“Laying Priebus’s Plans To Waste”: A Nation of Sociopaths? What The Trump Phenomenon Says About America
The Republican Party has a Donald Trump problem—and that has some Democrats thanking Lady Luck for apparently blowing on their dice. The casino mogul, after all, has thrown the GOP into a disarray even greater than that wrought by the Koch brothers and the Tea Party, dashing the hopes of Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to launch a nominee who could reach out to racial and ethnic minorities, or one who at least would not say terrible things about women.
With his continued antagonism of Spanish-speakers, his incendiary denouncement of the Black Lives Matter movement, and his base comments about actor Rosie O’Donnell and Fox News host Megyn Kelly, as Trump continues to surge in polls of Republican primary voters, he threatens to lay Priebus’s plans to waste.
This is no way to win a general election, the thinking goes. And so in some corners of Democratland, there is happy dancing in the streets.
Trump offers other benefits, as well, to liberals and progressives in the form of the monkey wrench he could throw into the works of Charles and David Koch, who have been positioning their organizational network as the party within the party, replete with resources for candidates who would run on their platform of smashing unions and coddling private capital. Among these resources is a voter data system said to be superior to that of the RNC.
Part of the Koch network of political and policy organizations and entities, the i360 data system is made available to Republican candidates; they in turn use the data collected to construct their campaigns. But then the data stays within the Koch network, allowing the billionaire brothers and their confrères to act as kingmakers within the party at a level beyond the ad-buy and ground-soldier support bestowed by the network’s other entities, such as Americans for Prosperity.
The Trump campaign, through the candidate’s support for socialized medicine and raising taxes on the wealthy, as well as his opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, constitutes a major nose-thumbing at the Kochs. By staying in the race, he denies them the level of control over the 2016 presidential campaign that they surely expected to have.
Beyond the question, though, of whether Trump is good for Democrats lies the question of whether his candidacy is good for America. Some have implied that the response to Trump on the stump—the smoking out of nativists, racists, and misogynists, bringing them to the surface—is indeed a good thing, because it reveals, in no uncertain terms, to whom the Republican Party most appeals. Heck, even avowed white supremacists—not a constituency prone to endorsing candidates of either major party—are professing their love for The Donald.
If I had faith that America would look at those smoked-out varmints in horror, and resolve as a nation to ostracize all who professed such views—and, better yet, enact policies to rectify the vestiges of past oppression and discrimination in our present society—I might be able to buy the “Trump is good for America” argument. But, alas, I am not familiar with an America whose people, as a whole, are willing to do that.
Instead, what Trump is doing, via the media circus of which he has appointed himself ringmaster, is making the articulation of the basest bigotry acceptable in mainstream outlets, amplifying the many oppressive tropes and stereotypes of race and gender that already exist in more than adequate abundance.
For all the ink I’ve just spilled on these two questions, neither is the most important one that should be asked about the Trump candidacy. That would be this one: What is wrong with America that this racist, misogynist, money-cheating clown should be the frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of its two major parties?
Donald Trump is a rich man despite having driven several businesses into the ground, resurrecting himself through the bankruptcy process—meaning that he essentially cheated his creditors out of what they were owed. According to CNN, “no major U.S. company has filed for Chapter 11 more than Trump’s casino empire in the last 30 years.”
In giving Trump, star of The Apprentice—a reality show in which he played an abusive boss whom the audience apparently loves for his frequent utterance of the words, “You’re fired!”—an even greater platform as a potential occupant of the White House, America enables a vicious swindler, holding him up as a figure to emulate.
He’s a boon to the ratings of news programs, both on the networks and on cable channels. It’s not just the wing-nuts who are watching. America just can’t get enough of this guy!
It’s time to put down the mesmerizing kaleidoscope of the Trump media spectacle, and examine the Trump phenomenon through a more penetrating lens. Revealed is America as a deeply troubled, even sociopathic, nation.
