The Dark Holes Fascism and Racism Crawl Out From

Many sides? That's how Trump tried to defend his followers in the white supremacist fringe.*

There are two distinct sides in this, just as there were in 1941, when one side attacked peaceful neighbors and exterminated millions, and the other side (the Allies) opposed fascism and defeated it.

There were two clear sides in 1861; one defended slavery and bigotry, the other side opposed these evils. This film from the 40s states what our values were after we fought and won WW2, when we knew the difference between good and evil.

The WW2 era film explaining why we fought fascism can be seen via The Atlantic

But the Nazi flags are back, carried by people who think they are great patriots upholding a better America, a pure white America. Seeing the Nazi and Confederate flags together carried by armed mobs shouting bigotry and hate down the public street is disturbing, especially because these people believe themselves to be patriotic––while telling us that the United States should have been defeated in WW2 and the Civil War. They believe American values of democracy and tolerance should not prevail. They believe that the men and women who died for those values died for nothing, or, worse, that they died for false values. They may carry the U.S. flag along with their enemy flags but they are not patriots.

Here’s another video making the rounds, from the NRA. This is the organization that arms the Right and inflames their dreams of “purifying" this country the way Germany “purified” itself in the 1940s, by force of arms. The NRA urges “real Americans" to arm themselves against “the other”, the person who looks or thinks or worships differently. Note that it was the Nazis and Confederates who came to Charlottesville armed.

You can watch the virulent NRA hate propaganda spot here at ThinkProgress

It appears that the NRA gets considerable support and aid from Russia, America’s longtime global foe and Trump’s greatest ally.

The NRA's coziness with Russia is discussed here, at Medium

Fascism, bigotry, authoritarianism, violent suppression of people's rights. These strains crawl out of the same hole. It turns out the Nazis got many of their ideas from the American South.

Business Insider goes into how the founders of Nazism looked to the American South and its race laws to devise the Nuremberg Laws that looted and repressed and finally exterminated the Jews of Europe

*It's being argued that Trump derived the points his more aggressive statement yesterday from the predominant right wing propaganda machine in America today, FoxNews. This is laid out in a video comparison from MediaMatters.

The NRA is a Dangerous Terrorist Organization

"In a 1995 fund-raising letter, the executive vice-president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, called federal law-enforcement agents “jack-booted thugs,” and suggested that “in Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”

"In Texas, where the police ambush occurred, an open-carry advocate last year urged the killing of state legislators if they do not approve a more relaxed policy. (“They better start giving us our rights or this peaceful non-cooperation stuff is gonna be gamed up . . . We should be demanding [Texas legislators] give us our rights back, or it’s punishable by death. Treason.”)

"At the annual N.R.A. convention last year, the board member Ted Nugent said, “Our government has turned on us.” Stopping short of calling for violence, he urged members to focus their ire on “the bad and the ugly.” He said, “It’s a target-rich environment. If it was duck season, there’d be so many ducks, you could just close your eyes and shoot ’em.””

Evan Osnos discusses the dangerous contradictions of the NRA in the New Yorker A must-read. Worth sharing with a few elected representatives.

The point Wayne Lapierre was making ought to be applied to the NRA, whose members, unlike our police and federal agents, have never sworn to respect anyone’s rights:

“...if you have a gun, you have the NRA’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens."

How should we categorize the NRA? What kind of organization are they? A dangerous one. A powerful one. Is it a religion? If it is it’s a fundamentalist and intolerant religion.

What terms apply?

Calling for the violent overthrow of our democratically elected government… what’s that called?

Rationalizing the murdering of police officers… what’s that called?

Urging people to shoot their elected representatives like ducks… what would you call that?

If the NRA were an organization of black Americans they would be shut down and the leaders would be prosecuted for incitement to violence––at least. But more likely they’d be prosecuted for complicity in murder. Having a white face makes the NRA immune.

The American public is being held hostage by the NRA. Being heavily armed with high-capacity fast-firing military style weapons gives them the right and the power to tell everyone else to shut up and sit down.

The NRA holds America hostage like a repressive religion. Not almost like, exactly like. They intimidate and threaten us the way fundamentalist regimes do all over the world. Not only is their gospel holy and absolute, it is compulsory. In Khomeini’s Iran people were afraid to oppose the regime because they might be jailed or deported. In this country we are told that opposing the NRA means you deserve to be gunned down.

Joke. Nugent and his gun-worshiping friends are just kidding.

