It’s so funny when liberals lecture communists about not knowing how anything works, that we need to grow up and face the real world etc, while publicly demonstrating that their political imagination is so deeply impoverished that they genuinely believe the only thing the leader of the most powerful country on the planet in all of human history can do is block a slightly more fascist guy from taking his place every four years

This is a transcript of a speech by developmental biologist Dr Emma Hilton delivered on 29 November 2020 for the ‘Feminist Academics Talk Back!’ meeting. This talk was originally published by womentalkback.org

Sex denialists have captured existing journals We are dealing with a new religion

Thank you for the invitation to speak today, as a feminist academic fighting back.

As ever, let’s begin with a story. And, trust me, by the end of this talk, you’re going to know a lot more about creationism that you expected:

1. In the 1920s, in concert with many other American states, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed the Butler Act, making it illegal for state public schools to: “teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible.” In other words, banning schools from teaching the theory of evolution.

Three months later, Tennessee science teacher John Scopes was on trial, charged with teaching the theory of evolution, a crime he was ultimately found guilty of. He was fined £71 – about £1064 in today’s money – so it could have been an expensive affair for him, had he not got off on a really boring administrative technicality.

Yet, despite the evidence against him and his own confession, he was an innocent man. Scopes was not guilty of teaching the theory of evolution. He admitted to a crime he had not committed. He even coached his students in their testimonies against him. So why would he admit to this wrongdoing of which he was entirely innocent? Why would he contrive apparent guilt? In protest. In protest against a law he viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the pursuit of scientific truth.

2. The history of creationism and education laws in the US is turbulent and often opaquely legalese, especially for those of us unfamiliar with US law. Some of the methods of the wider creationist movement, however, will be immediately recognisable as they are employed by a new movement, one which seeks to erase another scientific truth, the fact of sex.

Method 1. The framing of human classifications, whether it’s species or sex, as “arbitrary”. This leads to the premise that such phenomena are “social constructs” that need not exist if we chose to reject them. That truth must be relative and consensual. Never mind that these “arbitrary” classifications appear to be surprisingly similar classifications across all cultures and civilisations.

It also necessarily spotlights tricky boundary cases – not really a personal problem for the long-dead evolutionary missing links, but a very real problem in the modern world for people whose sex is atypical and who are constantly invoked, even fetishized, as “not males” or “not females” to prove sex classification is somehow no more than human whimsy.

People with DSDs have complex and often traumatic medical histories, perhaps struggling to understand their bodies, and they deserve more respect than to be casually and thoughtlessly used as a postemodernist “gotcha” by the very people so horribly triggered by a pronoun.

Method 2. The distortion of science and the development of sciencey language to create a veneer of academic rigour. Creationists invented “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” while Sex denialists try to beat people over the head with their dazzling arrays of “bimodal distributions arranged in n-dimensional space”.

Creationists, unable to publish in mainstream science journals because they weren’t producing, well, science, established their own journals. “Journals”. Sex denialists have captured existing journals – albeit limited to more newsy ones and to occasional editorials and blogs about gender (which is not sex), about how developmental biology is soooo complicated (which does not mean sex is complicated – I mean, the internal combustion engine is complicated but cars still fundamentally go forwards or backwards), about how discussing the biology of sex is mean (OK, good luck with that at your doctor’s surgery). Many such blogs and articles are written by scientists who simultaneously deny sex to their social media audience while writing academic papers about how female fruitflies make shells for their eggs (no matter how queer they are), about the development of ovaries or testes in fish and about how males make sperm.

The current editor-in-chief at Nature, the first female to hold this position, studied sex determination in worms for her PhD, and she now presides over a journal with an editorial policy to insert disclaimers about the binary nature of sex into spotlight features about research on, for example, different death rates in male and female cystic fibrosis patients.

The authors of the studies are not prevaricating or handwaving about sex, but the editorial team is “bending the knee”. I used to research a genetic disorder that was male-lethal – that is, male human babies died early in gestation. I’d love to know if this disclaimer would be applied there.

Method 3. Debate strategies like The Gish Gallop. This method is named for Duane Gish, who is a prominent creationist. What it boils down to is: throw any old argument, regardless of its validity, in quick succession at your opponent and then claim any dismissal or missed response or even hesitation in response as a score for your side. In Twitter parlance, we know this as “sealioning”, in political propaganda as the “firehose of falsehood”, although Wikipedia also suggests that it is covered by the term “bullshit”. So, what about intersex people? what about this article? what about an XY person with a uterus? what about the fa’afafine? what about that article? look at this pretty picture. what about what about whataboutery what about clownfish? The aim is not to discuss or debate, it is to force submission from frustration or exhaustion.

Method 4. The reification of humans as separate from not just monkeys but the rest of the living world. The special pleading for special descriptions that frame humans as the chosen ones, such that the same process of making new individuals, common to humans and asparagus, an observation I chose because it seems superficially silly – it could have been spinach – requires its own description, one that accounts for gender identity.

3. In the Scopes trial, which saw discussion of whether Eve was actually created from Adam’s rib and ruminations on where Cain got his wife, Scopes was defended by a legal group who had begun scouting for a test case subject as soon as the Tennessee ban was enacted. This legal group claimed to advocate for:

“Freedom of speech for ideas from the most extreme left such as anarchists and socialists, to the most extreme right including the Ku Klux Klan, Henry Ford, and others who would now be considered more toward the Fascist end of the spectrum.”

The legal group so keen to defend the right to speak the truth, in this case a fundamental, observable scientific truth? The American Civil Liberties Union, a group whose modern day social media presence promotes nonsense like:

“The notion of biological sex was developed for the exclusive purpose of being weaponized against people.”

and

“Sex and gender are different words for the same thing [that is] a set of politically and socially contingent notions of embodied and expressed identity.”

and shares articles asserting that biological sex is rooted in white supremacy.

Since the Scopes case, the ACLU have fought against many US laws preventing, or at least compromising, the teaching of evolution. I cannot process the irony of a group of people historically and consistently prepared to robustly defend the truth of evolution while now denying one of the most important biological foundations of evolution.

4. How do we fight this current craze of sex denialism? A major blow for creationism teaching was delivered in 1986 while the US Supreme Court were considering a Louisiana state law requiring creationism to be taught alongside evolution. The Louisiana law was struck down, in part influenced by the expert opinions, submitted to the court, of scientists who put aside their individual and, as one of them has since described “often violent” differences on Theory X and Experiment Y, to present a unified defence of scientific truth over religious belief. 76 Nobel laureates, 17 state academies of science and a handful of scientific organisations all got behind this single cause, and made a very real change.

Support for creationism has slowly ebbed away and the US is in a much more sensible position these days, although I still meet the occasional student from a Southern state who didn’t learn about evolution until college.

Sadly, one of the Nobel laureates has highlighted how unusual this collective response was and that he could not imagine any other issue that would receive the same groundswell of community support. Although he forged his career listening out for the Big Bang, so maybe I need to go through the list and find the biologists.

Part of the problem petitioning biologists to speak out is not necessarily fear of being cancelled or whatever, but simple lack of awareness of the issue, or incredulity that it is being taken remotely seriously. I’ve been working on a legal document and was discussing with a colleague about my efforts to find a citation for the statement, “there are two sexes, male and female”. He laughed at the idea that this would require a citation, told me to check a textbook, then realised that this statement is so simple that it would not even be included in a textbook.

And he’s right. I can find chapters in textbooks and hundreds of academic papers dedicated to how males and females are made, how they develop, how they differ, yet very few that feel the need to preface any of this with the statement “There are two sexes, male and female”. It is apparently something that biologists do not think needs to be said.

But of course, I think they are wrong, and that we live in a time where it does need to be said, where some aspects of society are being restructured around a scientific untruth, and where females will suffer.

Without recognition of and language to describe our anatomy, and the experiences that stem from that anatomy, mostly uninvited, we can neither detect nor measure things like rates of violence against women, the medical experiences, the social experiences of women and girls.

And, as for creationism, the reality of sex perhaps needs to be said by those with scientific authority, in unambiguous terms. Otherwise, we are living in a society that tolerates nonsense like there is no such thing as male or female, that differences evident to our own eyes are not real, that anatomies readily observable and existing in monkey and man alike do not actually exist. I’m sure this last assertion has the full support of the creationist community. And perhaps, as for creationism, a true tipping point will be tested when it is our children being taught these scientific untruths, or worse, when it is illegal to say different.

5. At the end of his trial, the only words Scopes uttered in court were these:

“Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom—that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom.”

I do not exaggerate when I say we are dealing with a new type of religion, a new form of creationism and a new assault on scientific truth. I also do not exaggerate when I say it may take a high profile court case to rebalance the public discourse around sex. There is only so far letters and opinion articles can go.

Two things I predict: 1. It will not be defended by the ACLU, and 2. With the recent proposals on hate speech law, it will probably involve a Scottish John Scopes, who finds themself in front of a judge for the seditious crime of discussing the sex life of asparagus at their dinner table.

Dr Emma Hilton is a developmental biologist studying aspects of human genetic diseases, and her current research focuses on a congenital motor neurone disease affecting the genitourinary tract, and on respiratory dysfunction in cystic fibrosis. She teaches reproduction, genes, inheritance and genetic disorders. Emma has a special interest in fairness in female sports. A strong advocate for women and girls, Emma tweets as @FondofBeetles.

Hindsight may very well be 20/20, but with that caveat out of the way, some events truly come across as historical in their importance even as they play out in realtime. We might not know what the results will be, but we can feel that something quite big is happening. Watching the fall of the Berlin wall was one such moment in recent history, and watching the twin towers fall was another one.

The retreat from Afghanistan should not have made the list, or least not the top of it. Yet, it has clearly already made its way there, being widely seen as something truly momentous by most if not all the people observing it. The reason it shouldn’t have had those same connotations as the fall of the Berlin wall is because it was not only planned in advance and decided upon by the 45th president, not the 46th, but because almost everyone at this point wished for the war to just end. But it is how it has ended that has really thrown back the curtain and shown the world the rot festering beneath. The Soviet Union was dying in 1989, when it completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. It still managed to do so in an orderly fashion, with a symbolic column of russian APCs crossing the bridge over to Uzbekistan. The leader of the war effort, one Colonel-General Gromov, symbolically rode in the very last BTR, and then proclaimed to the gathered journalists that there wasn’t a single russian soldier behind his back.

The American withdrawal, by contrast, is a grotesque spectacle, laid bare to the eyes of the world in realtime thanks to the wonders of modern technology. The Soviet attempt at braving the graveyard of empires could, if one was charitably inclined, at least be construed as some form of tragedy (”we tried to help, but in the end, we accomplished nothing”), and the russians did their best to make the entire thing appear somewhat dignified and solemn. Thirty years later, the scene is closer to a black form of comedy. The American consulate was evacuated by helicopter, about one month after president Biden referred to just such an evacuation from Saigon as an example of how Afghanistan and Vietnam were not comparable. The entire government collapsed within a matter of hours, not months. Throngs of people gathered around the airports, desperate to escape; American authorities had no more guidance to offer american citizens stuck in Afghanistan than to ”shelter in place” and then presumably ask the Taliban for a visa once regular flight traffic resumes. Desperate people even clung to the airframes of departing cargo planes before falling to their deaths, like a grim re-enactment of frozen and starving german soldiers trying to escape by clinging to the last planes leaving Stalingrad.

…

There may be a deeper aspect to this than a lot of people might perceive at present. On the level of pure geopolitics, the utterly embarrassing debacle of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan can only serve to make China more bold in any future confrontation over Taiwan. The American eagle is faltering, and its rivals will not sit idly by for long. But this is probably the lesser of the big consequences of Afghanistan. There is another, much more significant implication of the collapse of the American project here, one with much more acute bearing on the immediate future of American society itself. To understand why, it’s useful to reflect on a certain political and historical point made by Carl Schmitt in his by now nearly hundred year old essay, whose english name is often rendered as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. The essay is well worth a read in full today, and the reader might be surprised (or maybe not) at how relevant many of the descriptions of the ongoing political crisis in 1923 may seem to us today, nearly a hundred years later. The most relevant passage, however, deserves to be quoted in full:

”In the history of political ideas, there are epochs of great energy and times becalmed, times of motionless status quo. Thus the epoch of monarchy is at an end when a sense of the principle of kingship, of honor, has been lost, if bourgeois kings appear who seek to prove their usefulness and utility instead of their devotion and honor. The external apparatus of monarchical institutions can remain standing very much longer after that. But in spite of it monarchy’s hour has tolled. The convictions inherent in this and no other institution then appear antiquated; practical justifications for it will not be lacking, but it is only an empirical question whether men or organizations come forward who can prove themselves just as useful or even more so than these kings and through this simple fact brush aside monarchy.”

What Schmitt is saying here is very important, and it might very well end up being the true cost of the Afghanistan debacle. Every ruling class throughout history advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating claims can take many different forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted or lose their credibility, that is pretty much it.