But, damn, it’s one heck of a show.
By: Adele M. Stan, The American Prospect, September 9, 2015
“Hundreds Of Thousands Of Bad People”: Fact-Checking Bill O’Reilly’s Dumb, Hateful Lies; Fox News Propaganda Breaks New Ground
When Bill O’Reilly got his start on Fox News, he was charmingly irreverent, a moderating factor on a right-leaning news network; and I liked him for it. I was 14 years old, and would go on, in my teen years, to read one of O’Reilly’s early books, along with Christopher Hitchens’ “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” and eventually Dinesh D’Souza’s “Letters to a Young Conservative” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil.” I was hashing out a political identity into my 20s, and, as this awkward reading list suggests, it was complicated. It’s perhaps a shame that today’s O’Reilly is not complicated.
In the segment where O’Reilly calls Salon a “hate site,” and his program ambushes a handful of San Francisco civil servants, I was struck more by the “talking points memo” working in conjunction with O’Reilly’s monologue than with the breach of decorum or even the comparison of Salon to white-supremacist outlet Stormfront. The real danger of that O’Reilly segment isn’t so much the ambush tactics or the sensationalism as the sloppy thinking O’Reilly performs for his viewers, which gives the appearance of justifying that sensationalism.
For this reason I’ve decided to work through that O’Reilly segment, which Salon’s Scott Eric Kaufman has reported on, paying close attention to those moments when O’Reilly uses both rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies to convey a provocatively hateful message about undocumented immigrants, a message that, ironically, comes a lot closer to hate speech than the simple act of advocating on either a conservative or progressive media outlet like National Review Online or Salon.
O’Reilly kicks off the segment by addressing the “evil” of the coldblooded murder of Kate Steinle before airing a clip of an interview with Steinle’s parents, who speak of the “battle of evil and goodness.” I mentioned Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” above because it’s a powerful critique of Manichaeism, the belief in a dualistic moral struggle of good versus evil. Manichaeism makes it easy to oversimplify conflicts and tragedies by defining actors as pure good and pure evil. This is exactly what O’Reilly will go on to do in his “talking points.” He writes, “Every sane person knows that gunning down a 32-year old woman in the street is an act of pure evil.” The memo goes on: “There are many Americans who will not act to prevent that kind of evil from taking place.”
Here we can see two important rhetorical moves designed to bring audiences to the conclusion that, despite the culpability of the evil man who murdered Steinle, we are to identify that murderous evil both with undocumented immigrants and with people who don’t agree with O’Reilly’s hard-line immigration views. O’Reilly first sets up the scenario as though it’s as simple as good people versus evil people (as opposed to, for example, a more complicated policy nexus of immigration and gun control issues). Then he swiftly aligns “the Americans who will not move to act to prevent that kind of evil from taking place” with the evil itself. In these steps O’Reilly effectively conflates the evil of coldblooded murder with the evil of some Americans who will fail to act on some measure that O’Reilly will assign as a cure for that evil.
What, then, is that measure? O’Reilly begins by blaming the media, which “does not oppose sanctuary cities,” “sanctuary city” being a term with no legal meaning that refers generally to cities that don’t spend city funds and resources to enforce certain federal immigration policies. O’Reilly claims that the “sanctuary city policy” (it’s not a coherent policy at all) “is supported by people who believe that poor illegal immigrants should not be held accountable for violating immigration law,” “folks cloaking themselves in compassion, thinking they’re being humane to the poor who want better lives.” Crucially, however, O’Reilly goes on to re-label these people “hundreds of thousands of bad people.”
Here we can see, again, O’Reilly invoking the Manichaean framework with which he started, only this time, the “evil” one isn’t simply the individual who murdered Kate Steinle, but the “hundreds of thousands” of undocumented immigrants, whom O’Reilly lumps together as “bad people.” This is the point of O’Reilly’s slippage from the evil of murder to the evil of being an undocumented immigrant, to use a negative example of one to stand in for the whole. O’Reilly completes the slippage by claiming that “it is insulting when pro-sanctuary city people equate poor immigrants with violent criminals,” going on to further conflate all undocumented immigrants with violent criminals with one phrase: he calls them “brutal undocumented people.”
