major party ever to earn his support because Trump "is talking about policies that would slow the dispossession of whites. That is something that is very important to me and to all racially conscious white people."

Trump fever quickly spread: Other extremists new to presidential politics openly endorsed Trump, including Don Black, a former grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of the neo-Nazi site Stormfront; Rocky Suhayda, chair of the American Nazi Party; and Rachel Pendergraft, a national organizer for the Knights Party, the successor to David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Richard Spencer, an emerging leader among a new generation of white nationalists known as the "alt right," declared that Trump "loves white people."

"The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions. They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will."

But Trump did not become the object of white nationalist affection simply because his positions reflect their core concerns. Extremists made him their chosen candidate and now hail him as "Emperor Trump" because he has amplified their message on social media—and, perhaps most importantly, has gone to great lengths to avoid distancing himself from the racist right. With the exception of Duke, Trump has not disavowed a single endorsement from the dozens of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, and militia supporters who have backed him. The GOP nominee, along with his family members, staffers, and surrogates, has instead provided an unprecedented platform for the ideas and rhetoric of far-right extremists, extending their reach. And when challenged on it by the press, Trump has stalled, feigned ignorance, or deflected—but has never specifically rejected any of these other extremists or their ideas.

This stance has thrilled and emboldened hate groups far more than has been generally understood during the 2016 race for the White House. Moreover, Trump's tacit welcoming of these hate groups into mainstream American politics will have long-lasting consequences, according to these groups' own leaders, regardless of the election outcome.

"The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions," Pendergraft told us. "They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will."

A three-month investigation by Mother Jones and the Investigative Fund—including interviews with white nationalist leaders and an analysis of social-media networks, nearly 100 hours of fringe talk radio, and dozens of posts on influential hate sites—reveals that what has largely been portrayed by the media as Trump "gaffes" has instead been understood by far-right extremists as a warm embrace by Trump. Extremists' zeal for Trump only grew with his decision in August to hire a new campaign chief, Stephen Bannon, the former publisher of Breitbart News and a big booster himself of far-right rhetoric. Trump's enduring campaign tactics—from calls for black protesters to be "roughed up" to the circulation of racist, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic language and memes—is proof for them that white nationalism has not only arrived, but has found a champion in a major-party nominee for president of the United States.

The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple detailed requests for comment regarding this story.

In early October, when bombshell archival video revealed Trump bragging about sexual assault and plunged his campaign and the GOP into chaos, that only further energized his extremist supporters. "Girls really don't mind guys that like pussies," influential alt-right video blogger RamZPaul said. "They just hate guys who are pussies."

Others celebrated Trump's angry, defiant debate performance on the heels of the video revelation. Spencer declared victory for Trump "because, basically, Trump fought back. He didn't abandon these issues that really define him and define our connection to him."

"The people believe Trump won the debate," Anglin posted. "It's really just an objective fact. Not sure how even liberal kikes could claim otherwise."

Continues at: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... ist-racism

[American Dream]

Alex Jones Responds To Clinton Video Tying Him To Trump: "There Were Bombs” In The World Trade Center On 9/11

Jones: "Trump Knows About 9/11"

And I’ve interviewed the police, two different police officers on-air, including a deputy fire chief -- that’s another person -- Lee Ann McAdoo did, it’s got like 5 million views on YouTube, when they told them there’s a countdown we’re going to blow up Building 7. We heard the countdown. And it was coming from the Red Cross. Do you know who the Red Cross is, folks? You know who can go behind enemy lines even 500 years ago out of Switzerland? The Red Cross. And I’m not bashing you if you were in the Red Cross, it has a lot of good things it does, but it is the main global intelligence agency front. So, you want to put this in your ad,Hillary? The Red Cross ran the countdown to blow up Building 7. No one would suspect the Red Cross, would they? So when I say Red Cross, I mean intelligence operatives there with the countdown. And then I have the news saying, “Building 7 has fallen. Building 7 has fallen.”

More at: http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/10/1 ... 911/213883

[American Dream]

Trump Train Derailed: Canadian Supporters Respond

http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... adian.html

[American Dream]

Trump Ally Alex Jones Suffers Debate Meltdown Over “Lying Whore” Hillary Clinton
TIMOTHY JOHNSON



Conspiracy theorist and prominent Donald Trump ally Alex Jones ranted throughout his livestream of the third presidential debate, calling Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton a “lying whore” and “monstrous pig” and claiming that he is mentally “synced” with Trump.