…

What Schmitt is saying is that when the legitimating claim for a particular form of elite is used up, when people no longer believe in the concepts or claims that underpin a particular system or claim to rule, the extinction of that particular elite becomes a foregone conclusion. Once Napoleon came along, it became increasingly impossible to actually believe (or at least effect a suspension of disbelief) that kings were born to rule and had a right to rule. As such, the only argument kings were left with in order to be tolerated by their own subjects became practical in nature: look at how useful this king is, look at how well his administration runs, look at how much stuff you’re getting out of letting him sit on the throne. But once you are merely left with practical arguments of that kind, as Schmitt rightly points out, your replacement becomes a question of simple empiricism. The moment someone more useful is found – like, say, a president – out you go, never to return. The replacement of Louis XVI with a republic was a world-shattering event. The fall of his nephew, Louis Philippe I, in favor of another republic, was a mere formality by comparison. By the time of his fall, not even Louis Philippe himself believed in kings being some sort of semi-divine beings. Certainly almost none of his subjects did.

…

Moreover, on a more practical level, the war in Afghanistan became another sort of crucible. In very real terms, Afghanistan turned into a testbed for every single innovation in technocratic PMC governance, and each innovation was sold as the next big thing that would make previous, profane understandings of politics obsolete. In Afghanistan ”big data” and the utilization of ever expanding sets of technical and statistical metrics was allowed to topple old stodgy ideas of dead white thinkers such as Sun Tzu or Machiavelli, as ”modern” or ”scientific” approaches to war could have little to learn from the primitive insights of a pre-rational order. In Afghanistan, military sociology in the form of Human Terrain Teams and other innovative creations were unleashed to bring order to chaos. Here, the full force of the entire NGO world, the brightest minds of that international government-in-waiting without a people to be beholden to, were given a playground with nearly infinite resources at their disposal. There was so much money sloshing around at the fingertips of these educated technocrats that it became nearly impossible to spend it all fast enough; they simply took all of those countless billions of dollars straight from the hands of ordinary americans, because they believed they had a right to do so.

…

Put plainly: managers, through the power of managerialism, were once believed to be able to mobilize science and reason and progress to accomplish what everyone else could not, and so only they could secure a just and functional society for their subjects, just as only the rightful kings of yore could count on Providence and God to do the same thing. At their core, both of these claims are truly metaphysical, because all claims to legitimate rulership are metaphysical. It is when that metaphysical power of persuasion is lost that kings or socialists become ”bourgeois”, in Schmitt’s terms. They have to desperately turn toward providing proof, because the genuine belief is gone. But once a spouse starts demanding that the other spouse constantly prove that he or she hasn’t been cheating, the marriage is already over, and the divorce is merely a matter of time, if you’ll pardon the metaphor.

I suspect we are currently witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades. Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs have obviously been multiplying over many years, but it is only now that the picture is becoming clear to everyone. When Michael Gove said ”I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss.

It is not just that the elite class is incompetent – even kings could be incompetent without undermining belief in monarchy as a system – it is that they are so grossly, spectacularly incompetent that they walk around among us as living rebuttals of meritocracy itself. It is that their application of managerial logic to whatever field they get their grubby mitts on – from homelessness in California to industrial policy to running a war – makes that thing ten times more expensive and a hundred times more dysfunctional. To make the situation worse, the current elites seem almost serene in their willful destruction of the very fields they rely on for legitimacy. When the ”experts” go out of their way to write public letters about how covid supposedly only infects people who hold demonstrations in support of ”structural white supremacy”, while saying that Black Lives Matter demonstrations pose no risk of spreading the virus further, this amounts to the farmer gleefully salting his own fields to make sure nothing can grow there in the future. How can anyone expect the putative peasants of our social order to ”trust the science”, when the elites themselves are going out of their way, against all reason and the tenets of basic self-preservation, to make such a belief completely impossible even for those who really, genuinely, still want to believe?

…

I find it very likely that most future historians will put the date of the real beginning of the collapse of the current political and geopolitical order right here, right now, at the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Just as with any other big historical process, however, many others will point out that the seeds of the collapse were sown much farther back, and that a case can be made for several other dates, or perhaps no specific date at all. This is how we modern people look at the fall of the french ancien regime, after all. Still, it is quite obvious that the epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over. The bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else.

How long it will take for their institutions to disappear, or before they end up toppled by popular discontent and revolution, no one can know. But at this point, I think most people on some level now understand that it really is only a matter of time.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 20, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

The news today remains Trump’s unprecedented attempt to steal an election in which voters chose his opponents, Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, by close to 6 million votes, so far. A close second to that news is that the leadership of the Republican Party is not standing up to the president, but is instead seemingly willing to let him burn down the country to stay in office.

Never before in our history has a president who has lost by such a convincing amount tried to claw out a win by gaming the system. Biden has not only won the popular vote by more than any challenger of an incumbent since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s win in 1932, but also has won crucial states by large margins. He is ahead by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, almost 160,000 votes in Michigan, and between 11,000 and 34,000 each in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

And yet, only two Senate Republicans—Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Ben Sasse (R-NE)-- have called Trump out for refusing to accept the results of the election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has simply said he is willing to let the process play out. In the House, only two Republicans have said they oppose Trump’s attempt to steal the election. Kay Granger (R-TX) and Fred Upton (R-MI) said there is no evidence of fraud and it is time to move on.

State leaders, though, have refused to do Trump’s bidding. Today, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, certified Georgia’s vote for Biden. Also today, two top Republicans in the Michigan legislature, whom Trump had invited to the White House apparently to enlist their help in overturning the vote in their state, issued a statement about what happened in their meeting with the president.

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Michigan Speaker of the House Lee Chatfield said they used their time with the president to press him for more money to help Michigan fight the coronavirus, which continues to rage across the country.

As for the election, they said “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors…. Michigan’s certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation. Allegations of fraudulent behavior should be taken seriously, thoroughly investigated, and if proven, prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And the candidates who win the most votes win elections and Michigan’s electoral votes.”

Central to Trump’s argument is that Democrats have cheated, even though his own former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Christopher Krebs, said the election was “the most secure in American history,” and “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Krebs was the first director of CISA, an independent agency established within the Department of Homeland Security in 2018, and he worked hard to protect the election from foreign intervention despite the fact the president appeared to be angling for just such intervention.

Krebs’s defense of the security of our elections led to Trump firing him—by tweet—with Trump falsely asserting: “[t]he recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud - including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.”

Trump’s attempt to throw out Democratic votes and lay claim to victory in an election that he lost by quite a lot is the culmination of a generation of Republican rhetoric claiming that Democratic votes are illegitimate.

Beginning in 1986, Republican operatives began to talk about cutting down Black voting under a “ballot integrity” initiative in hopes that would depress Democratic votes. They bitterly opposed the Democrats’ expansion of voter registration in 1993 under the “Motor Voter” law, which permitted voter registration at certain state offices. By 1994, losing Republican candidates insisted that their Democratic opponents had won only through “voter fraud,” although voter fraud remains so exceedingly rare as to be virtually non-existent. They fought for voter ID laws that tended to disfranchise Democrats, and immediately after the landmark 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision in which the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republican state officials introduced voter ID laws and bills restricting voter registration.

In addition to suppressing Democratic votes, recent Republican leaders also took the manipulative system of gerrymandering to new extremes in order to make sure Democrats could not win power. In 2010, party operatives raised money from corporate donors to make sure that state legislatures would be controlled by Republicans that year, as states redistricted for the following decade. After 2010, Republican controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and won a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. But Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering meant that Republicans did not have to attract moderate voters. Instead, Republican candidates had to worry about challenges from further right. Over time, they became more and more extreme. At the same time, without competition, they fielded increasingly weak candidates, who doubled down on inflammatory rhetoric rather than advancing viable policies.

Increasingly, Republicans insisted that Democrats were anti-American “socialists,” a theme Trump picked up and ran with in his 2020 construction of his opponents as “radical left” extremists who would destroy the country. Trump said "I'm not just running against Biden — Sleepy Joe — I'm running against the corrupt media, the big tech giants, the Washington swamp. And the Democrat Party is a part of all of them — every single one of them. They flood your communities with criminal aliens, drugs and crime, while they live behind beautiful gated compounds." When the Democrats won, Trump promptly insisted that Democrats had cheated.

Aside from the outcome of this particular election, this attempt of Republican leaders to delegitimize the Democratic Party is an assault on our democracy. Here’s why:

Democracy requires at least two healthy political parties, so there is always an organized opposition to the party in power. Having a party that stands in opposition to those in power does two things: it enables people to disagree with current leadership while staying loyal to the nation, and it provides a means for oversight of the people running the government.

Until the early 1700s, in Europe, the monarch was the state. Either you were loyal to the king, or you were a traitor. Gradually, though, the British political thinkers from whom Americans drew their inspiration began to object to the policies of the British monarchy while remaining loyal to the government. They developed the idea of a loyal opposition. This was an important development in political thought, because it meant that a person could be loyal to the country (and keep his head firmly on his shoulders) while criticizing government policies.

It also meant that the people in power would have oversight to keep them on the straight and narrow. There’s nothing like opponents watching you for any potential scandal to keep corruption to a minimum.

During the establishment of the early American republic, the Framers of the Constitution briefly imagined that since the colonists had thrown off the king they would no longer need an opposition. But almost immediately—as early as President George Washington’s administration—men who disagreed with Washington’s policies organized their own party under Thomas Jefferson to oppose those in power. Jeffersonians offered to voters an alternative set of policies, and a way to put them into practice without overthrowing the government itself. This recognition of a loyal opposition was key to more than 200 years of peaceful transfers of power.…

until now.

Trump is rejecting the idea that Democrats can legally win an election. As this crisis drags on, more and more of his followers are echoing his insistence that the Democrats could not possibly win except by cheating. There is no evidence to support this claim. Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly admitted as much in court. It is rather a rejection of the possibility that Democrats can legitimately govern.

Our democracy depends on our ability both to criticize our government and to believe that we can legitimately elect a different set of leaders to advance different policies. If we lose the concept of a loyal opposition, we must all declare allegiance to the king.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Trump Calls For GOP Unity, Repeats Lies About Election Loss

— By Jill Colvin | Associated Press February 28, 2021

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Taking the stage for the first time since leaving office, former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for Republican Party unity, even as he exacerbated intraparty divisions and trumpeted lies about the election in a speech that made clear he intends to remain a dominant political force.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he has been hailed as a returning hero, Trump blasted his successor, President Joe Biden, and tried to cement his status as the party’s undisputed leader despite his loss in November.

“Do You Miss Me Yet?” 😂🤣😅😇 Trump said after taking the stage, where his old rally soundtrack had been playing. “I stand before you today to declare that the incredible journey we begun together ... is far from being over.”

Though Trump has flirted with the idea of creating a third party, he pledged Sunday to remain part of what he called “our beloved party.”

“I’m going to continue to fight right by your side. We’re not starting new parties,” he said. “We have the Republican Party. It’s going to be strong and united like never before.”

The conference, held this year in Orlando instead of the Washington suburbs because of COVID-19 restrictions, has served as a tribute to Trump and Trumpism, complete with a golden statue in his likeness on display. Speakers, including many potential 2024 hopefuls, have argued the party must embrace the former president and his followers, even after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

And they have repeated his unfounded claim that he lost the November election only because of mass voter fraud — an assertion that has been repeatedly rejected by judges, Republican state officials and Trump’s own administration.

Still, Trump continued to repeat what Democrats have dubbed the “big lie,” calling the election “rigged” and insisting that he won in November, even though he lost by more than 7 million votes.

“As you know, they just lost the White House,” he said of Biden, rewriting history as he teased the prospect that he will run again in 2024. “I may even decide to beat them for a third time,” he said.

And he mocked those who have warned that such talk will damage the party.

“If Republicans don’t get this and the other things I’m going to say, then you should, like the Supreme Court, be ashamed of yourselves,” he said.

The conference’s annual unscientific straw poll of just over 1,000 attendees found that 97% approve of the job Trump did as president. But they were much more ambiguous about whether he should run again, with 68% saying he should.

If the 2024 primary were held today and Trump were in the race, just 55% said they would vote for him, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 21%. Without Trump in the field, DeSantis garnered 43% support, followed by 8% for South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and 7% each for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

It is highly unusual for past American presidents to publicly criticize their successors so soon after leaving office. Ex-presidents typically step out of the spotlight for at least a while; Barack Obama was famously seen kitesurfing on vacation after he departed, while George W. Bush said he believed Obama “deserves my silence” and took up painting.

Not Trump.

He delivered a sharp rebuke of what he framed as the new administration’s first month of failures, including Biden’s approach to immigration and the border.

“Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history,” Trump said.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki brushed off the expected criticism. “We’ll see what he says, but our focus is certainly not on what President Trump is saying at CPAC,” she told reporters.

Aside from criticizing Biden, Trump used the speech to crown himself the future of the Republican Party, even as many leaders argue they must move in a new, less divisive direction after Republicans lost not only the White House but both chambers of Congress in the last elections.

