Your Daily Trump-The Alt Right Explained

Trump has embraced that oddball fringe of the right wing called “Alt Right”. What is it? The Alt Right wishes George Washington would have declared himself king. The Alt Right believes democracy is a joke and our country should be run like a corporation, from the top down. The Alt Right believes people are expendable and discardable… everybody but them of course.

Explained succinctly and well by VOX

The horrible history of campaigns like Trumps that suggest people take up arms against each other

From The Nation

The "Make America Great Again" meme dates back to the days of Jim Crow and lynching.

From BuzzFeed

The old Trump campaign manager summarized at SLATE

The new guy's open bigotry and extremism explained by Alternet.

One of Breitbart’s bright boys is a lot like Donald, bragging about big charitable giving and pocketing the money instead.

So explain again why we are crucifying Hillary and Bill for running one of the most ethical and effective charitable organizations in the world...

How America became a nation that worships selfishness and greed, conned by the high priestess of greed and hate, Ayn Rand. From Raw Story

A mild satire on Trump’s potemkin fantasy which might result in the satirists imprisonment if Trump is elected

Slavery is the Next Neat Idea (and other outrages)

Republican Department of Neat Ideas (via Mike Huckabee): slavery for non-violent offenders

Here's how deals are done on the money minded Right. You use the Party office to run a loansharking business and loot a charity to cover expenses. When there's trouble, declare bankruptcy. Pocket consulting fee. This actually happened in the GOP offices in Nevada.

"We didn't have a spending problem. We had a revenue problem,” said Scott Walker's campaign manager. This is how the failed Walker campaign brushes off their $1 million deficit. The point being this: if you spend people’s money on Scott Walker it’s well spent. If you spend taxpayer dollars on public needs it’s money wasted.

Another example of the Republican “Not My Responsibility” mindset: whenever possible let’s give the wealthy and corporations the option to avoid supporting public needs. NPR reports on a "neat" Oklahoma law that allows companies to leave workers high and dry.

For them, owning the company is what funds their workers’ comp. The only worker they want to compensate is the one at the top. Everything spent on other people is either waste or theft.

For the guys at the top “efficiency” becomes a question of “Who can we do without?” “Who can we get rid of?” The CEO himself is essential, of course, but everyone else is expendable.

When this kind of thinking migrates from the top of corporations into the top of government, what does it begin to remind you of? Which countries have systematically planned how to get rid of groups of people they didn’t want or didn’t like?

Don’t immediately say Germany in the Thirties. That’s easy. The same nasty thinking has been rampant in this country too. One loud voice in favor of selective extermination is now the favorite philosopher of the Republican Party: Ayn Rand.

When the thinking gets this toxic people want to step away from it. So you’d think.

But the migration of the GOP from levelheaded mainstream practical thinking to nutty extremist hate mongering insanity has been so gradual that a lot of people you thought are sane are still party to it. They’re the ones trying to explain away the ugly statements and proposals as isolated gaffes not representative of the broader party. David Brooks, the soft-voiced overly-polite columnist for the NYTimes is one of these, but even he is expressing disgust. Not so much with the hateful policies, though. It’s the dysfunction he finds embarrassing. Forgodssake, if you’re going to be a bigoted extremist party at least be an efficient and competent one! Think German engineering.

Here's an analysis of Brooks' fed up rant.

The problem is, David Brooks has been ushering the GOP down this road for decades. Explaining away the nuttiness, smoothing out the ugly policies, rationalizing the outright unAmericanness of the whole selfishness creed. He’s shocked, SHOCKED, to find the Republican Party––whose dysfunction and extremism he’s been doing PR for all this time––has become a dysfunctional and extremist party. Typically Republican. His response to any problem is threefold: Not my job. Not my responsibility. Not my fault.

The Founding Principles of Kiss Up, Kick Down.

I came across an interesting article from the Economic Policy Institute. Look at the graph. 1. Reaganomics killed the middle class 2. Productivity rose by a greater percentage when workers were paid better.

The business end of the Reaganomics tool sees need and vulnerability as a business plan and profit opportunity, an opportunity to exploit people. The Washington Post describes ways hospitals exploit the uninsured by jacking up their costs.

That was the hospital/healthcare business, here’s how they exploit need in the judicial/penal business. John Oliver explains. (Funny and true as hell.)

The poster child for pure Reaganomics is the state of Kansas, where Governor Brownback hoped to prove lower taxes would increase revenue like Papa Reagan promised. I’ll let Doonesbury explain how well that works out...

And SLATE reports that if the Kansas courts rule against him, Brownback “has a way of shutting that whole thing down.”

If Reagan was the messiah, who wrote the gospels? (Ayn Rand. Here are some interesting conclusions we're meant to draw from Atlas Shrugged.)

A purer libertarian and Republican world functions on a mixture of wishful thinking and “I don’t have to if I don’t want to.” This one's from The Onion, which is nearly as hilarious as Ayn Rand herself.

Your Weekly Reader

Kiss Up/ Kick Down (How to remove the poor)

A child told her mother she wanted to be a libertarian when she grew up. Her mother said she can’t be both. (A funny story about Ayn Rand)

Modern Christianity (How not to convert the unbeliever)

(How Republicans are harming the Christian brand)

Adventures in Republican Misogyny (The meat market of Republican thought)

O’Reilly’s make believe war journalism (Bill O'Reilly has an amazing imagination)

Ron Paul celebrates the New Confederacy (Secession and violating the Constitution are patriotic!)

The Giuliani Story (Giuliani explains how he cannot possibly be racist)

(Guiliani's Inspiring Tale of Patriotism)

“They’re all around us” (The strange secret club of vigilantes who are the guardians of Freedom)

(They even have a secret handshake)

We went to war to stamp this evil out in Europe and Asia. (It was called WW2. What do we do when it happens here?)