Men with machine guns telling jokes are not telling jokes.

Another Sad Story About Gun Rights

“It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semiautomatic handguns.” ~Christy Sheats, Texas gun advocate who murdered her two daughters with a gun over the weekend.

Here is the story in TIME.

Here's the story in the Houston Chronicle.

A lot is unclear about this family birthday party that turned violent. The one thing that's clear is Ms. Sheats' handgun killed the family it was supposed to protect. Having a gun in the home increases the risk that the people living in that home will die from gun violence. In other words, guns don't tend to protect the people who own them, they tend to kill them.

This article by Susan Perry, the health reporter at MinnPost, is worth reading for a better understanding of the lethal effect of guns on their owners.

The Deception Industry

I discovered this interesting story this morning from the BBC.

"Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour."

I’ve been asking this question for a while. What do we call the intentional organized effort by corporations to disinform and confuse the public over matters of public safety and public health?

Now there's a word for the study of intentional corporate falsehood. But is there a name for the act itself?

Until this dangerous corporate strategy is understood and there's a name for it it's hard to make it a crime.

Ignorance is their friend.

The lag time between harm done and public awareness allows decades to go by, while the company reaps large annual profits, and their dangerous products cause harm to millions of people.

This same delay allows the statute of limitations to expire. It allows their victims and witnesses to die off and the evidence to vanish.

Chemical companies whose products cause neurological diseases use this strategy.

The global Catholic hierarchy used this strategy for decades to cover up for pedophile priests, enabling them to go on destroying innocent lives.

Big tobacco used this strategy.

The asbestos industry used this strategy.

Big Oil knew the dangers of global warming caused by CO2 emissions and covered it up for decades, paying scientists to fabricate and distort evidence and confuse the public.

The NRA’s allies in Congress have prevented the scientific study of the harm done by gun violence.

Police departments have prevented the collection of information on police abuse and police shootings.

The corporations that control the machines that tally our votes claim the technology is “proprietary” and therefore it is a secret and the public has no business overseeing the vote count.

Why is there no name for this deliberate, organized, systematic and decades-long practice of keeping the public in the dark? Is the language also in thrall to their corrupt money? Without language to define the abuse it is hard to pass laws against it. Corporate money buys more lawyers and creates wealthier lawyers, who then endow law schools and universities, and the ignorance becomes a public fact, a carefully nurtured public policy.

Money shapes how we think. Call it “moneythink.” It certainly shapes our laws and how our laws are enforced. This same corrupt money dominates our legislative process, thanks to Citizens United, which was shaped by the right wing of the Supreme Court, which was created by the dominance of corporate money in politics. Millions more Americans vote Democratic than vote Republican, yet the Republicans still control both houses of Congress. Corporate money helps them do this.

But we are complicit too. We are individually in thrall to “moneythink”. When we are unsure how to vote or what to think we delegate our decisions to our money. What do our stock portfolios want us to do? If it’s a coin toss decision between left and right, we too often side with the markets which hold our retirement plans hostage, and the markets are dominated by large corporations.

Never mind that the markets have always done significantly better during Democratic presidencies, the corporations and the people in control of them prefer deregulation and lax enforcement and public ignorance of the damage corporations are causing to public health and well being. What we don’t know can’t hurt them.

Know-Nothingism and Nullification

In Wisconsin, failed candidate Scott Walker is making it harder to investigate the alleged corruption of his governor’s office or his election by allegedly illegal means. He is supported in this effort by a state supreme court dominated by justices who allegedly used the same corrupt means to get elected. But if we cannot investigate it, then it must conclude no crime was committed.

This brash arrogance is described brilliantly by Charles Pierce in his Esquire column.

In the lobbyist-ruled halls of our nation's capital, the NRA asserts its role as chief health research officer by blocking all research into the health hazards of being shot with a gun.

Public Radio International reports on efforts to hide, cover up and shut down such research before it can be done.

Meanwhile the leading candidate in the GOP presidential sweepstakes is an odd, twinkly-eyed sociopath named Ben Carson M.D. Here are some of his odder beliefs, notably his bizarre comparisons of healthcare and the institution of slavery and his idea that freedom of thought should be enforced on college campuses by censoring liberal ideas.

ThinkProgress lists Dr. Carson's nuttier ideas. (Don't laugh. He might win the nomination.)