From this point, O’Reilly moves onto San Francisco city supervisors, holding them up as an example of the next link in a tenuously constructed chain of evil that begins with a murderer, who, by his undocumented status, becomes a stand-in for all undocumented immigrants, and ends with the civil servants of San Francisco and the broader left, presumably the kind of people who “will not move to act to prevent that kind of evil from taking place.” O’Reilly states unequivocally that Kate Steinle “is dead because of policies that endanger the public,” conflating once again the act of murder with the refusal to support O’Reilly’s specific vision of border security. O’Reilly’s closing judgment is that “it’s a damn shame that all Americans cannot support a policy that would protect people like Kate Steinle … if you saw the heartbreaking interview with her parents last night, how could you not support tough measures against criminal illegal aliens?”
In all of this we should note three tactics of distortion. First, by framing the entire issue of Steinle’s murder as a Manichaean problem of good versus evil, O’Reilly is able to pretend for his viewers that there can only be one problem (lax immigration law), which is itself a manifestation of evil. Both gun control and wider issues of how to distribute limited city funds and resources (O’Reilly isn’t exactly a fan of higher taxes) are as significant factors in this tragedy as immigration law.
Second, O’Reilly’s entire argument relies on the fallacy of composition, which presumes that if something is true of a part of a whole, it must then be true of the whole. This is why, because an undocumented immigrant is alleged to have committed a murder, O’Reilly goes on to call all undocumented immigrants things like “bad people,” “brutal undocumented people,” “violent criminals” and “criminal illegal aliens.”
Third, O’Reilly avails himself of the fallacy of false equivalence in two ways. He equates the culpability for murder with the politically mainstream disagreement between San Francisco city officials and O’Reilly on immigration policy; and he equates sites like Salon and MediaMatters with the self-proclaimed white-supremacist outlet Stormfront, confusing yet again mainstream, partisan media outlets with neo-Nazis. A simple test to reveal the fallaciousness of the comparison would be to ask yourself how long a site like Salon or MediaMatters would exist, drawing articles from prominent policymakers, politicians, artists, academics and journalists, if any of these sites regularly proclaimed white supremacy as its reason for being.
Though it’s a little laborious to go through talking points like O’Reilly’s in this manner, it’s important to reverse-engineer them from time to time to expose what lies at the heart of the machine. In this case we find that the source of hatred isn’t a side of a mainstream political debate about immigration policy, but a desire to paint all undocumented immigrants as murderous villains, “bad people,” “brutal undocumented people” on the side of evil who threaten to put out the white light of America.
By: Aaron R. Hanlon, Salon, July 17, 2015
“Yes, There’s A July 4 Terror Threat From The Right”: I Believe It. But I Bet It’s Not From Muslims
Representative Peter King (R-NY) told us on Wednesday that we need to be afraid, no, very afraid, of Muslims over the July 4th weekend. Why? Well, King, in his typical Muslim fear-mongering style, warned, “Because if there is a threat, if there is gonna be something happening, it’s gonna come from the Muslim community.”
Apparently King only sees a threat by Muslims to America. But while ISIS is a threat, how is he blind to the growing right-wing terror threat we see in this country? I have never seen a more alarming level of “chatter” and acts of terror by people on the right as in the last few weeks.
Here are a few recent examples of what I mean:
1. Calls for violence surrounding gay marriage: After the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that gay couples have the same freedom to marry as the rest of us, Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church called for the stoning death of any pastor who would perform a same-sex marriage. He also called for the murder of all LGBT people, stating, “I hate them with a perfect hatred… I count them mine enemies.”