After a Trump attack line on Clinton during the debate, Jones said he was “about to say that” and then claimed, “we’re like synced, there isn’t any wires in our ears, literally, to each other, but we’re synced with common sense.” His rant then devolved into screaming at Clinton, “You’re a criminal monster. We have the emails. You want our guns. You lie about everything. You’re a monstrous pig picked by the globalists to curse this country”

Trump previously praised Jones and his “amazing” reputation during an appearance on Jones’ radio show. Jones is a self-identified founder of the 9/11 Truth movement and promotes numerous conspiracy theories, including claiming that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and other national tragedies were events staged by the government. He has previously marveled at how “it is surreal to talk about issues here on air and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later.”

Videos at: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/10/20 ... ton/213969

[coffin_dodger]

Watching Alex Jones (in the 3 clips at the link you provided above), I alternated between physically laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of it all when he starts shouting 'no no no no...', intermingled with moments of shock at his obvious dislike of females - his constant use of gender-specific perjoratives when referring to Clinton is really nasty - does anyone have any idea how many people in the US actually watch his channel output? I'm hoping it's a tiny percentage.

[American Dream]

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex ... rmination/

Alex Jones: Endgame Of LGBT Movement Is ‘An Asexual Humanoid’ And Human Extermination

By Brian Tashman | July 13, 2015 1:30 pm

Alex Jones’s InfoWars network posted a video clip today of Jones discussing same-sex marriage, which Jones said he rarely talks about because he considers it a “distraction.”

However, Jones said that he is worried about the attempt to “sexualize children” with books like “Heather Has Two Mommies.” This effort to “target children,” Jones said, represents the “space-cult, suicide-cult, exterminism, craziness” of the United Nations and global elites.

“The eugenics, trans-humanist cult wants to confuse the general species ahead of rendering us down and removing us,” he said. “The plan is an asexual humanoid, even if they decide to keep us around, stated in hundreds of textbooks.”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfnbyR_PT_o

[American Dream]

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex ... opulation/

Alex Jones: If Trump Loses, A World War Will Kill One Third Of The World’s Population

By Miranda Blue | October 21, 2016



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K55GwFPr8Y

Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist who enjoys mutual admiration with Donald Trump, warned on his radio program yesterday that if Trump loses the presidential election, it will cause a “worldwide financial meltdown and probably a world war” in which one third of the world’s population will be killed.

“We’re at a decision time,” Jones said, “and I think, in my gut, I know if we don’t elect Trump—but beyond that, if we don’t all start making the right decision to stand up and speak out—I believe we’re going to come under great judgment and I believe there’s going to be a total worldwide financial meltdown and probably a world war. And I think, like the Bible says, I think a third or more of the population’s going to be killed.”

Jones’ guest, Curves fitness founder and consummate conspiracy theorist Gary Heavin, added that the election represents a “great battle” between globalism and nationalism, as foreseen in the Bible.

“And this globalism the Bible predicts is going to happen,” Heavin said. “The Bible predicts it’s going to be led by the Antichrist himself. You know, you’re going to have to take the Mark of the Beast to buy or sell.”

“They’re suddenly, on every channel, NBC, CBS, FOX, Dr. Oz, all saying, ‘Take a mark to buy and sell, make yourself—’ They’re all saying it,” Jones responded.

The two went on to connect Apple CEO Tim Cook’s discussion of a cashless society with the Mark of the Beast and the Apple logo, which they said represented the apple that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden.

[American Dream]

http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/the-n ... trump.html

Epistemological Apathy and Egomania: The Not-so Mysterious Case of Donald J. Trump and the Implications for American Democracy

Bryant William Sculos I Politics & Government I Analysis I September 29th, 2016



Over the past several months, there have been a number of articles written exploring how to typologize Donald Trump ideologically. Is he a fascist? Is he a conservative? A populist? A liberal? A sexist racist xenophobe? Some irrational combination of all of them? A cursory look at the comments sections of Internet new sites, the blogosphere, and social media shows that there are a variety of preferred terms used by people responding to the incalculably racist, bigoted, hateful, and often wildly outlandish or incoherent comments and policy proposals of firebrand Republican Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. Most of these labels, while probably accurate, are vulgar and not worth repeating here, but two of them stand out as potentially having a great deal of accuracy and indeed political significance. Trump is often referred to as either an asshole or a bullshitter (which is equivalent to being "full of shit" for the purposes of this essay), and sometimes he is referred to as both at the same time. Assuming that these "expert" political commentators do not genuinely believe that Donald Trump's body is full of male bovine feces nor that he is an exceptionally large anus, these labels likely refer to more sarcastic idiomatic meanings. What the creative masterminds who use these epithets (again, however accurate they are) likely don't realize is that these terms refer to rather well-defined concepts in contemporary philosophy and sociology, specifically developed by Harry G. Frankfurt and Aaron James respectively.