And he insisted the party was united, even as he called out by name Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, including the No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, and lashed those he labels RINOs, “Republican in name only.”

“We cannot have leaders who show more passion for condemning their fellow Americans than they have ever shown for standing up to Democrats, the media and the radicals who want to turn America into a socialist country,” Trump said.

On Friday, Trump began his vengeance campaign, endorsing Max Miller, a former aide who is seeking to oust Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who voted in favor of Trump’s impeachment.

Still, in his speech Sunday he insisted the only gulf in the party was “between a handful of Washington, D.C., establishment political hacks and everybody else, all over the country.”

While he no longer has his social media megaphone after being barred from Twitter and Facebook, Trump has already been inching back into public life. He called into conservative news outlets after Rush Limbaugh’s death and to wish Tiger Woods well after the pro golfer was injured in a car crash. He has also issued statements, including one blasting Mitch McConnell after the Senate Republican leader excoriated Trump for inciting the Capitol riot. McConnell has since said he would “absolutely” support Trump if he were the GOP nominee in 2024.

At his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump has been quietly meeting with aides and senior party leaders as he builds his post-presidential political operation. While he has already endorsed several pro-Trump candidates, aides have been working this past week to develop benchmarks for those seeking his endorsement to make sure the candidates are serious and have set up full-fledged political and fundraising organizations before he gets involved.

They are also planning a new super PAC that could raise unlimited amounts of money, though one aide cautioned they were still deciding whether to create a new entity or repurpose an existing America First super PAC.

Made in Mexico 🤮 but Mexico did pay for it 😂🤣😅😇😆😄😃😀😁!

Robert O. Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism”

Digital Elixir Robert O. Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism”

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

The word “fascism” has been much in the news of late. Here is a chart of the year 2019 from Google Trends:

Interestingly, usage is more or less flat until the first spike, when President Trump put tanks on the National Mall for July 4, and then a second, larger spike, when he gave his Greenville, NC speech, and the crowd chanted, of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, “send them back.” Omar reacted as follows:

Rep. Ilhan Omar called President Trump "fascist" and said she fears for people who share her identity, after a crowd at his rally led a "Send her back!" chant about the Somali-American congresswoman https://t.co/zpsZ02qtbS pic.twitter.com/06iZXDT7mY

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 18, 2019

Omar is a serious person and that’s a serious charge, so it’s worth looking at. Certainly my left/work corner of the Twittersphere was consumed by the word “fascism,” to the extent that RussiaRussiaRussia was drowned out. Notably, however, the two spikes, and the resulting moral panic, were caused by symbols: Tanks on the mall, and a speech. (Interestingly, words about the border, like “concentration camps,” and “fascism” do not spike simultaneously, even though one might expect them to. We’ll see more about symbols in the Appendices.) However, although fascist deliverables often have excellent symbolism — graphic treatments especially — fascism is about more than symbols, although you might not know it from the ruminations of our symbol-manipulating poltical class.

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a deeper look at the work of Columbia historian Robert O. Paxton, who is a scholar of fascism. Basically, this post will be the notes for the class I wish I had taken with him; Paxton writes as lucidly as another great scholar of fascism, Richard J. Evans, author of The Coming of the Third Reich and two wonderful successor volumes. I’m going to quote great slabs mostly from Paxton’s article “The Five Stages of Fascism” (The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 1. Mar., 1998, pp. 1-23), but also from his later book, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). “Five Stages” is only 24 pages, and easy, so do consider reading it in full, because I’m not really doing it justice; I’m leaving out all the historiography, for example.

And so to Paxton. I’m selecting passages partly when they contain useful ideas I just don’t see in today’s discourse, but mostly to give us tools to assess the current “conjuncture,” as we say.

Fascism and Democracy

From the Five Stages of Fascism, page 3:

The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the beginning in part because it was unexpected. Until the end of the nineteenth century, most political thinkers believed that widening the vote would inevitably benefit democracy and socialism. Friedrich Engels, noting the rapid rise of the socialist vote in Germany and France, was sure that time and numbers were on his side. Writing the preface for a new edition in 1895 of Karl Marx’s Class Struggles in France, he declared that “if it continues in this fashion, we will conquer the major part of the middle classes and the peasantry and will become the decisive power.” It took two generations before the Left understood that fascism is, after all, an authentic mass popular enthusiasm and not merely [1] a clever manipulation of populist emotions by the reactionary Right or [2] by capitalism in crisis.

I think most “hot take” analysis by liberals would fall into the bucket labeled [1]; by the left, label [2]. I think the idea that democracy is, as it were, the host body for fascism deserves some thought. Certainly there was no fascism as such until democracy was well advanced.

Fascism: Made in America?

From the Five Stages of Fascism, page 12:

But it is further back in American history that one comes upon the earliest phenomenon that seems functionally related to fascism: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans by the Radical Reconstructionists in 1867, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders’ eyes, no longer defended their community’s legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group’s destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It is arguable, at least, that fascism (understood functionally) was born in the late 1860s in the American South.

(As an aside: It’s probably coincidence, but Civil War tactics, especially by the time of the Overland Campaign, were also a “remarkable preview” of World War I. Intuitively, I feel that fascism does not take hold of the body politic without a lot of organic damage, whether in the entrenchments of the Civil War, the trenches of World War I, or — just possibly — the opioid crisis, deaths of despair, and falling life expectancy.) Hitler’s American Model shows that Nazi jurists and lawyers came to America to research Jim Crow, and thought very highly of the legislation; they saw Jim Crow as an example of modernity — how advanced the United States was. Of course, by their lights, Jim Crow was misdirected.

Mutability of Fascism

From the Five Stages of Fascism, page 4:

[Individual cases of fascism] differ in space because each national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much greater role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons. They differ in time because of the transformations and accommodations demanded of those movements that seek power.

And page 5:

Fascists deny any legitimacy to universal principles to such a point that they even neglect proselytism. Authentic fascism is not for export. Particular national variants of fascism differ far more profoundly one from another in themes and symbols than do the national variants of the true “isms.” The most conspicuous of these variations, one that leads some to deny the validity of the very concept of generic fascism, concerns the nature of the indispensable enemy: within Mediterranean fascisms, socialists and colonized peoples are more salient enemies than is the Jewry. Drawing their slogans and their symbols from the patriotic repertory of one particular community, fascisms are radically unique in their speech and insignia. They fit badly into any system of universal intellectual principles.

One result of the “Lost Cause” propaganda and the historiography of the Dunning School — William Dunning, ironically enough, professed at Columbia as well — is that the notion that there might already have been an American Fascism (see above) is not available to us. Hence, we often see Nazis (and generally Nazis, not even Mussolini) as the quintessential fascists. The argument can be made that globalization has, in fact, created fascism of export — some in my Twitterverse had no problem believing that Trump was simultaneously a Russian puppet and a fascist — but I just don’t see how that helps fascism to root itself (see below) in any given country, which is a requirement for it to grow.

The Stages of Fascism

From the Five Stages of Fascism, page 11:

But one must compare what is comparable. A regime where fascism exercises power is hardly comparable to a sect of dissident intellectuals. We must distinguish the different stages of fascism in time. It has long been standard to point to the difference between movements and regimes. I believe we can usefully distinguish more stages than that, if we look clearly at the very different sociopolitical processes involved in each stage. I propose to isolate five of them: (1) the initial creation of fascist movements; (2) their rooting as parties in a political system; (3) the acquisition of power; (4) the exercise of power; and, finally, in the longer term, (5) radicalization or entropy.

And stage 2, the importance of parties, pages 12-13:

The second stage—rooting, in which a fascist movement becomes a party capable of acting decisively on the political scene—happens relatively rarely. At this stage, comparison becomes rewarding: one can contrast successes with failures. Success depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies seems to condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner. Some fascist leaders, in their turn, are willing to reposition their movements in alliances with these frightened conservatives, a step that pays handsomely in political power, at the cost of disaffection among some of the early antibourgeois militants.

That underlined portion does seem familar, doesn’t it? However, it’s worth noting that there’s no “seem” to American decline; how is a nation with dropping life expectancy not in decline? It’s also worth noting that “frightened conservatives” doesn’t necessarily equal Republicans; it was not, after all, the Republican Party that painted the anti-semitism target on Ilhan Omar’s back. It’s worth asking, then, whether centrist Democrats would seek a bipartisan alliance against the left.

Fascism Today

Here is Paxton’s first definition of fascism, from the Five Stages of Fascism pages 22-23:

Where is the “fascism minimum” in all this? Has generic fascism evaporated in this analysis? It is by a functional definition of fascism that we can escape from these quandaries. Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline. Its complex tensions (political revolution versus social restoration, order versus aggressive expansionism, mass enthusiasm versus civic submission) are hard to understand solely by reading its propaganda. One must observe it in daily operation….

And his second, from The Anatomy of Fascism, page 218:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim- hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Speaking as an amateur, I think the two definitions map to each other, and both to the present day (“liberal democracy stands accused” v. “abandons democratic liberties,” but I like the second one much better, because the language is crisper, and is testable. For example, “redemptive violence”: During Reconstruction, the states that came under control of the former Slave Power, a process achieved by great violence, were referred to as “redeemed.”

More from the Five Stages of Fascism, page 23:

Can fascism still exist today, in spite of the humiliating defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, the declining availability of the war option in a nuclear age, the seemingly irreversible globalization of the economy, and the triumph of in- dividualistic consumerism? After ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the rise of exclusionary nationalisms in postcommunist Eastern Europe, the “skinhead” phenomenon in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy, and the election of `

Mirko Tremaglia, a veteran of the Republic of Salo, as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Italian Parliament during the Berlusconi government, it would be hard to answer “no” to that question.

The most interesting cases today, however, are not those that imitate the exotic colored-shirt movements of an earlier generation. New functional equivalents of fascism would probably work best, as George Orwell reminded us, clad in the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time. An authentically popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black; in Western Europe, secular and antisemitic, or more probably, these days, anti-Islamic; in Russia and Eastern Europe, religious, antisemitic, and slavophile. We may legitimately conclude, for example, that the skinheads are functional equivalents of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi: only if important elements of the conservative elite begin to cultivate them as weapons against some internal enemy, such as immigrants.

Rather prescient for 1998, I must say. (And much as I loathe black bloc, it may be that they have their place in making these “functional equivalents” less easy to form.) Nevertheless, we do not have a “mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,” Yet. Paxton goes on:

The right questions to ask of today’s neo- or protofascisms are those appropriate for the second and third stages of the fascist cycle. Are they becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene? [TBD] Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities? [Yes] Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge? [TBD] It is by answering those kinds of questions, grounded in a proper historical understanding of the processes at work in past fascisms, and not by checking the color of the shirts or seeking traces of the rhetoric of the national-syndicalist dissidents of the opening of the twentieth century, that we may be able to recognize our own day’s functional equivalents of fascism.

And from Anatomy, page 218:

Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries—not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions,” especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march” on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies” is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power.

Our immune system kills off little cancers all the time; a metastatizing tumor takes a lot of effort to create. Stage One fascisms are little cancers, killed off by a healthy body politic. Stage Two fascisms, without treatment, will metastatize.

Conclusion

I think we’re somewhere in Stage Two: Rooting — or, to be optimistic, Uprooting. I invite the views of readers!

APPENDIX I: “Cosmopolitan”

Stoller tweeted, of a speech by possible Trump 2.0 Josh Hawley:

Liberals are freaking out about these comments, but Hawley is correct. Does anyone doubt Wall Street/Silicon Valley and their weird globalization fetish has harmed the middle class? Beating Hawley is going to require better policy, not better tantrums. https://t.co/yyfbSgBMuK

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) July 18, 2019

Then ensued the most moralizing and banal Twitter discussion I’ve seen in some time, and that’s saying something. Hawley used the word “cosmopolitican” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry here), which Stoller’s detractors felt proved Hawley was sending an anti-semitic dog whistle, and hence Stoller, in defending him, was an anti-semite too. (Paxton: “not by checking the color of the shirts or seeking traces of the rhetoric….”). To show how useless the entire episode was, I’ll quote The Nation’s Jeet Heer:

All politics is based on a division between friend & foe. A left-wing populist-nationalist can make big business the foe. The right-wing nationalist can't because they accept capitalism & are often financed by wealthy, so their foe is the (cough, cough) cosmopolitan

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 20, 2019

Of course, the view that “all politics is based on a division between friend and foe” could be traced right back to Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose doctrine that was, and so Heer could be said to be sending an anti-semitic dog whistle. Of course that’s absurd, because context matters. Our symbol manipulating professional friends in the political class would do far better to look at function instead of checking their Index Expurgatorius of words suitable for censure and calling out. Liberals, and the left, have been calling out “dog whistles” for twenty years, at least. It hasn’t gotten them anywhere. Yet still they do it!

Robert O. Paxton’s “The Five Stages of Fascism”

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(in which I become angry...)