And keep in mind we have heard other Christian pastors in recent times also call for gays to be “put to death” and make statements like “homosexuality is a death worthy crime.” Can we responsibly dismiss these people as “crazies” until someone actually heeds their call and kills gay Americans?
2. Black churches are burning: At least two of the six black churches that caught fire last week are believed to have been cases of arson.
This threat is so serious that the NAACP issued a warning this week urging black church leaders to take “necessary precautions” to protect themselves from other attacks.
3. Right-wing politicians’ alarming rhetoric could radicalize people: After the Supreme Court recognized same-sex marriage, we heard the shrill cries of victimhood by some conservative politicians. For example, Mike Huckabee remarked that he expects civil disobedience by some Christians in light of the court decision. Let’s be blunt, this is Huckabee’s attempt to inspire civil disobedience. We also heard Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal describe the Court’s ruling as “an all-out assault” against the “rights of Christians.”
The words of political leaders can inspire people to do good and to do bad. We saw that during the civil rights movement, when the inflammatory rhetoric of people like George Wallace validated the views of scared white people that equal rights for blacks was a threat to our nation as well as to them personally. The response to these words, by some, was violence against blacks and even white supporters of the civil rights movement. Similarly, the constant drumbeat we hear today from some conservative politicians that gay marriage is a threat to our nation and an attack on Christianity could possibly incite a person on the far right to violence.
4. We have 784 hate groups on U.S. soil. Per the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), hate groups have grown by 30 percent since 2000. These groups, as the SPLC notes, include the Klan, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, border vigilantes, and others. In fact, the SPLC is so concerned by the threat posed by these homegrown terror groups that last week it sent a letter to congressional leaders urging them to hold “hearings on the threat of domestic terrorism.”
Adding to my concerns is that we just witnessed a terrorist attack on our soil on June 22 in Charleston, South Carolina. And yes, I am aware that the U.S. government has not as of yet classified, and may never classify, this incident as “terrorism” under federal law. (How the assassination of a state senator and the execution of eight black people by a man who wanted to start a race war is not considered terrorism is truly mindboggling.) Putting aside the debate over the T-word, the killer, per his own manifesto was radicalized at least in part by the racist words of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a right-wing hate group per the SPLC.
And keep in mind that domestic terrorists have been killing far more Americans than Islamic-related ones over the past 14 years. As The New York Times reported last week, “since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics, and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.” Dr. Charles Kurzman, a terrorism expert, explained in that article: “Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists.” Consequently, we need to be just as concerned when a person posts images associated with white supremacist causes on Facebook as when a person posts images supporting ISIS.
These facts truly deem the government’s warning of a potential terror attack on U.S. soil that much more credible. Let’s hope they are wrong. But if a terrorist attack is committed by a right-wing actor, we can’t claim there were no warning signs.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, July 3, 2015
“Enlightenment On Confederate Flag Was Long Overdue”: This American Swastika Is Unfit For Human Consumption
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”
That’s an observation widely credited to Winston Churchill, though it’s one he may or may not have ever made. Whoever said it, the truth of the axiom has seldom been more obvious than now, as we watch the fall of the Confederate battle flag. It is too early to say whether this will prove lasting. But the signs certainly point toward a seismic shift.
In South Carolina, where the Confederacy was born, a motion to allow debate on removing the flag from the grounds of the state Capitol passed by a vote of 103-10. Alabama has already removed its flag. Meantime, a number of major retailers, including Amazon, eBay, and Arkansas-based Walmart, have announced they will no longer carry the flag. Perhaps most amazing, Valley Forge Flag, a 133-year-old flag maker in Pennsylvania, has said it will no longer manufacture it.
We appear to be on the verge of a long-overdue national consensus that this American swastika is unfit for human consumption. And to think: All it took was the blood of nine innocent people.