In their respective books, On Bullshit and Assholes: A Theory, Frankfurt and James offer specific conceptualizations of "bullshit" and "assholes." Taken together, looking at the political campaigning of Donald Trump, it becomes quite obvious that, strictly technically speaking, Donald Trump is a bullshitting asshole. As such, I argue, Trump is not so much unique as he is a manifestation of what our contemporary social condition produces, and as such Trump exists as an extreme caricature of an increasingly cold, narcissistic, self-righteous capitalistic mentality that must be a central concern for all of us as we aim to move beyond the present towards an emancipated and habitable future.


Theorizing Bullshit and Assholes

According to Harry G. Frankfurt (1988), bullshit is an epistemological category that, though not itself a product of modernity, has become a hallmark of it. Bullshit is not a lie. It is a deception based on a complete apathy towards the truth. For the bullshitter, the truth is irrelevant. Beyond the traditional binary of honesty and lying, bullshit is a category of knowledge that is defined by its emphatic disconnect from knowledge itself (125). In order to be honest, one must know the truth (or at least have the intention of speaking what one believes to be the truth). To lie, one must also know the truth. In the case of lying, one needs to have a sense of the truth in order to effectively avoid speaking it. "There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed" (127).

The question as to what produces bullshit is a complicated one, and for Frankfurt, it could have any number of sources. In all of the examples he gives (any situation where a person is expected to know more than they do, a situation where one could benefit from seeming like they know more than they do, or more academically in the anti-realist or postmodern philosophical critique of Truth), bullshit typically has a social source-but it is a social source that is directly channeled through agents. It is not that the bullshitter does not know that they are full of it; they do. The origins of bullshit lay in the social relations that incentivize and normalize bullshitting (Frankfurt 1988, 132-133).

Aaron James (2012) takes a similar approach to Frankfurt's in his typology of assholes.[i] In his recent book Assholes: A Theory, James explicates various types of assholes, all sharing these basic qualities: [1] systematic enjoyment of special advantages, [2] due to a deep-seated belief in their own superiority, and [3] belief in their own superiority to such a degree that they ignore any potential obligation to justify their special advantages to others (5).

The asshole…sees no need to wait for special circumstances to come his way in the normal course of things. The asshole feels entitled to allow himself special advantages as he pleases systematically, across a wide range of social interactions….He rides people with wearing comments-veiled criticisms, insinuating questions, or awkward allusions to topics not normally discussed in polite company. He is often rude or more often borderline nasty….More important, the asshole gains special advantages from interpersonal relations, not by stroke of continuous luck, but because he regards himself as special….If one is special on one's birthday, the asshole's birthday comes everyday. (James 2012, 15-16)

The asshole is thus a special kind of elitist, but they aren't born that way-though some certainly have psychopathic traits. More relevant to my argument here though, according to James, assholes are created, created by a culture of self-centered hyper-individualism that allows people-and indeed encourages people-to feel that they are superior (James 2010, 88-100). It is the most extreme version of when your Mom told you in grade school 'not to worry about what other people think'. Assholes internalize this sentiment to the extreme, taking it to mean that they deserve respect to the point of servility, simply because of how great they believe they are. For the asshole, there is a complete lack of perspective, self-reflection, and humility. The asshole may feign these traits, but according to James, in most cases they wouldn't even bother. After all, who cares if people think you're an asshole if you know you are better than they are?

Taken together, a bullshitting asshole would be a personal who consistently speaks without regard for the truth, in a way that is insulated by an inflated sense of their own worth, entitlement, and superiority. Let us turn to the recent evidence Donald J. Trump has provided us in order to decide if he fits this categorization.


Typologizing Donald Trump

One of the key areas that Donald Trump is clearly bullshitting about-in a purely technical sense-is immigration. Trump has said on a number of occasions that his plan is deport as many illegal aliens present in the United States as can be rounded up and then construct a gigantic wall along the US-Mexico border, regardless of the cost (which he plans to somehow pass on to the Mexican government). Ignoring the fact that he has presented no evidence or speculation about how he would get the Mexican government to pay for this massive construction project nor where the funds for the mass deportation initiative would come from. Trump is completely ignoring the vast evidence (which we have no way of knowing that he is even aware that this evidence exists, due to his apparent apathy towards evidence in general) that tells us that the most common way that people who end up in the US without legal documentation is by overstaying their legally obtained entry visas. Though it is important to note that this is fairly old data, but the Pew study this information comes from makes it clear that more than 40% are not crossing the Rio Grande. If the goal of Trump's immigration plan is anything more than to excite the xenophobic crypto-fascists (who have, in his view, too long been silenced in this country), we can assume the goal is a more secure state and a more open employment market for US laborers, a common neoliberal argument. More recent data suggests that there is currently a reverse migration wave occurring due to the downturn in the US economy, meaning that Mexican immigrants are leaving the US in greater numbers than are entering. Does Donald Trump know this? Does he care whether he knows?