On Thursday evening, I attended a vernissage at the Grassi Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig for The German Dream, an "ethnographic study of the dreams, rituals, and visions of a society in which many of its members are looking for an alternative for Germany." The exhibition, as seen through the eyes of its two curators – a cultural anthropologist and an art historian – attempted to identify “typically German” things that seemed doomed to disappear in the future.

"At the beginning of the 20th century, ethnologists were driven into the world by the fear of the loss of "foreign" societies, which is why they set off to collect objects, languages, and stories from all over the world before the respective communities disappeared under the pressure of colonialism. Before this presumably happens to the Germans as well, we have collected important every day and cult objects of this community and offer here a small insight into the current state of what is often speculative research."

On the whole, I found the exhibition interesting (having translated parts of it into English, I was curious what it looked like). There were elements of it that I particularly liked – for example, a 1972 video of Germany in the year 2000 that portrayed the typical working day of a specific "Herr B, 45 years old, politically independent, and single. For the past five years, he has had a steady girlfriend, and for the past two years an artificial heart that works satisfactorily for him." In the adjacent room, there was a mockup of the "Weisses Ross" (White Horse), a Leipzig bar that, after 143 years, was forced to close its doors to make way for a modern microbrewery (at the Stammtisch, the regulars of the bar had been invited to drink beer and play a final round of cards for the visitors). And in yet in another room, there was an installation titled "Digging for Dreams and Nightmares" – a presentation of how a German archeological team has been deliberately planting time capsules at random locations for future generations to discover.

These were the exhibition's highlights. For the most part, however, The German Dream seemed to focus on the dreariness of conservative middle-brow mentality and consumerism – a life of plastic water bottles, barbecue grills, supermarket checkout counter dividers at Aldi, Märklin model train sets, plastic garden dwarfs, Playmobil figures, and Jack Wolfskin rain parkas (strange, the exhibition failed to display those little waste receptacles found at breakfast tables in German hotels). These odds and ends that we take for granted in everyday life, accompanied by pictures of faceless communities (where, when you step off of the bus, you stare heavenwards and wonder to yourself "Just what the hell am I doing here?") attempted to portray modern German society, on the whole, as ‘castrated’:

“While megalopolises such as Shanghai and Dubai are realizing the belief in progress in concrete and steel, the Germans are forced to put up with the question: What happened to the great projects? While around 1900 the overall fascination for visions of the future was still great, it seems, only 19 years after Expo 2000 in Hanover, that the German mentality of the 21st century remains stuck in provincialism, skepticism, and retro kitsch.”  

That said, the ‘epicenter’ of The German Dream was a room that had been cordoned off by heavy velvet curtains – the "heart of darkness," a space apart from the drab grey of consumerism where "good citizens" dare not go. It was here where the fascinating and yet controversial aspects of German culture could be found. It was here where Lucas Cranach's Eve was offset by, among other things, Schinkel's stage design for the “Queen of the Night” aria in Mozart’s Magic Flute, stills from Reni Riefenstahl's film Olympia, a portrait of Karl Marx's daughter Laura, and a drawing of a wolf in the woods made by the art historian's five-year-old daughter. It was here where Caspar David Friedrich's Cloister Cemetery in the Snow was juxtaposed with portrayals of Albert Speer's Germania (as an "idealized" future) and black and white photographs of drab concrete prefabricated East German housing blocks (as the reality of Socialist utopia). And it was here where, unfortunately, in the middle of it all, Deutschland, Rammstein's latest video, was being played in an endless loop on a video monitor.

In a time where political views seem to be a polarization of extreme political correctness and blatant right-wing populism, Deutschland is a disturbing attempt by Rammstein to address key points of German history: the Crusades, the Reformation, colonialism, National Socialism, and the Cold War – in effect, all of the things that The German Dream didn’t address. And, although I can understand why some regard Rammstein's "message" in the video as a criticism of German history and thus a dissociation of right-wing ideas ("Deutschland, meine Liebe kann ich dir nicht geben" – "Germany, I cannot give you my love"), Rammstein doesn't hesitate to portray the very violence it seems to criticize.

This, in turn, effectively makes Deutschland nothing more than a rape of German history. In an online article about the video, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (Central German Broadcasting, MDR) didn't hesitate to conceal the outrage of many who see Deutschland as an affront to humanity and German culture. According to Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee, the band’s members "rage with their violent fantasies through German history as if inspired, driven by the greed for the most bloodthirsty images and scenes possible, including those of the German concentration camps […] The value of this video as an artistic examination of German history and Germany as a fatherland is far below zero." MDR adds Josef Schuster's opinion to Heubner's thoughts: "Anyone who misuses the Holocaust for marketing purposes acts reprehensibly and immorally."

(Even the title of the video stoops to the lowest common denominator by using the 1934 “Deutschland” typeface, which typesetters, who were brought up with more elegant, humanistic examples of Fraktur from 16th and 17th centuries, ironically referred to as Schaftstiefelgrotesk ("jackboot grotesques"). Oddly enough, Hitler later banned the blackletter typeface in 1941, decreeing that "the so-called Gothic letters were based on Jewish Schwabacher letterforms.")

The message of the video aside, I felt that the overbearing maelstrom of Rammstein's music – its sheer aggressive, overbearing force – pulled the visitor away from being able to focus on the rest of the images in the dimly lit room. It angered me, in part because the visual associations offered were absolutely brilliant – there was so much to discover in the room, and yet, after unsuccessfully trying to draw my attention away from the video, I simply gave up and left, frustrated by the experience.

On my way back home, I started wondering about what this part of the exhibition might have been like if there had been different music. It then hit upon me that in his essay Concert Design. Form Follows Function, Folkert Uhde, the director of Radialsystem V in Berlin, writes about the importance of context in a concert program, citing an experiment he often holds in workshops about concert design:

"I often conduct a small experiment by showing ten very different photographs and playing the same piece of music for each photograph. The reactions are always surprising: depending on the image, which is seen as 'suitable', the music achieves in part an entirely different effect. Sometimes it is even doubted that it was the same recording of the same piece."

With that in mind, I began to ask myself, “What would it have been like the other way around?” How might have the public reacted had this room been presented with a different pieces of music in the background? How might such parallel worlds, which, musically, equally reflect the complex diversity and beauty of Germany's cultural past, affect and alter the visitor’s perception of the images on the wall? Which music would have been best suited? Would the relationship and meaning of the images change according to the musical context - perhaps intensifying the one over the other?

As Folkert Uhde explains: “If the impression is strong enough, it will make an impact. Contextualization can introduce a particular atmosphere, make associations and, above all, create individual personal points of reference for the listener.”

What if, for example, if classical music ranging from Bach's chorale "Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig" or Salomone Rossi's Al naharot Bavel to Richard Wagner's “Im Treibhaus” (from his Wesendonk Lieder) or Anton Webern's Passacaglia for Orchestra, op. 1, had been playing? Or, if popular music were desired, something like Wolf Bierman's Ermutigung, Jupp Schmitz's Wer soll das bezahlen?, or a video of MarieMarie's A Beautiful Life? What associations might have been made through these pieces of music?

Or, if they really wanted to be confrontational, why not a video of the Ernst Thälmann Lied, the unofficial hymn of the German Democratic Republic?

“The most precious thing man possesses is life. It is given only once. And he shall use it so that he may say when he dies, ‘My whole life, my whole power, I have dedicated the most glorious thing in the world, in the struggle for the liberation of mankind.’”

(my translation of the text at the end of the video)

Unfortunately, the opportunity to explore such relationships within the context of The German Dream was simply missed. Actually, that’s putting it lightly – the use of the Rammstein video was, in in my opinion, a display of ignorance. 

Admittedly, it showed the point where we have arrived in society (which, from what I understand, was the justification for using the video), but failing to take the rest of Germany’s rich musical culture into consideration is criminal. Indeed we have come a long way from Martin Luther’s proclamation “Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.” But do we really need to reach for the bottom of the barrel and scrape out ‘music’ that is so vile and does nothing more than glorify the history of violence for commercial purposes? And just because we are too blind to look beyond the horizon? 

I hope not, and yet, when I see Deutschland being used in a serious discourse about German society, I have my doubts.

Last February, a website called Rave News reported that leading vaporwave producers were gathering in Montreal for an emergency summit to discuss "creeping fascism" in the scene. Vaporwave, an electronic subgenre conceived on the web in the early 2010s, is perhaps best described as post-apocalyptic mall music, with producers like Macintosh Plus and Saint Pepsi (now Skylar Spence) warping muzak, smooth jazz, and dated adult contemporary into airless, warbling soundscapes. It was a progressive-leaning genre that seemed to satirize consumer culture. "I always assumed it was transparent through my work that I leaned left," vaporwave pioneer Ramona Xavier, the woman behind Macintosh Plus, told THUMP.

But now, according to Rave News, vaporwave was mysteriously attracting fascists.

The article's comments section was quickly swarmed by neo-Nazis eager to defend their interest in vaporwave. "The National Socialists who lived in the time of Hitler were big fans of Richard Wagner," one wrote. "But in modern times, it is appropriate for us to turn to modern music." There was just one problem: the report, like everything else on Rave News, was fake news. No anti-fascist meeting of vaporwave artists had actually taken place.

"Our souls are wrapped up in these sounds."—Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer founder

The point of The Onion-like satire wasn't clear. But knowingly or not, Rave News had hit on a real trend. On SoundCloud and Bandcamp, self-identified fascist musicians really have appropriated vaporwave, along with synthwave, a genre that nostalgically recapitulates the soundtracks of early video games like Sonic the Hedgehog and 80s movies like Blade Runner and Halloween. Today's fascists have stamped synthwave and vaporwave with a swastika and swirled them together to concoct a new electronic music subculture called fashwave (the "fash" stands for "fascism"), and another related microgenre called Trumpwave. The aesthetic of both might be summed up as Triumph of the Will on a Tron grid.

Fashwave is almost entirely instrumental, and wholly unoriginal. If it weren't for the jarring track titles—"Demographic Decline," "Team White," "Death to Traitors," to cite a few by fashwave artist Xurious—you might not be able to tell the difference between fashwave and the microgenres from which it draws inspiration. Occasionally, though, a track will interrupt its celestial synth atmospherics or arcade-like 8-bit bloops with a sample of Adolf Hitler ranting at a rally, or President Trump's speeches spliced together to make him boom, "The heroes are those who kill Jews!" The effect is a hammy nightmare—think Jane Fonda leading one of her 80s exercise routines at a Nuremberg rally.

Fashwave has become propaganda for the neo-fascist movement known as the "alt-right," a term that originated on America's far-right fringe in the early 2010s. Proponents of the loosely configured movement tend to reject "political correctness," trade, immigration, Islam, feminism, the left, "globalism," and establishment conservatism—which are also more or less the targets of Trump and, after his takeover, much of the Republican Party. Like fascism through the decades, the alt-right is shot through with contradictions; many of its followers disavow racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. But its underlying motive is still that of the fringe from which it sprang: white ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism.

With Trump's election and the spread of far-right parties in Europe, the alt-right is on the ascent. Like its Nazi and Italian fascist forerunners, it wants to infiltrate and remake popular culture. And fashwave—with its sonically inoffensive, largely lyric-free instrumentals—is the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal.

On 4chan's /pol/, the web's unofficial alt-right headquarters, posters talk frankly of fashwave as a "trap to make our ideas seem friendly and approachable," as one user wrote. Another warned that the slogans on fashwave-related art work needed to be softened for wider consumption: "Careful guys, the phrase needs to be oblique and vague, not direct 'GAS THE KIKES' /pol/ memes. Try some subtlety."

"I think it's great that we have our own culture, even if it's small."—alt-right leader Richard Spencer

With its tinny musical quality and tiny scope, however, fashwave is a long way from exuding any real cultural power, and might flame out any day. Until Buzzfeed brought the music into mainstream awareness with an article in December, it was virtually unknown beyond alt-right circles. There are only a handful of major fashwave artists, and they're not headlining any fascist raves or military parades. Instead, they're toiling in the internet's depths, getting a few thousand listens for every track. Leading fashwave producer Cyber Nazi's two biggest hits, "Right Wing Death Squads" and "Galactic Lebensraum," cracked 50,000 YouTube views—respectable, but hardly a cultural Reichstag fire.

Still, the alt-right's gatekeepers have adopted fashwave as the movement's signature sound. Black Sun Radio, an online neo-Nazi station, is saturated with both fashwave and non-fascist synthwave. Andrew Anglin, founder of leading neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, last year christened synthwave the "soundtrack of the alt-right," praising it as "the Whitest music ever [sic]" for its ostensible lack of African rhythmic influence. He posts a recurring feature called "Fashwave Fridays," which includes a synthwave playlist alongside typical synthwave imagery, like 80s women in bright spandex and retro sports cars. "The music is the spirit of the childhoods of millennials," Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer. "Our souls are wrapped up in these sounds."