Ever since 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot up Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the ground has been shifting beneath that flag, so beloved of the white, conservative South — especially after images emerged of Roof posing with one. “God help South Carolina if we fail to achieve the goal of removing the flag,” said South Carolina senator and presidential aspirant Lindsey Graham last week. He said this just days after telling CNN the flag was “part of who we are.”
The suddenness of the change in attitude toward that flag is bracing, reminiscent, in an odd way, of when the Berlin Wall fell: Nobody saw it coming — it happened. That said, it is hard to be wholly invested in cheering what is happening here.
Consider: The Confederate battle flag was not somehow made more racist by Roof’s alleged rampage. Notwithstanding claims by Graham and others that it has somehow been misused as a racist symbol by the likes of Roof, the fact is, the thing was used as such from the moment the first thread of the first flag was sewn in support of a treasonous regime that was, to borrow Mississippi’s words, “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”
The flag was certainly understood as racist — that was the whole point — by those who resurrected it to signal massive resistance to the civil rights movement. It is still understood that way; why else is it ubiquitous at white supremacist rallies?
So what happened at Emanuel did not change the flag’s meaning; it only made that meaning harder to ignore. And while its fall is significant, you have to wonder if it really marks a fundamental change in the mind of the white, conservative South. Particularly since you can’t turn around in Dixie without running into some road, bridge, statue, or park honoring some individual who took up arms against the U.S. government in the name of perpetuating slavery — or without meeting someone eager to rationalize that, hiding behind abstracts like “honor” and “duty” to avoid admitting what the Confederacy really was.
The tragedy at Emanuel has forced a moment of clarity into this fog of cognitive dissonance. In days to come, we’ll see just how much that’s worth in terms of real change. Because at some point, the people of the white, conservative South must themselves take responsibility for their own racial education, for facing — and growing from — the truth about their beloved Confederacy.
Consider that it took an act of mass murder before they were willing to reckon honestly with their flag and its meaning. Yes, one is pleased to see that finally come to pass.
But the price of enlightenment seems awfully high.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, June 29, 2015
“The South Shall Not Rise Again”: But, Beware When Right-Wing Manipulators Of Historical Memory Offer Reconciliation
Let’s not get carried away here, friends told me yesterday. A flag is just a symbol. When they stop passing voter-ID laws or start passing gun laws, then I’ll be impressed.
This is a sound view, no doubt about that. But if you don’t think symbols matter, think about how tenaciously people fight to hold on to them. And more than that: In terms of our political culture, the pending removal of the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina’s capitol grounds, and now Mississippi’s state flag—and, don’t forget, from WalMart’s shelves—represents a rare win for North over South since Reconstruction.
This is a history and set of facts that far too few Americans know, and it’s vitally important to understand it in order to grasp the full magnitude of this moment. The South, more than the North, has dominated and defined the limits of America’s political culture for most of the last 140-ish years. The North has the money, the North has Wall Street, and the North runs (most of) our high and popular culture. But the South has run our politics. And this moment that we’re witness to now could be the blessed beginning of the end of all that.
It all started during Reconstruction, when a debate ensued about how the Civil War would be remembered. Our guide through these waters is Yale historian David Blight, whose groundbreaking book Race and Reunion tells this story. He shows masterfully how collectively historical memory is constructed.
According to Blight, there were three competing interpretations of the war. The “emancipationist” one emphasized slavery as the cause of the war and the slaves’ freedom as its great moral accomplishment. The “reconciliationist” view emphasized the common hardships endured by soldiers and citizens who were after all countrymen. There was also a white supremacist version that marginalized the role of slavery as a cause of the conflict (sound familiar?), but the main interpretive battle was between the first two.
It’s a long a complex and quite revolting story about this country we love, and you should read the book. But the gist of it is that in the interest of national reconciliation, the North—where, let’s face it, there was also no shortage of racists in the late 1800s—capitulated to a view of the war with which the South could be comfortable, as a battle that fully and finally unified a country that never really had been.