In a related instance of epistemological bullshit, Donald Trump has continued to refuse to acknowledge that Barack Obama is not a Muslim. This is not mere lying, because we can't be sure that Trump neither knowingly believes that Obama isn't a Muslim nor do we have any evidence that Trump cares about whether it is true or false.

We can see this particular brand of bullshit in several recent events: James brings up Trumps earlier leadership of the "Birther" movement when Barack Obama was elected and even when he was running for re-election in 2012, but this tendency, while it has become a more subtle part of Trump's campaign, has not dissipated. When confronted by a supporter during a campaign rally who suggested that getting rid of Muslims was a crucially important issue and explicitly stating that the current President was one of those Muslims, Trump refused to correct the supporter. Trump has continued to refuse to state clearly that he knows Obama is not actually a Muslim.

More recently, Trump has taken multiple positions on a few issues, including abortion and transgender bathroom use. In a matter of forty-eight hours Trump changed his position on abortion at least three times. For most of his public life Trump has been pro-choice, but as he began to drift towards the precipice of reactionary politics, he drastically shifted his position suggesting that abortion should be made illegal and women who have abortions should be legally punished. Apparently he meant the doctors…apparently he meant that states should decide…apparently he has no ungodly idea what he thinks. He doesn't seem to care either, and more fantastically, neither do his millions of supporters-which includes one or two women I believe. On transgender bathroom use, he has also changed his tune, now saying that this issue should be resolved by the states.

Beyond Trump's proclivity for bullshit, he also evinces characteristics of James' asshole typology (something James explicitly states, though he focused narrowly on Trump's "moralizing" about Barack Obama's birth certificate, which makes sense because when the book was written Trump had not ascended to the GOP's top spot) (James 2012, 67).

Towards the beginning of his primary campaign Trump took the bold step of criticizing Senator John McCain's status as a war hero due to surviving as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, because as Trump says he "likes people who weren't captured…." There is certainly a smug superiority to this claim, especially coming from someone who has never served in the military. There was also a refusal to provide justifications-only the rationalization that he was kidding, but the basic premise was accurate.

After that lovely comment, Trump kicked Univision journalist Jorge Ramos out of a briefing because Ramos refused to be silenced by Trump's bloviating. Trump characterized Ramos as being overly-emotional, but kicking a reporter out of a press conference is nearly unheard of for a Presidential candidate. Trump never apologized nor did he say much beyond asserting his completely unjustified authority to remove reporters he doesn't like for whatever reason he wants. This is the epitome of unjustified entitlement and refusal to respond to the concerns of others.

Completely unsurprisingly this wasn't Trump's last contribution to his increasingly well-deserved label "asshole." During the August 7th republican primary debate Trump made a very gentlemanly reference to debate host Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle with regard to her emotional state when asking him questions. He said "she had blood coming out of whatever." When asked about the clear implication of his comment, Trump accused anyone of thinking that he was talking about her being on her period as having a sick mind (Yan 2015). Again, he immunized himself from any criticism. These example provide evidence for the systematic requirements of James' typology. Trump seems to be the sociological asshole, par excellence.

In the most recent incident of Trump's egomania, in his GOP nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, regarding the many many problems facing America (which of course he wildly exaggerated), he claimed "I alone can fix it." While it very may well be in his power to solve the problems he has invented in his own mind and convinced millions of people are real, the kind of megalomania that is takes to assert that one can solve the problems alone is further evidence of Trump's well-earned asshole status.

These systematic episodes of completely unjustified elitism, condescension, and refusal to subject himself to the complaints of others (including his victims) and pervasive and outright refusal to engage in the now minimally popular practice of "being a good person," Trump evinces nearly all of the traits of James's various typologies of assholes (e.g., the boorish asshole, the smug asshole, the presidential asshole, the corporate asshole, the asshole boss, the self-aggrandizing asshole, and the category where James actually places Trump, "the self-aggrandizing asshole with a thin moral pretext")(James 2012, 37-67).


Why Should We Care About Bullshitting Assholes?