This shutting down of investigations (while your own witch hunts proceed unchecked) and shutting down scientific inquiry that might harm some corporations’ profits and shutting down freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedoms in general at the Boss’s discretion, all of it flows from the central concept that has energized the radicalism of the white South since the age of Lincoln. The theory of nullification. Lincoln fought and won a war to kill the idea, but it laid eggs. All across the white South and the Right Wing West folks are taught and firmly believe that obeying the law is optional. If you disagree with the law you ignore it. Unless, of course, it’s a law they hold sacred. Then failure to obey it to the letter is treason. Again: if they like the law disobeying it is treason. If they dislike the law obeying it is treason. All authority resides in the gut (specifically in the large intestine) of god-fearing, gun-carrying, white-ancestored, non-scientist folks of the American South and West, with its various extremist outposts in northern backwoods and suburbias.

Nullification is the blunt refusal to respect federal law, especially on the subject of slavery and equal rights for persons of color. The Confederacy was an armed nullification, which followed the legislative nullification practiced by various Southern legislatures in the 19th century. Followed by the violent nullification of the Civil War defeat, a period we know as Jim Crow.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has encountered nullificationists as I have. I had a disagreement with a lawyer once. To disprove his point I cited a state law on the books. He replied by saying that state law was invalid because it had not been fully litigated up to the Supreme Court of the land. By which logic, most laws are invalid, because very few laws are argued up to the Supreme Court. And if nullificationists disagree with a Supreme Court ruling they still maintain it is illegitimate while they relitigate it.

The reductio ad absurdum of this being that the only valid law is whatever each individual wants to believe. A mixture of narcissism and libertarianism and our beloved Wild West Yahoo Yosemite-Sam-gunfight-free-for-all.

The Politics of Unreason

H&RBlock lobbied to make our tax preparations more complicated so the poor would be unable to file their own taxes and H&RBlock would get more customers.

MotherJones reports

Rudy Giuliani looked at homeless people as vermin to be eliminated. This approach was tried once in Germany.

From the New York Times

The NRA used to be a responsible organization favoring the strict regulation of killing machines. That changed.

From VOX

One gun maker actually admitted America has a problem with gun violence. They were severely punished for this moment of reason.

Reported by Frontline/PBS

Americans usually equate Republican and Christian values. How did Christianity go from being on the side of the poor and less fortunate to being against them, working on the side of the rich and powerful?

I guess Jesus preferred rich people, loved war, opposed healing the sick and favored universal gun ownership. I must reread my New Testament. Maybe it’s in the Revised Standard Version.

From Salon, an article on the unChristianity of Christians today

The Republican half of our politics has become unhinged––but not like an eccentric neighbor we can tolerate and find amusing. (I’m one of those.) They’ve become the insane neighbor with the vicious dogs and the arsenal of weapons. He sics his dogs on kids who set foot on his grass. It’s the house where we hear shouting and crying late at night. Do we call the police? Now they want to build a ten foot spite wall along the property line. What do you do when your neighbor is insane?

Their actions affect all of us...

Andy Borowitz reports in this insanity

In 1936 only two states voted against FDR. Vermont and Maine. Two years later the Republican governor of Vermont had had it with the Republican Party and said so. The GOP was moderate then compared to now…

Bill Moyers takes a look back

The NRA is arming kids to kill zombies

There was an interesting interview with Tim Dickinson on MSNBC this afternoon. Host Martin Bashir showed us that grade schoolers are the latest target market of the NRA's gun manufacturer clients. The interview included video of kids like Billy next door firing hundreds of rounds in seconds at targets that looked like people. Fun.

The targets weren't the usual paper silhouette of an intruder. They were life-sized human dummies. For the purposes of gun practice they were people. They were realistically made human dummies that began to bleed whenever a shot connected. Bubbling blood from bullet wounds is the new sales technique to the NRA crowd. And these techniques are being pitched at small children. Schoolkids the age of the innocents murdered at Newtown.

To the NRA, which condemned the game industry as despicable, shooting high powered weapons is a game. It's a game designed to tie into the zombie craze, the vampire craze. The NRA is carefully and cannily dehumanizing the humans killed by their products.

One of these target dummies is named The Ex.


It's made of lifelike plastic. It is a blood oozing figure of a woman. Not a man. A woman. The woman is dressed provocatively, the way the exes of angry ex husbands dress in their angriest fever-dreams. What is the message here?

They sell machine guns that come in pink. As far as I know there is no Barbie murder weapon, no Hello Kitty murder weapon. Not yet.