Over the phone with THUMP, Richard Spencer—president of white nationalist group the National Policy Institute, and widely regarded as the inventor of the term "alt-right"—said he loves fashwave. "Sometimes when I'm doing business, busy-work, I'll just flip on Xurious or Cyber Nazi on SoundCloud or YouTube and just listen to it," the white supremacist writer and publisher, who sports a Third Reich-reminiscent "fashy" haircut, said. "I think it's great that we have our own culture, even if it's small." (Spencer recently became a national meme when he was punched in the face by an anarchist while giving an interview to ABC News, footage of which has been set to different popular songs, including "Sandstorm," and which gave rise to the hashtag #punchanazi.)

Spencer has incorporated fashwave aeshthetics into the alt-right's branding. In November, at a National Policy Institute conference in Washington where Xurious was a musical guest, Spencer unveiled a logo for the movement. Its geometric "A" and "R," cast against a starry sky, looked like letters from an alien language, and over the mic, Spencer said the design was inspired by "synthwave nostalgia."

Fashwave's visuals, circulated on Twitter and 4chan, are just as essential as its music. Typical vaporwave pop-art—such as Windows 95 logos, Japanese characters, and Greco-Roman statues sprinkled on pastel or neon backgrounds—mingles with Nazi iconography, like Hitler in a Hawaiian shirt. At the same time, the neon-lit cityscapes of synthwave visuals are populated with red-eyed cyborg death squads.

In an email to THUMP, Cyber Nazi proclaimed fashwave to be the "direct heir" of Futurism, the 1910s avant-garde art movement that hitched itself to Italian fascism. The Futurists gloried in technological advances such as trains, automobiles, and electric light, as well as the violence of heavy industry and war. Similarly, "We have the internet and computers," Cyber Nazi wrote. Viewed a certain way, fashwave does reflect a kind of present-day Futurist project: a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan and the new Twitter alternative, Gab. In synthwave and vaporwave—genres born, like the alt-right, largely on the internet—the movement has found a natural fit.

Meanwhile, fashwave fans have cast aside punk, folk, and metal—music traditions with long histories of being appropriated as vehicles for far-right ideology—as relics. "It's impossible to build anything with [those] old and expired genres," Cyber Nazi told THUMP. "We are young people who have nothing to do with the skin heads gangs, hoolingans or kkk masons. [sic]" This disavowal, however, doesn't mean fashwave represents a friendlier fascism; in an interview on Right Stuff Radio, Cyber Nazi casually mentioned his hatred of "niggers" and "sand-niggers."

Vaporwave and synthwave aren't the first electronic music genres to be appropriated by fascists, either. In fact, they're just the latest iteration in a long history of co-opted machine-made sounds, one with roots in the early 20th century.

"It's impossible to build anything with old and expired genres"—fashwave producer Cyber Nazi

Back in the 1910s, Futurist thinker Luigi Russolo called for an explosive "art of noises" for the industrial age, and in the 1970s, early industrial and noise musicians consciously rose to the challenge. According to Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music by S. Alexander Reed, pioneers like Spahn Ranch, Nurse with Wound, and Pornotanz aimed to critique society's invisible totalitarianism by conjuring it as violent noise. However, industrial music's nihilistic outlook and martial overtones—including its use of fascist symbolism and regalia for shock value—also attracted neo-Nazi fans. An example of what Reed calls industrial's "often intentional language of ambiguity" can be found in Laibach, a leather-clad Slovenian group whose name refers to the Nazis' term for their occupation of Slovenia. The group has embodied a vaguely Stalinist aesthetic since the 80s so convincingly that North Korea welcomed them to Pyongyang in 2015.

As industrial music was emerging in the 70s, Kraftwerk was busy in Germany laying the groundwork for electronic pop music. The group always insisted that their artistic vision of a dawning cybernetic age was a continuation of the radical modernism of 1920s Weimar Germany rather than a homage to the Nazi era. But Kraftwerk's automaton-like presence recalled soldiers marching in lockstep, and the cover of their 1975 album, Radio-Activity, pictured a Nazi radio set called the Volksempfänger. That tension led Genosavior, one of the scene's artists, to praise Kraftwerk on Twitter as an "Early #FashWave prototype." One alt-right meme even rechristens them "Fashwerk."

https://soundcloud.com/user-625608547/team-white-free-download

Spencer, for his part, says his favorite bands are Depeche Mode and New Order—two groups that are practically synonymous with the 80s, the decade in which the alt-right bigwig grew up. But unlike most other fans, he sees a fascist sheen on the icy synth plains of the New Wave music they pioneered. Upon surface inspection, you can see where he might have gotten the idea. According to a biography of the band, New Order traced its name to a stray phrase from the Situationists, a postwar French art collective of anti-authoritarian Marxists. But "New Order" was also Hitler's term for his program of world domination. The band's earlier iteration, Joy Division, borrowed its name from brothels in the concentration camps, in addition to putting a drawing of a Hitler Youth drummer on the cover of its 1978 debut EP, An Ideal for Living. To the band's dismay, plenty of skinheads misunderstood where the band was coming from, and showed up at Joy Division's concerts.

Over the phone with THUMP, Spencer said he thought New Order and the New Wave bands that took after them "were consciously or unconsciously channeling... something darker, more serious, maybe more authoritarian."

At least with New Order, he's right, although it's complicated. On the one hand, the band was critiquing fascism as a growing menace in a late-70s Britain where imperial decline and industrial decay had radicalized a stagnated white working-class (sound familiar?). On the other hand, as Simon Reynolds recounts in his 2006 history Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, singer Bernard Sumner "enthused about the beauty (the art, architecture, design, even uniforms) that emerged despite 'all that hate and all that dominance.'" Fellow member Peter Hook, writes Reynolds, admitted to the dark allure of flirting with fascist aesthetics. "We thought it was a very, very strong feeling," Hook said.

That guilty fascist charge, so acutely felt by New Order in the 70s and 80s, now flows shamelessly through the alt-right, finding full expression in fashwave.

"By connecting an easily digestible message to the soundtrack of our youth, the alt-right seeks to subvert our critical thinking and directly appeal to our emotional selves."—Stefanie Franciotti AKA Sleep ∞ Over

But fashwave taps into still another lineage in the history of modern music—that of vaporwave's raw material, muzak, which in turn is haunted by the specter of fascism.

In September 1934, the National Fascist Militia Band, an Italian brass band created by Benito Mussolini, entered the New York studios of the newly formed Muzak corporation and recorded one of the first-ever sessions of muzak. There were 25 songs in the set, including an Italian ditty called "March on Rome (Anthem for a Young Fascist)" and America's own "The Star-Spangled Banner." The Muzak corporation piped the National Fascist Militia Band's tunes into hotel lobbies, restaurants, and homes under a sanitized alias: "The Pan-American Brass Band."

The Muzak corporation wasn't a fascist outfit itself, but its use of canned easy-listening music to spur on shoppers and workers had stark martial origins. Its founder, Major General George Owen Squier, was America's chief signal officer during World War I, responsible for the military's communications network. The company's patented "stimulus progression"—playlists calibrated to maintain workers' energy levels and morale through the day—first came into wide commercial use during WWII in armaments factories. According to Elevator Music: A Surreal History, by its heyday in the 1960s and 70s, muzak was everywhere: trickling out of megaphones at a Nixon inauguration, calming cattle in slaughterhouses and astronauts on their way to the moon, keeping missile operators awake and alert in underground nuclear silos. As if winking at the critics who called muzak (a portmanteau of Kodak and music) an instrument of societal control, the Muzak corporation branded itself a "System of Security for the '70s," as well as "The Total Communications System."

By 2009, following the economic crash, the Muzak corporation went bankrupt. (It was eventually bought out, renamed, and revived, and now creates customized playlists of pre-existing songs for store branding.) Around the same time, left-leaning experimental electronic artists like Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro, and Ramona Xavier began plumbing all the bland sonic ambience of capitalism, including muzak and largely forgotten pop and smooth jazz numbers, resulting in what would later be known as vaporwave.

Lopatin, best known for his work as Oneohtrix Point Never, looped and slowed down bits of old pop songs for a 2009 compilation called Eccojams Vol. 1, released under the alias Chuck Person. Ramona Xavier's 2011 album Floral Shoppe distorted 80s pop and old smooth jazz, and her retro net-art aesthetic, presented as kitsch, has a become canonical vaporwave signifier, extended and reinterpreted by later acts like 2 8 1 4 and Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv. James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual, released the same year, assembled cheap MIDI presets, the Skype login sound, and other bits of pointedly contemporary digital detritus into a gratingly cheery faux-muzak orchestra. While the project's absurdly gleeful tone leaves it unclear whether Ferraro's vision of life in the digital age is utopian, dystopian, or neither, that ambiguity and perhaps ambivalence has persisted in the music of the vaporwave scene he helped inspire.

In a 2011 essay that helped define the genre, Adam Harper asked: "Is [vaporwave] a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it?" "Both and neither," he continued. "These musicians can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound."

The development of vaporwave ran parallel to that of synthwave, which emerged in the mid-2000s, rebooting the synthy 80s film scores by composers like John Carpenter, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream. Within the past two years, the semi-ironic nostalgia of synthwave and vaporwave has outgrown its subcultural roots and seeped into the mainstream—a process exemplified by MTV's use of vaporwave in branding, and the popularity of the soundtrack to hit Neflix series Stranger Things, by Austin synthwave group S U R V I V E.

At the same time, fascists have flipped this retromania around, collapsing the ironic distance into a vortex of nostalgia for the worst elements of the Reagan era. According to Spencer, the alt-right's fascination with the 80s stems from looking back on the decade "as halcyon days, as the last days of white America." Fashwave, then, directly links pop culture's generalized 80s nostalgia to the alt-right's racist ideology. The "one connecting factor" of white nationalism, an alt-rightist declared on Twitter, is "a belief in the supremacy of the 1980s. This is the goal."

A vaporwave video by satirical artist Mike Diva

Stefanie Franciotti, who records under the alias Sleep ∞ Over, emerged from the same Austin-based, synthesizer-centric scene as S U R V I V E. She is decidedly anti-fascist, and described fashwave to THUMP as "weaponized nostalgia.

"By connecting an easily digestible message to the soundtrack of our youth," she said, "the alt-right seeks to subvert our critical thinking and directly appeal to our emotional selves."

Today, arguably, the 80s are back, but with a few modifications. The Reagan rictus smile has slumped into a scowl, and the Shining City on a Hill is to be ringed by a great wall. At the center of it all is Trump, a living time-capsule of 80s capitalist excess and garishness, and thus the ideal subject for fashwave. In "Trumpwave," a track by the synthwave artist iamMANOLIS is annexed to play over footage of a younger Trump wrestling at WWE, hitting on women, and eating stuffed-crust for a Pizza Hut commercial. Below the video, a YouTube commenter wrote: "When you see all these older videos it all makes sense. It's not that Trump is weird and we're going towards some parody of a society, it's that we already live in a parody. Trump is bringing back the sanity of the good old days." Another wrote simply: "The Donald is here. I feel the capitalism! <3 "

"Trumpwave" is an exemplar of the genre by the same name. Trumpwave shares an alt-right audience and at least one producer—Cyber Nazi—with fashwave. But the fashwave off-shoot is distinct in appropriating mainly vaporwave, and in its emphasis, through both sampled audio and video clips, on The Donald himself. In Trumpwave, he is recast as the modern-day inheritor of the mythologized 80s, a decade that is taken to stand for racial purity and unleashed capitalism. "Ivanka Vaporwave," a production by an alt-right YouTube channel, slows down the Cosmat Angels' 1985 "I'm Falling" over old clips of Trump's daughter Ivanka modeling as a young teenager. Cyber Nazi's "Take Back Our Future" rolls light muzak over stock footage of early 90s New York on a sunny day and Trump awkwardly dancing on Saturday Night Live.

Trumpwave exploits a vulnerability in vaporwave: its ambivalence about the cultural detritus that inspired it. This careful tension between irony and earnestness was part of what made vaporwave fun—it flirted with the implicit transgressiveness of appreciating its aggressively commercial source material. But that ambiguity left the aesthetic distressingly easy for the alt-right to appropriate by stripping it of irony and playfulness—by taking it literally, as a glorification of capitalism. Similarly, when synthwave artists exhumed 80s movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, and Terminator, they also dressed the music in the decade's fatalist retrofuturism. A glance at the album art of Cyber Nazi—with its jackbooted cyborg cops going door to door—shows how for fascists, this dystopia is utopia. Extrapolating from the 80s, fashwave embraces that decade's grim sci-fi forecasts as paradise.

There's nothing inherently fascist about any sound—everything is context. But the deployment of vaporwave and synthwave by the alt-right proves that fascism has survived the defeat of the Axis, incubating its own culture even as it lost all political power. New Order, Kraftwerk, and many others traced an enduring fascination with fascist aesthetics. Meanwhile, neo-Nazi subcultures thrived in the shadows of genres like industrial, punk, metal, and trance. Fashwave is just the most recent in a long line of fascist appropriations, stretching beyond music: the Nazi swastika is, of course, a literal inversion of a Buddhist symbol. But unlike other genres, fashwave arrives at a time when fascism itself is surging to global power for the first time since the 30s, and both its music and visuals can seem like a premonition of the future. Refracting a nostalgia for the 80s and a love of capitalism through the prism of Trump, fashave projects an image of a looming dystopia, one that grows a little more plausible by the day.