Why does any of this matter? Why does it matter that the nominee for one of the two major parties in the United States is a bullshitting asshole? After all, it is likely that "bullshitting asshole" is a socio-philosophical label that applies to many politicians, so why does it matter? It matters because these categories, however humorous it might be to write an entire essay with them, are politically dangerous and antithetical to democracy. Democracy, especially representative democracy-even one that doesn't work all that well for most people-requires some degree of interpersonal trust among the people and between the people and politicians. People listen when leaders speak, and if we come to realize that these leaders are assholes who don't care about the truth or their constituents, it can either breed apathy or resentment. Apathy or resentment towards the current system can either be turned into further apathy or it can be deployed for extreme political movements. While Occupy Wall Street was certainly a nascent positive example of this, the Tea Party or the recently emboldened Trump-supporting white supremacists (see David Duke) can hardly vouch the same credentials in regard to fighting against injustice. Bullshitting assholes in power are dangerous.

Maybe Trump is a fascist, but it seems to be more immediately problematic that even if he isn't, he's likely to be a very dangerous President (I'd need another whole article to detail the similar, though not identical, dangers of Hillary Rodham Clinton's risk to the poor in the US and around the world given her corporate neoliberal history as well as her hyper-militaristic foreign policy approach-but that's for another time and place).

Bullshit and assholeishness in political leaders are not conducive to democracy, whether we agree with Hardt and Negri (2012) that representation immediately and inherently separates the people from power, or we accept Chomsky's (2013) more moderate position that representation, when done properly, can produce a lot more justice and equality than we are used to at the moment. Chomsky's position is that effective representation can indeed make peoples' lives better while we wait for or work for revolutionary change like Hardt and Negri's autonomist revolution. Bullshitting assholes are a reflection of the ideological structures that undermine both reform and revolution by normalizing a corrupt notion of representation and mystifying the true relations of production and hierarchy that must be the target of revolution.

Thus from this admittedly crude analysis of an admittedly crude figure, there are insights for a twenty-first century democratic-socialist strategy. Combined with the rich resources of Critical Theory, democratic-socialist strategy must begin with a demystifying strategy in service of human emancipation. Furthermore, it must include the practice of pointing out who the bullshitting-assholes are as well as where they come from. While these are certainly pathologies; there's no reason to believe they are naturally occurring.

Capitalism and other instantiations of oppressive hierarchy like racism, sexism, heterosexism and others continue to exist primarily because most people fail to see their continued functioning (even as they experience them), and when they do acknowledge these oppressions, they locate those instances in individual behavior and not the social structure. While we can still focus on individual manifestations of bullshitting and assholeishness, we must also being to see them as structural characteristics as well: systemic bullshit and assholeish systems.

While we should be concerned about the social roots and political reproduction of these traits, we need to remember that for those of us that are even somewhat aware of these things: Individual behavior matters. Trump shows us that. Individuals matter, not because if we simply change a few people the world would be entirely different, but rather because in a hyperindividualistic society, even if we accept that solidarity-based collective action is the only avenue for systemic change, individual still need to decide to get involved (though this use of the term decision here is not to imply this is a choice made "outside" or "beyond" ideological social conditioning). Individuals are also sources of persuasion. They can inspire and drive mobilization. It is not just about us making our choice to get involved (or not), but also our capacity and indeed moral responsibility to persuade others to join us.

Additionally, scholars on the Left should be interested in individuals. In their social contexts, individuals provide avenues for critical scholars and social critics an opportunity to point to the social origins of individual behaviors and societal norms. Why is Trump an asshole? Why is he so full of shit? Why are politicians so often assholes? Why are they so often full of shit? What produces, and indeed encourages, incentivizes, and normalizes, these characteristics? What is the relationship between people who possess this characteristics and the social, economic, and political context from which they emerge and inhabit? What makes Trump, Trump, and why should we care so much?

What makes Trump well, Trump, is not that he is unique but rather that he is a caricature of the latent beliefs and urges that contemporary neoliberal capitalism encourages. Trump is the embodiment of the alienated cruelty, apathetic reified epistemology, and insulated self-centered elitism that characterizes a nearly purified form of a capitalistic mentality; a mentality that identifies success with being a bullshitting asshole who has a lot of money.

