Wednesday, August 16, 2017

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.

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Monday, February 13, 2017

The Lunatic Fringe Running the White House

Watch this startling and blood chilling montage of White House pup Steve Miller appearing on the Sunday news shows. The kid thinks he’s the shit.

Courtesy of Morning Joe on MSNBC

The looks on former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough’s face and Mika Brzezinski’s face say it all.

The cocksureness of this 31 year old "senior" advisor in the White House is astonishing and disturbing. (Point of context: he used to work for Michele Bachmann. Remember her? She's the one who's excited about the End Times coming.)

Notice the comment thread. The far far right End Times GOP base loves cocksureness, especially when that certainty is based on no information.

Then there’s this damning analysis from conservative author and columnist Andrew Sullivan, who explains, for those Republicans who don’t know it, that having a cuckoo as president is not a good thing. Trump is crazy. He is detached from reality.

Sullivan's The Madness of King Donald column in NewYorkMagazine

And Sullivan in an interview on CNN.

The GOP fold appears to be thrilled. A lie shouted is much better than a lie spoken in a normal voice.

What will the consequences be of the White House’s aggressive shredding of our democratic institutions and the whole constitutional precedent and its credibility?

Fortune magazine is reporting that judges are beginning to fear for their safety. Because they know Trump’s supporters are as crazy as he is and they tend to be violent. Thank you GOP.

The Republicans’ goal is to destroy our democratic system. Make it not work. Make Americans not trust it. Persuade Americans to have contempt for it.

In The Nation

This interview with Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century“ is instructive. Snyder warns: “We have at most a year to defend American democracy, perhaps less“

In Süddeutsche Zeitung

What does non-stop, bullhorn volume lying eventually do?

From WIRED


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