On Internal Struggles: Eliot Ness Versus Jim Malone

As I've said many times on this blog, I write mostly as an avenue to vent.  I vent in order to release the mental pressures of being a self-aware person who treasures truth in a world where superficiality, intellectual laziness, and ignorance have become badges of honor for a lot of folks.  This pressure has been turned up to eleven the past few months to the point where I am having a hard time releasing it fast enough to keep me sane.  One reason for this build up of pressure is because I'm not as busy at work this time of year so I have far too much mental free time.  Another and much more significant reason is the sheer amount of dumbfuckery and bullshit that's been thrown around by conservatives and by far too many on the left.  Dealing with this from just one side is often overwhelming. Dealing with it from two fronts has pushed things, at times, almost to the point of depression.

On top of all of this, I've had to seriously rethink strategies and attitudes about how to think about and deal with certain individuals and groups of people.  How do I think about and treat someone who has been more than willing to stand up and vote for thinks completely antithetical to everything I believe?  How do I think about and treat people and organizations who spent the past eight years lying about, obstructing, and demonizing facts, laws, precedents, history, and President Obama, who are now demanding “unity” and “bipartisanship”?  How do I think about and treat people who spent the past eight years using every negative, derogatory, and racist term around to talk about Michelle Obama and her two girls, who are now demanding no one say a mean thing about Melania or Barron Trump?  How do I think about and treat Republican leaders who met the night of President Obama's first inaugural to lay out a strategy of obstructing and denying anything the new president put forth, even though we were in the midst of a major economic crisis, who now are saying Democrats need to work with them for the good of the country? How do I think about and treat these same Republicans who let a Supreme Court seat go unfilled for almost a year, refused to even hold hearings for the nominee, and made up reasons for doing so out of whole cloth, who are now lecturing Democratic Senators for wanting to see ethics reports on Cabinet nominees before holding hearings? How do I think about and treat so-called progressives who did everything they could to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who are now whining about all the anti-progressive things being proposed by the new administration?  How do I think about and treat these same “progressives” who berated anyone who tried to talk to them about their horrible behaviors and piss-poor strategy, who now are having second thoughts about them?  How do I think about and treat people who are proud of being ignorant and deny basic facts.  How do I think about and treat people who did everything they could to make sure Hillary looked bad and didn't win, who are now demanding we all join forces to resist the Trump administration?

All of these and more keep churning in my head and so far I don't have any good, easy answers.  One reason I'm having such difficulty with all of this is because I've been able to hold and take a theoretical stance about things most of my life.  It is easy to “stay above the fray” when the fray doesn't really impact your life.  Believing progressives should always take the high ground is great in theory, but not very practical against an opponent who cares less about ethics, rules, and standards of behavior.  Believing you should always treat people with respect is great in theory, but not practical against those who refuse to treat you the same.  Believing everyone has reasons for why they do and say what they do is wonderful, but it is a gross mistake to think and treat their reasons as being good and rational.

Part of the problem is my Christian upbringing of “turning the other cheek” and “loving your enemy” is in conflict with the pragmatic side of my nature.  It seems the more progressives “turn their other cheek” the harder they get slapped by conservatives. The more we “love our enemy,” the more our enemy damages and takes away the very things we cherish the most.  At some point, the definition of insanity-”doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result,” has to set in and a lesson needs to be learned.  I feel like part of me is Eliot Ness in “The Untouchables” wanting to do things squeaky clean, by the book, and above board against an enemy who has no guiding rules other than do whatever it takes to win.  Then, there is the other part of me that is Sean Connery's character in the movie, Jim Malone, “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone. Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?”  It's this battle to find a balance between these two sides that is causing me so much trouble. I don't think I'm alone in this struggle.  I see Democratic members of Congress going through this right now in deciding whether or not to do their civic duty to protect and help the American people as best they can or take a firm stand against the new administration by not supporting anything it does even though by doing so they are going against their beliefs about how government should work and their desire to help people.  I understand this internal conflict.  There isn't an easy answer.  Part of the reason it is so difficult is because these are not even close to ordinary circumstances.   I didn't like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush but on some level, they played by the rules.  Even though they had some really horrible ideas and policies, on some level they respected the history, standards, and protocols of running the country.  There was a common understanding and agreement everyone could work from no matter what the disagreements.  This commonality no longer exists. It's been eroded and destroyed intentionally by conservatives over the past twenty-three years.  It started with Newt Gingrich when he became Speaker of the House and adopted an aggressive, anti-cooperation, demonize your opponent at every opportunity approach to governing.  As time passed, conservatives have taken Newt's strategy, modified and amped it up to the point where not only do they run their campaigns on bragging about not cooperating, they have completely destroyed all notions of standards and protocols. They are so wedded to this strategy, they willingly vote against their own bills and abandon their own policy ideas if it looks like Democrats will vote for them.  The Dream Act?  Backed by a lot of Republicans right up to the moment it was supported by President Obama, then it suddenly became horrible policy.  Cap and Trade? Supported by a large number of Republicans until Democrats proposed it.  Health care reform with an individual mandate to help fund it? A Heritage Foundation idea that was implemented by a Republican governor in Massachusetts, that suddenly became a “socialist takeover of the American health care system,” when the Democratic president suggested it.  Raising the debt ceiling?  Never an issue when a Republican is the president but an existential crisis when a Democrat holds office.  Shutting down the government when they don't get their way?  Only been done by Republicans.  Holding up a Supreme Court nominee leaving the Court without being fully staffed?  Never been done in history until last year by the Republican-led Senate. Norms, protocols, standards...none of these things mean anything to today's conservatives.  They are fighting with knifes while progressives have been fighting back with scathing editorials.  They aren't going to change.  In fact, they have been and only gotten worse because they haven't suffered any consequences for their behaviors.  This needs to change.  It's time for progressives to become less Eliot Ness and more Jim Malone. This means progressives need to put aside some of their beliefs and attitudes about “playing fair” and “playing nice.”  This doesn't mean we have to adopt the devoid of ethics strategies of conservatives, but we have to be willing to play hard and mean when necessary.  It is possible to be tough but not lower ourselves to the same level as conservatives.  Of course, this is a very difficult balance to achieve but is necessary if we are going to compete against an opponent who has no regard for the rules.  The same goes for dealing with individuals.  I don't need to resort to name calling or personal attacks when dealing with someone who uses these tactics on me, but I certainly can throw their own “logic,” words, arguments, and strategies back on them.  I can point out their hypocrisies.  I can cram facts down their throat at every turn.  I can hold them accountable for the consequences of their actions and decisions.  If they howl they are not being treated fairly, too fucking bad.  They forfeited the right to judge and bitch about behavior a long time ago.  They need to pay a price.  The best way to make them pay is to vote them out of office.  As long as they are allowed to win elections, they will not only never change, they will only get worse (as we've seen this last election.)  They need to be politically marginalized.  This means voting for the progressive who has the best chance of beating them.   If there is a Republican and a Democrat on the ballot.  Vote for the Democrat even if they aren't the best Democrat.  A bad Democrat is infinitely better than the best Republican right now in American politics.  Every time we allow Republicans to win an election, we are rewarding their bad behaviors. Saying, “both parties are the same” or “there is no difference between the candidates” is nothing more than bringing a knife to a gun fight.  Whenever this happens, we are going to lose and lose badly.

It's time to get away from the theoretical world us progressives love so much and get down to the dirty business of politics.  This doesn't mean we abandon our ideals or what we really want to see happen.  It just means none of those things are even remotely a possibility without having the power to make them happen.  This power is never going to be given to us and we aren't going to get it without a tremendous fight.  Conservative white men have had power for centuries.  They aren't going to cede it without fighting for it tooth and nail.  They have shown how badly and dirty they'll fight to keep it and they haven't even scratched the surface of how low and nasty they'll go.  American fascism is being built and centered on white male dominance.  You don't fight fascists with scathing arguments.  You fight them with necessary and justifiable force.  If they have a march of 400,000 people.  We march with a million.  If they impose voter restrictions that impact 100,000 minorities, we go out and register 250,000.  If they impose Muslim registrations, we all register as Muslim.  If they roll out a heavily armed force against a Black Lives Matters protest, we surround the protesters as a protective buffer.  The one thing we shouldn't do is “turn the other cheek.”  

This brings me to Democrats in Congress.  Initially, it looked like they were going to oppose Trump, especially when it came to his highly unqualified cabinet appointees.  So far, this hasn't happened.  Not even a little bit.  They just voted to for Ben Carson to be head of HUD, Nikki Haley to be the US Ambassador to the U.N., and it doesn't look like they are putting up any resistance to Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State or any other nominee when it comes time to vote. The argument given is Dems want to “pick their battles” with Trump.  What the fuck?  Everything Trump has suggested, every single Executive Order so far, every single nominee has been an all-out war against progressivism and Dems are focused on winning a battle here or there?  The U.S. unemployment has skyrocketed, Muslim refugees have been banned, a wall is being built on the Mexican border, massive voter registration restrictions have been passed, the U.S. has undermined NATO, women's rights have been crushed, a trade war with China was started, ACA was repealed, the social safety nets gutted, massive tax cuts for the rich passed...but Dems stopped Trump from putting somebody on the 7th Circuit Court?  That's the fucking strategy?  I'm being told they are doing this to be “pragmatic.”  I'm a devout pragmatist.  This isn't pragmatic. This is stupid.  And, all the so-called “progressive icons” like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown are willingly playing along with this strategy.  Again, I understand why they are doing this.  They want the government to operate, for norms and standards to have meaning, to not look like they are the reason why people are disillusioned with government.  I get this.  However, their opponent doesn't give a damn about these things.  In fact, their stated goal is to destroy all of these things.  They are playing a different game that doesn't have any rules and they are winning.  You can't defeat them playing a different game with rules.

Conservatives have been waging a war against progressivism for decades.  The Tea Party and Trump are nothing more than the logical outcomes of years of rightwing propaganda and warfare.  Their goal isn't to win a battle against progressivism.  Their goal is to wipe it out.  They now have the political power to deliver a mortal blow.  Now is not the time to be satisfied with winning a battle here or there.  “The environment, minorities, women, the economy...were royally fucked, but we won a minor battle” is not a pragmatic.  This approach isn't even bringing a knife to a gun fight.  It's bringing a month old limp carrot to a gun fight and being proud of your weapon of choice.  Dems are treating things as if they were dealing with normal politics, a normal opponent, a normal administration.  There is nothing normal about Trump, his base or today's conservatives.  They don't play by the rules.  They don't care about standards of conduct.  They don't care about anything other than their ideology.  Viewing and treating the situation differently then this is a huge mistake.  Now is not the time to “turn the other cheek” or “love your enemies” because your enemy doesn't feel remorse, guilt, empathy, sympathy, humanity...that would cause them to stop hitting you.  They are devoid of these traits.  They are sociopathic and will keep hitting you long after the fight has been called and your body is cold and rigid.  If you don't view them for who they are and recognize what they have and will do, they will keep on doing what they do.  

Conservatives have not paid any price at the polls for their horrible behaviors. The main reason why is because Democrats give them cover.  Stop it. Let them own their failures, completely.  Don't vote for a single thing they propose.  You don't need to.  They have the numbers to pass anything they want.  Let them.  But, don't leave your fingerprints on their policies.  If Dems don't vote for a single thing and the country goes bad, they can say it wasn't because of them.  If they take this “win a battle here or there” approach, when things go south, voters will blame them as well as Republicans and Republicans will use this “both sides” to weasel their way out of being held accountable.  The main reasons Democrats took Congress and the White House in the 2008 election was because of the massive failures of the Bush administration.  Trump is going to make Bush look like Lincoln.  Let him fail.  Continually point out how he and the Republicans have failed to deliver on their promises and how their policies have hurt the working class.  But, for God's sake, don't willingly put your fingerprints on the murder weapon.   Somehow, some way progressives need to figure out how to take a high road while fighting dirty.  I know this sound contradictory and maybe it is.  All I know is fighting for what is right by the Marquees of Queensberry Rules against an opponent who doesn't give a fuck about rules isn't working.  No amount of arguing or pleading or understanding is going to convince them to start playing by the rules.  No amount of “reaching across the aisle” is going to stop them from their goal of wiping out progressivism.  Democrats need to come to terms with this and quickly.  I wish it was different.  I wish we could have rational conservations and debates about policy differences.  I wish norms, standards, and protocols mattered to conservatives.  I wish facts and truth were a priority.  I wish half of the country wasn't willing to believe right wing propaganda.  No matter how much I wish these to be true they aren't.  I need to form strategies based on how the world is, not how I wish it was.  I need to be less Eliot Ness and more Jim Malone.  So too do other progressives if we want to preserve the things we believe in.

Women's March and the future of Feminism.

I write this well aware of my hiatus, but I wanted to give myself time to cope with being done with school, deal with being jobless, then later the election and the downward spiral my depression took me in. All this time has given me some clarity and has given me something to write about, other than myself. 