We live in world where being a bullshitting asshole is increasingly the norm, whether we're talking about Trump, Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, or anyone on a show that begins with "Real Housewives of…"(not to say that these examples all fit this typology in identically egregious or dangerous ways). Maybe the past was just as bad for different reasons. Maybe it was exactly the same, but that is irrelevant. What matters is that we pick up our shovels and extricate the bullshit from our politics, and perhaps the shovel could even be useful to deal with the assholes too-though I think simply raising more compassionate people who are driven by more (or something completely other) than profit and fame would be more humane that pitchforks, torches, and shovels aimed at our plutocratic elites. A society long built on and by bullshit and assholes will not be just; nor will it be sustainable. We are thus left with a choice: we can either organize with and vote for (and probably be or become over time) bullshitting assholes or we can choose to care about truth, honesty, one another, and the world we inhabit-but it is impossible to do both.

The real problem is not that there are people like Trump who embody something akin to the Platonic Form or Weberian ideal-type of a bullshitting asshole, but rather that everyday people are increasingly encouraged to get closer and closer to that character-type, often times just to make a living (or so they are led to believe). Though Trump has yet to attempt to co-opt their music, Green Day may have preemptively written the best slogan for Trump's campaign: "Nice guys finish last [and most Mexicans are drug-smuggling rapists]." We need not-and should not-accept this conclusion. Let us hope and act in a way that moves the truth a bit closer to "Bullshitting assholes finish last." Whether there is or will be a dialectical moment soon where people notice, name, and reject the bullshit and the assholes and build a mass resistance to them and the systems that (re)produce them remains to be seen, but the continued normalization-and indeed glorification-of assholeishness and bullshit does not bode well for that goal.

[American Dream]

Soldiers of Odin Canada: Falling Apart Already?

http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... apart.html

[American Dream]

Britain ‘mystified’ more seven-year-old children haven’t made unaccompanied 2,300 mile journey from Syria



MILLIONS of Britons are surprised at how few seven-year-old refugees have journeyed alone across the whole of Europe.

The admittance of a handful of child refugees to the UK has seen widespread complaints that they are not small girls wearing artfully tattered clothing and clutching a one-eyed teddy bear.

Francesca Johnson, from Colchester, said: “My ideal refugee would be a girl aged between four and seven who lost her parents to the monsters of ISIS. Not Assad’s forces, that makes it too ambiguous.

“She’d have crossed the Mediterranean in a tyre and struggled through European countries filled with cruel stereotypes to reach the beacon of kindness and fair play that is Britain, but wouldn’t have aged in the face and would still have lovely pigtails.

“I’d accept boys, but with an upper limit of three years old because they’re not cute after that and get into mischief. Meaning terrorism.”

Roy Hobbs, from Darlington, agreed: “I tell you what, some of these 5,000 civilians fleeing the battle of Mosul look over 18 to me.

“I’ll need a bloody good explanation of why they didn’t stay in that warzone. Because they want to claim benefits, I bet.”

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/inte ... 1022115676

http://louisproyect.org/2016/01/21/disi ... ing-house/


Disinformation Clearing House




This week an article appeared on this website by one Robert Bridge titled “US Elites Are Trying to Destroy Europe with Immigrants“ that has this astonishing comment:

According to a German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, by mid-21st century millions of migrants from Africa and Asia (950 million of them are already willing to relocate to the EU) will drag Europe back into the Dark Ages. So isn’t this exactly what Barack Obama, a man with African roots, should be willing to achieve through his foreign policy?

This Robert Bridge lives in Russia and writes for RT.com and Infowars. No big surprise there. When you see the reference to Obama having “African roots”, you need to remember that RT.com has been airing a lot of racist junk about Obama. Irina Rodnina, an MP from Vladimir Putin’s party and a triple Olympic champion figure-skater photoshopped a picture of Obama with a banana on Twitter. You get the idea.

Meanwhile, Bridge’s article has drawn comments such as these from “Subluna” just like a pile of steaming shit draws flies. Love the reference to Khazar Jews, an obscure anti-Semitic trope if I’ve ever heard one:

“While on the surface it may seem that the refugee crisis has taken Western leaders by surprise, in fact it is all part of their plan for global domination, which was outlined in a paper by the now-defunct group of US neoconservatives known as The Project for a New American Century (PNAC).”

IT IS ALL PART OF THE JEWISH PLAN FOR GLOBAL DOMINATION! That is what I’ve been saying over and over again.

Now who are these US neoconservatives? The overall majority are the KHAZAR JEWS with dual nationality, US – Israeli.

Recently George Souros, the Jewish billionaire said that: “Europe Union should take “at least a million” refugees every year…” https://www.rt.com/op-edge/320747-soros-european-…

Have a look at Jewish Barbara Spectre in this 1 minute video where she calls for Jews to have a leading role in transforming Europe into a multicultural society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFE0qAiofMQ

The European Flag/Logo was the work of Jewish Paul Lévi, the 12 yellow stars on a blue background represent the 12 Tribes of Israel.