Gettysburg became organized basically around Pickett’s Charge, the last thrust of the Lost Cause. By the time of Woodrow Wilson—the first Southern-born president since Andrew Johnson had taken over from the slain Lincoln, and a militant segregationist—there was a 50-year commemoration of that battle attended by 50,000 veterans, not one of them black.
Meanwhile, historical memory was morphing into political reality. In Congress, the United States entered the era of the Southern committee barons whose influence on the making of national policy was obscenely out of proportion to either their numbers or the extent to which their views, particularly on race, reflected broader American sentiment. Accruing seniority and working the rules, Southerners (and yes, conservatives, they were all Democrats then; so what?) gained power. By Franklin Roosevelt’s time, of the House’s 10 most important committees, Southerners chaired nine. As for the Senate, all you need to know is this sentence, penned by the journalist William S. White in 1957: “The Senate might be described without too much violence to fact as the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”
The Southerners used that power to one end far above all others: keep black people down. But then, starting in 1958, the Senate began to elect some liberals; and outside the halls of power, which is where change actually happens, a certain young charismatic minister was changing white minds and opening white hearts across the country, even a few in the South.
Next came the only years, roughly 1964 to sometime in the mid-1970s, depending on how you measure it, that the North vanquished the South politically since the Civil War. Many chairmanships changed hands; the racists were defeated and changed political parties; accommodation of the South was no longer something most Northerners and Westerners were interested in.
So that was all good, but that of course doesn’t end our story. The South, through the person of Californian Ronald Reagan, who gave a high-profile speech invoking “states’ rights” in the very town where erstwhile states’ righters had murdered Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in 1964, came roaring back. The Christian Coalition became a force. From 1980 until 2008, the Democrats did manage to win two presidential elections, but only because they put forward an all-Southern ticket that talked more about “family values” than most Democrats would have really preferred, even if they did understand the political reality.
Just as Blight observed a post-Civil War era that saw two world views, one fundamentally progressive and the other fundamentally reactionary, competing to interpret the past and thereby define the future, I argue that we’ve been living through something very similar since 1980. And just like the emancipationists and reconciliationists, we’re stuck in the ’60s: They were quarreling about the 1860s, we about the 1960s. And in our political culture for most of the past 35 years, the modern-day version of the reconciliationists has won.
But now that’s changing. Fortunately, the emancipationists control the culture from New York and Hollywood, and they’ve pushed back on the Southerners hard—this too is a huge change from the old days, when for example television networks were extremely careful not to offend Southern tastes. And so even the Southern Baptist Convention has quieted down about same-sex marriage, even if the Republican candidates haven’t.
But this—this flag business is the first instance I can recall of conservative Republican Southern politicians defying their right-wing base on an issue of first-order emotional importance. It’s important that this isn’t some liberal federal judge ordering the flag removed. It’s Republican politicians doing it. I’m not saying that to pat them on the back—they’re at least a decade late to be getting anything resembling credit as far as I’m concerned. I’m just observing it as telling: When future David Blights write about how the South started losing its hold on America’s political culture in 2015, they’ll write about this moment, the first time their leaders said to them, “Your position is just too morally undignified for me to defend anymore.”
For his part, the actual living David Blight isn’t as hopeful about this as I am. In response to my question, he emailed me yesterday: “This may indeed be a rare moment. But if my work shows anything it might be simply to say beware when right-wing manipulators of historical memory offer reconciliation. They are looking for cover for other and perhaps larger matters.”
He’s correct, of course. This massacre is still about guns and terrorism, and it’s about South Carolina’s voter-ID laws too, on which Clementa Pinckney was one of just two favorable votes in the state Senate. All those fights will continue, with the usual achingly slow progress (if progress at all on guns).
But this is still a big deal. It could usher in a second era of conquest over Southern political hegemony. If that happens, those other fights will be easier to win, eventually, too.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 24, 2015
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