As I'm sure you and the rest of the world are aware, this Friday, January 20, 2017 is the beginning of a new era and one many of us are not only not ready for, but terrified of beginning. With this new start to the new America, we are witnessing an extreme interest or more like concern relating to the politics and what it means for us, all of us. 

I grew up in a very political family. Not sure if its my Cuban heritage, and the history of my “people” or maybe it was just my family but regardless of why, I grew up in a very political family and government and how its run has always been topic of conversation for us, but for whatever reason I feel as though this election has made us all more excited about the election process, and thats saying a lot given that the majority of my family members are “secret” racists (also it seems to be a cuban thing I've noticed) and we've had a black president for the past 8 years (ps. I voted for him twice and I have serious love and admiration for BHO). So to say that this recent election has everyone up in arms is saying, A LOT. 

This election started as crazy vs crazy (Republican party) and the democrat vs. the democratic socialist or the former independent. It was exciting to see the ridiculousness going on at every republican convention and the intelligent banter being held on the democrat side. But after months of pointing fingers, comparing hand size to penis size, email scandals, blood coming out of someones “wherever,” the American people were left with Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump aka the qualified vs. the morally bankrupt tan boy from NYC. Once both parties granted the Donald and Hilary as their parties candidates (conspiracies aside) we saw a completely different campaign being run on both ends of the political spectrum. 

Once Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton were our candidates for president, we saw the most ridiculous as well as truly frightening campaign trail. We saw a man that disrespected women, hispanics, muslims, the disabled as well as the country. We saw Hilary Clinton do her best to prove that she was the better candidate by showing her track record as a politician, let alone woman and mother, meanwhile DT was asking for riots at his rallies, was heard telling his fans to beat up those who disagreed with him all while his atrocities were being showcased on every major news network in the country. Trump liked to mention Clintons email scandal which any sane human knows there was no sensitive information relating to the government in those emails, on top of her husbands past infidelities as if it had anything to do with her. I can continue with the absolute nonsense that was our most recent election but frankly, I'm too tired also this is the age of the internet where everything this man has done is currently flooding the web and once you re-realize all of this, ask yourself again, “how did we let this happen”?

Truth of the matter is, Donald Trump will be sworn in as our countries next president this coming Friday. This Friday, January 20, 2017 we as a country have given the golden ticket to an alt right president just 4 days after we celebrate a national hero, Martin Luther King Jr. It is truly gut wrenching and soul shattering to admit that this will happen and to know that by not tuning in doesn't stop history from happening. The only solace I take in knowing this truly upsetting and disgusting thing will happen this Friday is what is happening the following day, Saturday January 21, 2017. 

Which brings me to the whole point I decided to write to you, the woman's march and the future of feminism. 

On Saturday thousands of women will flood the streets of Washington D.C as well as other major cites across the globe to form a protest, similar to the Lysistrata movement of the early 2000′s. On that day, women and men of all ages will take to the streets to protest in favor of women's rights and against Donald Trump, his presidency and everything that comes with it ( Im looking at you Republican party, you're not exempt from this). On this day, all feminists, regardless of gender, age, creed will march together to prove to not just this incoming administration but the rest of the world that women's rights are human rights and its about time EVERYONE knows it. This Saturday is when all feminists, radical, intersectional, lesbian, religious, etc. feminists will march arm in arm, as sisters for a greater cause and why, because we finally understand that all women and all of our rights are in jeopardy. On this day we set aside this notion that the white feminist suffers more than the black, the gay, the muslim the trans,etc. As women and humans we understand that we all suffer the trials and tribulations that come with being born with a certain mind set, with certain sexual organs and because of this we have decided to stand and march together. 

These next 4 years, whether Trump is impeached or not, are going to be difficult and knowing this we have to admit to ourselves that we are all sisters and one womans struggle is all of our struggle. We cannot allow for color of skin, sexual preference, religion or even the body parts we were born with to separate us in any way. God, science whatever and who ever you give credit for life made you this way because you are strong and capable of everything and because of this we all have to work together. We need to understand that our black sisters chanting “Black Lives Matter,” is a struggle we must not only empathize with but chant along side them. We need to understand that our muslim sisters who are attacked for wearing the religious garb is not something just happening to them, but to you and me and my neighbor etc. Look at life and creation, for a moment at least, as this idea that God who is all around us is similar or (perhaps the same?) as matter, it is always around us and is in us, therefore we are all equal. Neil degrasse Tyson once said and said it best that “The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.” 

If that is not proof enough of how we are all the same and family on this huge time line we call the history of earth, then I am out of words. All I ask is that my fellow feminists realize the importance of standing together in this crazy time. I am hoping that with this march and the ones like it, that when a child looking up the definition to feminism, that the definition isn't followed by smaller categories of the word because feminism isn't enough and it has to be particular to the individual group. I want this child to see one word, one definition and have it look something like this: 

               feminism: the advocacy of all women’s rights on the basis of equality 

Remember, this march isn't just for the white feminists, or the black or the gay, trans, religious, atheist etc. but a march for women, all women. We can't wake up Saturday morning standing together then go about our business after 5pm, because one group of women aren't more or less important than another. After all, we are stardust, each and everyone of us, and just like the stars in the sky shine together, so will we all.  

govenment

General fantasy worldbuilding outline for Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles: Jamais Vu Terre is a tropical island paradise ruled by the tyrannical Queen of the Island, who has been in power since her father's death The government is a monarchy with an elected head of state There are no religions or other forms of belief on the island All citizens must wear uniforms to avoid religious conflict, which has plagued the country before ; (The last time was when there were no uniformed police officers) there have only ever been two major political parties that had any influence on the island One being the "Socialists" led by a man named John Ketchum He ran for president four times and lost each time, until he finally died in office due to old age and infirmity His successor as President was a woman named Dolly McPherson In the time of the democracies of Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles In the time of the democracies of Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles, How could Jamais Vu Terre trade alligator art with Inspiridium Isles This reimagining of Rivers of London ; (formerly to be titled "Semiotic Engineering") as a tropical island story was inspired by the stories of Sophie Masson ; (Peter Pan and The Painting Game titles, being targeted to middle grade readers) and professional work involving visits to my favorite islands; Jamaica, Grand Cayman, Aruba, and Jamaica Villains for books three and four have been planned out, while book one has a basic outline of the major villains' plans How could Jamais Vu Terre trade alligator art with Inspiridium Isles? Jamais Vu Terre relates Inspiridium Isles because those protagonists are the villains of this story The names of the islands is related to Neverland from Peter Pan, because both are insular and monarchical places ruled by jealous, temperamental rulers with delusions of grandeur who hate when people don't obey their rules This series is planned to have three books Jamais Vu Terre relates Inspiridium Isles because those protagonists are the villains of this story Jamais Vu Terre felt that inspiring folks to create popular culture ; (such as music, movies, and video games) was cutting into her power as monarch of the island So she first inspired the characters Bob and Ian from "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" to form a Chucky Aside Out With the help of her first lieutenant in the form of Detective Ennis Deveroux, one of the Ciem creators, Jamais Vu Terre felt that inspiring folks to create popular culture ; making movies about their mischief Starting with a poorly-received slasher flick, "Inspector Stone: Principled Protector" and later inspiring second, third and fourth films in the series Inspiridium Isles responded by This didn't deter KVIT's attacks, but certainly changed what the police were prepared to deal with ; (especially after the Inspector Stone film series became used as inspiration for several school shootings) Inspiridium Isles responded by making movies about their mischief Too many seconds after Jamais Vu Terre knew about Inpiridium's counter-attack, the islands were set to nuke each other Then Bob and Ian decided they didn't want that to happen So they created a cursed video tape that killed the infant daughter of Detective Deveroux Collateral damaged: Unspeakable Too many seconds after Jamais Vu Terre knew about Inpiridium's counter-attack, realized they couldn't win this fight Another unforseen event was the rise of a third island: Despirado, ruled by an elected Despirte Council and Governor Nels Coxley, who rationed out carefully-measured help to both islands, not willing to piss off either side Despirado exists in a delicate balance between trying to trade with eachother profitably without insulting or alienating either side, because survival is more important than politics on an atoll Inspiridium Isles finally Inspiridium Isles finally realized they couldn't win this fight Because of this event the emotions could be summed up best between Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles as "mutual loathing Eventually at deadly stalemate, both sides grudgingly agreed to a truce Due to Despirado's mixed loyalties it was involved in the treaty-signing as a go-between, along with a representative of the smaller businesses on competing islands Because of this event the emotions could be summed up best between Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles as "mutual loathing The trade language between Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles sounded like a death knell to many: English The trade language between Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles sounded like a death knell to many: From Jamais Vu Terre , Inspiridium Isles imported flesh and mined resources: Food, building materials and the vital Adrenochrome that had to be collected by prisoners in "sacrifices" from the local cult of R'lyeh From Inspiridium, Future Islands imported Tech, Medicine, and coveted books Peace reigned but only for a while The story continues in: The Empire of Jamais Vu Terre Inspiridium Isles imported flesh and mined resources: How could the importance of flesh to Jamais Vu Terre when compare the same variety under the control of Inspiridium Isles authorities If The Empire of Inspiridium Isles loses more prisoners to the starved cultists of R'lyeh, they might close the market off once again The Governor-General is in an unenviable position, with no wiggle room for compromise The currency exchange for flesh is handled between Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles by How could the importance of flesh to Jamais Vu Terre when compare the same variety under the control of Inspiridium Isles authorities? transfer of credits over a grand data-grid A regular service that would be hard to pull out of for either parties to do so would cause the stock market in each others states to crash, as one would flood the suddenly booming market while the other would suddenly be helpless to fill the sudden demand with ; (legal) goods It wouldn't take long before one side or the other renegotiated a deal and locked up their credit rating again The currency exchange for flesh is handled between Jamais Vu Terre and Inspiridium Isles by transfer of credits over a grand data-grid on a list, so to speak As Kaltar Krell re-fills his pockets, Bob Gruz's black market can thrive once more Under the guise of minor exports, tools, and weapons cross the border everyday using diplomatic immunity as cover His journey is now concluded, having an audience with the Governor himself to report on the damage done to Despirado business interests by the grand spirited efforts of Inspiridium law enforcement on saving one girl at any cost The person responsible is considered to be The person responsible is considered to be on a list, now Inspiridium Isles settled in there territories in spite for The propaganda, the media coverage of their motives, everything works to their favor Sealing the borders and the food chain once more will created a starvation crisis that the unsupervised rule of Krell won't be able to keep from turning into revolt once again But he has other ideas Inspiridium Isles settled in there territories in spite for now While Jamais Vu Terre won there lands peaceably by the sense of fair play against a hated oppressive power, the average soil of Kipepeo land can't produce enough to break even their order alone The Red Hessians are entrenched and only getting bolder Krell knows this In addition Krell knows they won't stop at blowing up just a shuttle every now and again Working from Jamaica bay to refuel Blackriver, he's already laundered some stories that it was the pirate captain "Blacksail" While Jamais Vu Terre won there lands peaceably by the sense of fair play against a hated oppressive power, For the citizens of Jamais Vu Terre , life has changed little But getting water from public fountains, riding cable-cars and taking the train have never felt so safe--given that it's all been upgraded with shielding and bulkhead technology since the last war But even trade has been roughened by pirates lately attacking cargo ships outright instead of allying with smugglers No roots canever be given to such savage lawlessness lest it infest the rest of citizenry like a plague life has changed little When you compare the past for Inspiridium Isles a historian would record The tensions between government cause the merchants to shake in their expensive boots while spendthrift festivals are something the common man can dream of though never experience A feeling that they need to defend thier homeland, but not really having anything tangible to do so, bureaucracy standing in the way of it all For Despirado another history would record, struggle and discord the factions in this newborn nation fight over petty resources and greed instead of defending its people The tensions between government cause the merchants to shake in their expensive boots while spendthrift festivals are something the common man can dream of though never experience On the borders of Jamais Vu Terre customs inspectors unload crates of new rifles out of a Blackriver transportation ship The fuel refinery continues to operate full-time, as the planet's power demands and use of electronics continues to climb as these technologies spreads throughout now both coasts; west and east On the borders of Jamais Vu Terre customs inspectors unload crates of new rifles out of a Blackriver transportation ship The government of Jamais Vu Terre regulates the cities to ensure border security Any public gathering of 3 or more requires a licensed permit from the Department of Citizen Safety

PowerLine -> The hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center – Antifa “grows as left-wing faction”

Powerline image at HoaxAndChange

powerline at HoaxAndChange.com

Hey Libertards spend you time doing what you talk about, Feed some homeless or something. at HoaxAndCahnge.com

Daily Digest

Statue of Limitations (2)

How to Watch an Eclipse—Or CNN

Report: Bannon to be ousted

Antifa “grows as left-wing faction”

Restatement on comments

Statue of Limitations (2)

Posted: 18 Aug 2017 11:50 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

Further to my comments the other day about the issues emerging from Charlottesville, a few more observations, and interrogatories:

It is understandable that Democrats would be agitating to remove Confederate-honoring statues. After all, it is their history that they need to make go away. You know, things like this:

I won’t vouch for the accuracy of the histogram below (after all, it was produced by a hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center) of when Confederate monuments went up, but the reading given that they went up during the ratcheting up of Jim Crow in the Progressive Era, and then again during the Civil Rights Era, misses that those two eras correspond to the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War, which puts a slightly different cast on things. On the other hand, the Progressives—especially Woodrow Wilson—were deeply racist. (How about this one from Wilson: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” So when is Princeton going to get around to dumping Wilson’s name from its graduate school?)