Count R. N. Courdenhove-Kalergi is seen by many as the father of the modern European Union. His father was a close friend of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism.

Otto von Habsburg was Coudenhove-Kalergi’s successor as president of the Pan European Union. He is a honorary professor of the University of Jerusalem, and recipient of the ‘International Humanitarian Award’, of the ‘Anti Defamation-League’ (ADL) of the Jewish B’nai B’rith Masonery Lodge.

The Jewish owned media promote the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ by Samuel Huntington, who got the idea from Bernard Lewis, a Jewish scholar. Have the Christian West fight Islam, while the Jews conquer the world and make the Goyim their slaves.

Benjamin Freedman: “Act I was World War I. Act II was World War II. Act III is going to be World War III.

“The Jews of the world, the Zionists and their co-religionists everywhere, are determined that they are going to AGAIN use the United States to help them permanently retain Palestine as their foothold for their world government.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8OmxI2AYV8

Transcript: http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/israel/freedma…

The Feast of Tabernacles is the period when Israel triumphs over the other people of the world. That is why during this feast we seize the loulab and carry it as a trophy to show that we have conquered all other peoples, known as “populace”… Zohar, Toldoth Noah 63b

[American Dream]

SPECIAL REPORT
Dispatches from the Campaign

by David Levi Strauss




Dispatch 15: Wikitrump?
Sunday, July 31, 2016

I understand why Vladimir Putin would want to do anything he can to put Donald Trump in the White House, because a Trump presidency would fuel a resurgence of Russian aggression on the world stage. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had already attempted a complete makeover for Putin surrogate Viktor Yanukovych, before the former Prime Minister had to flee from Ukraine to Russia to avoid a newly incensed population in Ukraine. Manafort’s advising of Yanukovych ended badly two years ago, but the Trumpmeister’s business dealings in Russia and Ukraine continue. There’s no sense in letting a stinging political defeat interfere with one’s own personal financial interests.

What I don’t quite understand is Julian Assange’s position. The leak of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails hacked, presumably, by the Russians, on the eve of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was obviously intended to harm the Hillary Clinton campaign, but to what end? To give a last boost to Bernie Sanders’ supporters at the convention? Or to help ensure an eventual Donald Trump victory?

Assange had announced the coming Clinton leak back in June. When he was asked then if he’d prefer Trump as president, he replied that what Trump would do as president was “completely unpredictable,” whereas we know that Hillary would be a liberal war hawk and continue what Assange sees as her attacks on freedom of the press. He also views her as a personal foe.

The timing and method of the release of the DNC emails drew a tweeted rebuke by Edward Snowden on Thursday: “Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.” Assange responded within an hour and a half, impugning Snowden’s motives: “@Snowden. Opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton & curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows.”

Meanwhile, Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal, which sold over a million copies and earned its author and subject millions of dollars in royalties, has come out to decry the book and the Real Trump he discovered in the writing of the book. In an interview with Jane Mayer for the New Yorker, published on July 25, 2016, Schwartz said, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility that it will lead to the end of civilization.”



Dispatch 18: Simone Weil, T. J. Clark, and Bernie Sanders’s Grimace
Tuesday, August 2, 2016

“A political party is a machine for producing collective passion.”

“Collective passion is an infinitely stronger impetus to crime and lies than any individual passion.”

“If a single collective passion takes hold of a country, the entire country is unanimous in crime.”

“At the moment when a people becomes aware of its will and expresses it, there can be no collective passion.”

“Parties are organisms that are publically and officially constituted to kill the sense of truth and justice in our souls.”

“Almost everywhere—and often for purely technical problems—the operation of taking sides, of taking position for and against, has replaced the obligation to think. This leprosy of the mind began in political circles then spread throughout the country to almost all thinking. It is doubtful that we can cure this disease, which is killing us, if we do not start by abolishing political parties.”

—Simone Weil, Note on the Abolition of All Political Parties, translated by Ames Hodges (Semiotext(e), 2014), originally published in Paris in 1957, but written in the summer of 1943, just before Weil died.

“It is one thing to have an optimistic (or pessimistic) view of capitalism’s ability to weather the storm blowing from working-class Britain, another to underestimate the system’s endogenous vulnerabilities. What happened in 2008 will happen again. The break-up of the eurozone is one step nearer, the question now being whether it will be ‘managed’ from New York and Berlin or plunged into pell-mell. […] The political question therefore is this: could there be a future circumstance in which such a moment of capitalist crisis, or sequence of moments, none of them ‘final,’ could be greeted, in various nation-states […] by the beginnings—the first steps in a long reconstruction—of a minimal anti-capitalist resistance?”