(Click to embiggen.)

While it is sensible to object to the mindless eradication of history, especially at the instigation of a braying mob, I’m not sure conservatives should be standing in the breach against a set of monuments erected by Democrats. To the contrary, it is tempting to say exactly this: “The time has long been past when we should have removed these Democrat monuments.” In this regard, see David Goldman’s excellent cri de coeur from a couple days ago:

I can accept the idea that Robert E. Lee was a decent man. Decent men fought for causes even more wicked than the Confederacy. Would the Germans erect a monument to Field Marshal Rommel, a professional soldier murdered by Hitler? Of course not. They are left to mourn their dead in private. America had a different sort of dilemma. We fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, including a South that was only sorry that it lost. In the interests of unity we tolerated (and even promoted) the myth of Southern gallantry, the Lost Cause, and all the other baloney that went into D.W. Griffiths’ “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With The Wind.” We allowed the defeated South to console itself with the myth that it fought for “states’ rights” or whatever rather than to preserve a vile system of economic (and sometimes sexual) exploitation. Meanwhile the freed slaves had a very bad century between Appomattox and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Don’t expect them to look with understanding on the supposed symbols of “Southern heritage.”

I thought one of Trump’s better moments in the campaign was when he said to black voters in Detroit, “What have you got to lose?” Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, etc., have been governed by Democrats for decades. How’s that working out for you? Taking down statues is the epitome of cheap grace. (Aside: I see Nancy Pelosi now wants Confederate statues taken down in the U.S. Capitol. Wasn’t she the Speaker of the House for four years? Why didn’t she do it then?

Abe Lincoln on dems and slaves at HoaxAndChange.com

Will anyone in the media ask her this question?)

On the other hand, polls show a majority of American oppose taking down the statues, perhaps out of ignorance about the Confederacy. I’d have preferred to add monuments, starting with Frederick Douglas, rather than removing monuments

But it is easy to see why Steve Bannon is sitting back smiling about all of this. Let the liberals wallow in their identity politics, and let the left revive the violence of the Weather Underground. The Spencerites are a problem that the right needs to deal with, but the agitated left can be relied upon to produce much more public violence than neo-Nazis. Somewhere Richard Nixon is smiling. Antifa helps Republicans. No less a leftist icon than Noam Chomsky agrees:

“As for Antifa, it’s a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were,” Noam Chomsky told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant.”

   How to Watch an Eclipse—Or CNN

Posted: 18 Aug 2017 10:45 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

Power Line’s mobile news production crew is hitting the road today for eastern Oregon to take in the total eclipse Monday morning, and you can look forward to complete coverage here on Monday. (I’ve packed one video camera, two GoPros, two still cameras, and Power Line’s Drone Force One, though I am unclear just how I’ll be able to get the drone to circle the sun during the eclipse.) In the meantime, Remy Munasifi offers a handy guide to watching the eclipse—or CNN:

   Report: Bannon to be ousted

Posted: 18 Aug 2017 10:28 AM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reports:

President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.

The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.

Bannon has been twisting in the wind for some time. News of his ouster will surprise no one.

Bannon didn’t help matters when he granted an interview to left-wing journalist Robert Kuttner of “The American Prospect” in which he seemed to ridicule the idea that the U.S. has a viable military option against North Korea. Bannon stated:

Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

File this one under Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe.

Though my view of Bannon is mixed, I’m sorry to see him go. I think he provided an important counterweight to those with whom he clashed — Gary Cohn, a Democrat, Dina Powell, H.R. McMaster, and Jared Kushner. All of them, in various ways, seek to moderate President Trump on policy matters. Who now will speak up for substantive hard-line conservative and nationalistic positions?

NOTE: Haberman’s article also includes this passage:

A person close to Mr. Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug. 7, to be announced at the start of this week, but the move was delayed after the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Va.

   Antifa “grows as left-wing faction”

Posted: 18 Aug 2017 09:44 AM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

Are the violent Antifa thugs a fringe movement or an increasingly important part of an emerging left-wing coalition? I want to say “fringe movement.”

However, the New York Times reports that Antifa is growing as a left-wing faction. And Mark Lance, a professor of (I kid you not) justice and peace at Georgetown University, says “I’m seeing more concrete productive discussion between anti-fascists and others on the Left these days than ever before in my life.” Lance predicts that Antifa “will become integrated into an emerging coalition that includes Sanders supporters, democratic socialists, dreamers, the Movement for Black Lives, environmentalists, [and] Native American organizers.”

I can’t tell you that the professor of justice and peace is wrong. I think he’s right when it comes to Black Lives Matter.

The New York Times mostly indulges the fiction that the Antifa thugs are merely engaged in protecting cities, towns, and college campuses from hordes of fascists, though it admits that in some cases they have taken on “ordinary supporters of President Trump.” The antifas, of course, see no distinction between fascist hordes and ordinary Trump supporters.

Nor do they see a distinction between someone attending a speech by an extreme right-winger and someone engaged in violence against the left. As one prominent Antifa thug said of those on the other side of the political spectrum, “their existence itself is violent and dangerous, so I don’t think using force or violence to oppose them is unethical.”

Stalin couldn’t have put it better.

We can only hope that the New York Times and the professor of peace and justice are wrong. We can only hope that Stalinists will not be integrated into the emerging left-wing coalition of Sanders supporters, democratic socialists, environmentalists, etc.

   Restatement on comments

Posted: 18 Aug 2017 05:42 AM PDT

(Scott Johnson)

As I have mentioned a time or two before, we seek to maintain a tone appropriate to civil discourse on this site. It is a tone that comes naturally to most of our readers and commenters. I set forth our guidelines for comments, most recently, here.

Posting comments on Power Line is a privilege, not a right. I review comments for abuse and vulgarity. Most of our commenters have no problem speaking in polite company. However, every day I now moderate comments by commenters who are routinely vulgar. Some commenters appear to be incapable of expressing themselves without recourse to words such as “ass” or “asshole” or “dumbass” or “bastard” or “shit” or “bullshit” or “fuck” or “balls” (of the anatomical variety) or the like and their many colorful variants. “Libtard” is not acceptable here. Inserting asterisks or dashes to mask obvious vulgarities doesn’t cut it.

Our departures from the gospel according to President Trump are not to be deemed an occasion on which to abuse the contributors to this site or the site itself, for that matter. Disagreement is welcome. Abuse is not. Commenters who disparage us in personal terms — for example, “Paul, you are an idiot” — will be banned. Commenters who assert that we are “shilling” for some line or other will be banned. If you seek to disparage John or Paul or Steve or me personally, you are free to do so on a site of your own.

Those of you who employ vulgarity or abuse us personally are cordially invited to take your business elsewhere. If you don’t, we will resort to the expedient of banning you from the comments without notice.

   PowerLine -> The hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center – Antifa “grows as left-wing faction” PowerLine -> The hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center - Antifa “grows as left-wing faction”

1.0: Dissecting Dan Harmon’s “10 Minute Long Song” Metaphor

POSTED ORIGINALLY TO FAKEBOOKCASCADIA.TUMBLR

>You walk into a room in which a song has been playing for 8 minutes and everyone in that room tells you that the song sounds pretty well like it is going to end soon. It is on its third chorus, and you seem to hear the beginnings of what sounds like a bridge. Also you are pretty sure it is a pop song.

It is difficult to know where to begin, personally, with “problematizing” a theory postulated by the very man who opened my eyes to the concept of “problematization”-- by all means a sociology jargon. Dan Harmon is misunderstood in much the same way still today as he has always been, for the cult of personality surrounding him. But he is an impressively intellectual protege to both Joseph Campbell and (less notably) Spalding Grey, one of the most original writers in American history. I, like Dan Harmon, would agree that the work of Campbell and Grey might be a bit more worthwhile for fireside chats than say, Stein and Mensch, Ryan and McCain.

We are way way way way past the days when some headline from the frothy tops of the Today Show daily news has the potential to stir up a national conversation about fascism and apartheid. This might have been true in 2015 when Black Lives Matter protests were still attracting sizeable crowds. It is worth talking about that crowds at protests have dwindled. It is worth asking why.

So we dig deeper than the Today Show, into the realm of visionaries-- Camus, Laozi, hell, even Orwell. Zamyatin anybody? Harmon.

I hate to break it to him and to you, but our president half-consciously tweeting jibberish about coffee in the middle of the night really was the ultimate shark jump for this whole charade. But rejoice, because that means that we’re one step closer to taking it off air.

And I want to problematize the problematizer, but that does not make me his adversary. I have a respect for Harmon to the point where I am actually hurt by the arrogance and the ignorance and the anger that spews forth from these people who claim to actually follow him, but hey, that is a whole different story for a whole different day.

I want to dive right into what the point of this whimsical but officially inaugural post for FBC is about: Please refer to the meat of the opening monologue to the free E250 of his Harmontown podcast-- in the absence of actual transcriptions by yours truly all I can say is that it is easy to access and is between the 10 and 30 minute mark.. Recently Dan Harmon has taken on a bit of what we could call a “pro-praxis” position as an anarchist, meaning simply that he is willing to apologize for politicians. I am putting words in his mouth, only not. (paraphrase: ‘I just want to go back to the horrible thing with the two corporations rigging debates;’ ‘politics used to be the enemy but now it is actually the thing that we need to use to work against Trump supporters’-- yes, he was being glib, to an extent.) This represents a shift in ideology, since prior to the 2016 campaign of Trump Dan soundly swore against essentially all things polis, “political,” all things having to do with reptilians in suits doing corruption and greed.  The metaphor he used was, as far as I can tell, “a ten minute long song that you are just entering the room to hear, it is 8 minutes in, and the ‘older’ people are there (here) to say that the ‘song’ is going to end in two minutes because they know the general structure of ten minute long songs throughout history.” “If they tell you the song is about to end, listen to them.” I’m sorry Dan, but first of all, what? Second of all, what? And thirdly, what? Impeachment? Also, as an additional aside... really? Number one is painfully obvious- you just literally said that you haven’t been paying attention to the song these past eight minutes. How ageist is that? What about my 19-year old ass in 2008 getting a call from my best friend who worked for the Obama PAC, 10pm November 8th, listening to a parade of college students screaming on the streets of Bellingham, Washington, while you washed the cheeto dust out of your hair? You said yourself you weren’t listening to the song that whole time, and fifteen years of age under your belt doesn’t amount to a time machine, bruh. I was talking about Elizabeth Warren in 2011. I was lost in Adbusters and Mother Jones and Democracy Now! as a teenager. I debated socialist theory with my friends in middle school. Secondly, and this is crucial, what the hell is a 10-minute long song? “21st Century Splendid Man?” “Roundabout?” Beethoven’s 9th? Good god man, do you actually think that people still listen to that music? No, we are on future shock time, and there is no time for Manheim Steamroller in the life of a real life Millennial. Ever heard of a little band called Charles Bronson? Or a genre called Break-core? To extend your metaphor, we have to examine the actual science of music theory, which operates as so: pop song, like “art music” and traditional folksong, is an abstract form that is and can only be understood by the light of the historical existence of individual works. (so, to go along with point 1, not only would you have had to have been listening to the first 8 minutes of the song, you must also have had to have an actual set of historical data involving songs that last ten minutes with codas near the eight minute mark, which by all means would make you a scholar of little more than, yes, one good King Crimson album and a couple of Yes songs and Beethoven.) Epistemologically we should contend with the idea that there are in fact many 30-second pop songs for every 10-minute pop song**, just like there are 4-year terms for every giant unending empirical world megastate.  **(see: Philip Tagg’s “axiomatic triangle” theory-- this is actually very important to fully understand my argument involving this VERY imperfect extended metaphor.) Third, and there has to be a third because, style: where is this leading? All I am hearing is the exact opposite of what Barack Obama said in 2004 at the DNC, which by all accounts is an evocation of Jeff B. Davis’ post-neoliberal and anti-praxis, nonpartisan stance-- if Democrats want to act like they are saving the world while they secretly wage wars and profit off prisons, they really, really, are not any better than the other side. It seems to me that if Dan Harmon himself is saying to bring in the suits, the alt-right has literally already won. They have detached the anarcho-syndicalist arm entirely from the American left and replaced it with an ersatz. To ask the question was it the Russians, or is Democracy to blame? is the best way to completely fool and bamboozle yourself if you are the sort of person who likes to have faith in the common sense of her neighbor, but I suppose that is the way the tides are turning, so so be it.