—T. J. Clark, “Where Are We Now? Responses to the Referendum,” The London Review of Books, July 14, 2016.

Dispatch 29: The Base
Friday, October 14, 2016

At this point, twenty-five days from the election, it appears that Donald Trump has rebuffed all remaining attempts by surrogates and advisers to get him to do what is needed to broaden and extend his base to comprise a winning coalition. Instead, he has doubled down on the least attractive stances of his campaign and personality in order to isolate and harden his core constituency. The increasing danger for the country at large is what happens when this isolated and hardened core melts down.

This core or base (we remember that “al-Qaeda” means “The Base”) could turn more violent at any time, as they continue to be publicly shamed and mocked, but especially when they conclude that the election of their supreme leader and political martyr has been stolen from them in The Big Fix.

I remember going home to Kansas for Christmas in 1994, to visit my family. My youngest sister’s son had been living in Idaho with his estranged father, and had been radicalized into the militia movement there. When I spoke with him, he calmly espoused conspiratorial, anti-government, and xenophobic ideas, and at one point pronounced, “What happened in Ruby Ridge and Waco will not go unanswered. Something big is going to happen soon. You’ll see, and you’ll know.” Four months later, on April 19, 1995 (the second anniversary of the siege of Waco), Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols parked a Ryder truck, rented in the town of my birth, Junction City, Kansas, and loaded with explosives in Herrington, a few miles away from where I grew up, in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and blew it up, killing 168 people and injuring another 680.

In his speech yesterday in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump said, “the Clinton Machine is at the center of this Global Conspiracy and the Media Organizations.” He said the WikiLeaks documents released that morning prove that “Clinton meets in secret with International Banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these Global Financial Powers, her Special Interest friends, and her donors.”

Dismissing the recent press reports about his serial sexual assaults on women, Trump said, “I take all of these slings and arrows, gladly, for you. I take them for our movement, so that we can have our country back… This is our moment of reckoning as a country and as a civilization.”

This is not the language of a presidential candidate. This is the language of the leader of a violent movement to oppose a democratically elected government. I still believe that Trump stumbled into this role unwittingly, like the stooge he is, but at this point, the language and the rhetoric he is using is pushing him farther and farther to the Right and his followers closer and closer to a violent backlash that he will have no control over.

Earlier tonight, the FBI arrested three men in Garden City, Kansas, for plotting to use car bombs to blow up an apartment building housing mostly Somali refugees. The three militia members had written an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant manifesto and planned to carry out their deadly attack the day after the presidential election.


Dispatch 30: The Elites
Saturday, October 15, 2016

It is the elites and their elite thinking that has screwed everything up for us. Elite thinking is dominated by political correctness. Their political correctness has caused them to put the welfare of blacks, hispanics, gays, and others over our own needs. These groups are fine, but the elites act like these groups are better than us, more deserving. But blacks, hispanics, and gays didn’t build this country. We did.

The elites have let illegal immigrants get away with coming into our country and taking all the good things that were meant for us. They’ve let China and other countries take our jobs and then sell us back our own goods at inflated prices. They’ve given away everything our parents and grandparents worked for in unfair trade deals. Because they feel guilty about American power and dominance in the world, they’ve given up too much in trade.

Hillary Clinton represents the elites. She wants open borders. She wants to throw open the door and let everyone in, even radical Islamic terrorists who want to destroy us. She’s weak. Elites are weak. They spend all their time thinking about how to take more from us and give it to politically correct groups. They have all kinds of excuses for why this is a good thing to do, but we just keep losing things.

When we look back, all we see is us losing things. We used to be on top, but now we’re on the bottom. Maybe we should just give up and take welfare, like all the politically correct groups. But that’s not our way. We’re not like the Takers. We’re Givers, like Donald Trump. He fought his way up and made something of himself, and now he’s trying to give us hope, and a way forward.

He sees through the elites. He knows them. He could be with them if he wanted to be, but he chose to be with us. He understands us. He loves us. The elites hate him because of this. The elite media will do anything to bring him down. But we see through their attempts to demean and destroy him. They just can’t stand that we love him. It drives them crazy.

When this is all over, we’ll be on top again. Order will be restored. We’ll take our country back. Trump will make everything work like it used to. He’ll make everything okay again. We’ll go back to the way it was, before the elites took over. We’ll be nice to the politically correct groups, but we’ll be on top. This is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s only right.

More at: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2016/10/spe ... e-campaign