"Trump was always a product of the GOP base. He channeled their most feral instincts in order to gain power. And they matched his own feral instincts. But he didn't create that base. And as he recedes from view we're seeing just how deep the rot is in the Republican party. The GOP isn't just detched from reality. Much of it is opposed to popular sovereignty and democracy while many of its leaders are continuing to pursue dangerous delusions day after day, hour after hour and minute after minute that's getting people killed." - Chris Hayes, on ALL In, Tuesday night.
"You don’t have to be right when you have an army. That base is Trump’s political army, one that is permanently mobilized to serve as an insurance policy against his blunders, vivid flaws and anti-democratic designs. They, too, have become increasingly violent and threatening as Trump’s already negligible reelection hopes have all but collapsed." - William Rivers Pitt, 'Trump’s Backers Are Becoming More Violent. I Fear What Will Happen in January', smirkingchimp.com
The number of Covid infections is now hitting 222,000 a day with records broken for the past two weeks. This as deaths hit over 3,100 yesterday- exceeding those on 9/11. And amidst all of this we have beheld the effects of screaming maniac Trumpies such as in a Boise, Idaho, captured by the video of a district health board Zoon meeting. These and other screwballs have mounted armed protests against health commissions either advocating lockdowns or mask mandates.
And so along with the demented right wing wackjobs who deny Biden's election win we behold an unravelling of the country on the Covid front, with an assault on reason, reality and plain old common sense. What gives? WHO the hell are these nitwits dedicated to division?
It turns out, as Chris Hayes noted on ALL In Wednesday night, that these degenerates protesting masks and lockdowns are overlapped with the zombies protesting "election fraud" with their inane 'Stop the Steal' signs. What happened to fracture this nation into 40 percent who reject reality and the 60 percent who still accept it? One element has been the rise of right wing talk radio as a perpetual grievance machine, e.g.
As I pointed out in that post:
"many white-collar workers - professors, physicians, journalists included - struggle to understand the reach or power of talk radio because they don’t listen to it. Moreover, they don’t know anyone who does because such people would not be members of their socio-economic class. Why? Because only the lower socio-economic classes carry and cultivate grievance - which is basically what all the talk shows are about - to a greater or lesser extent. Just listen to Limbaugh for an hour and you will get an idea of the white grievance in this country. "
This comports with an essay Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an "epistemic" regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, non-theocratic societies, this is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
This ecosystem operates as a reality filter or funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny. “We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch wrote, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
As the sheer volume of knowledge has exploded over the past decades the information age has naturally created a lot more people earning their living working with ideas. These are professional members of the epistemic class, engaged full or part time in the knowledge- acquisition process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status, and has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metropolitan areas.
But while the urban centers have prospered, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling downward: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives. They are full of grievance at the "System" which they often associate with liberal "elites" as well as the Democratic Party. This conflation has had toxic consequences when melded with the grievance-trolling machine of the GOP and right wing media, including FOX.
And it all begins with the paranoid psychotic currently occupying the office of president, but doing nothing on the job. Oh wait, excuse me. He's watching Newsmax, OAN, tweeting, playing golf and filing frivolous lawsuits to try to steal the election. It is Trump who has fed the bottomless grievance well of the white working class, feeding them with conspiracy ideations and bull crap. The latest example of which has been to support a criminal Texas AG named Ken Paxton (visited by the FBI yesterday who served him a subpoena) who's been joined in a lawsuit by 17 other Repuke states to try to overturn the 2020 election and the votes of 81.2 million citizens. See e.g.
The insane Texas brief claims that its citizens are harmed if elections in other states (in this case, MI, WI, PA, and GA) are not "conducted properly." These batshit crazy assholes haven't figured out those 4 states already certified their respective elections under their own state laws and did it by December 8th, “safe harbor day.” As the Michigan AG Dana Nessel put it on ALL In Wednesday night:
"Well, I don't really care for the way Texas ran its elections. I mean it was outrageous they allowed only one drop box for 1.27 million people. But you didn't see Michigan suing the state of Texas. And I can't even imagine what kind of precedent it would set to allow states to sue other states when they don't like the outcome of their elections. And besides why are they only suing based on one part of the ticket. If there was fraud at the top of the ticket why didn't it extend to the other offices which would have been voted on in the same ballot?"
Alas, Ms. Nessel, you are using logic here, which process the crackpot Reeptardos aligned with the criminal Paxton cannot grasp. What we do know is that the hierarchy of the Reeps has actually been so turned into pod people by Trump that they've now convinced most of his cult followers that he won in a "landslide". And further that his mission is out to redress the massive fraud he insists was perpetrated on his miserable ass.
The latest episode sown by Trump, Paxton, Ted Cruz and the other Reeptard evangelists of distrust involved crazies in Trump jackets showing up at Michigan Secretary Of State Jocelyn Benson's home to shout epithets and threats while waving weapons. Benson, described her experience this past weekend:
“As my 4-yearold son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.” As Michelle Goldberg (NY Times) writes:
"So far, what happened to Benson doesn’t appear to be turning into a cultural crisis moment. There’s no frisson of the new, the novel about it. It’s pretty routine for Trumpists to threaten and intimidate people who work in public health and election administration."
So these Trumpist losers were determined to try to get Jocelyn Benson to overturn Michigan's certification of Biden's electoral win and install Trump. Didn't work, as Ms. Benson just called the cops on the refuse and renegades.
What is it that suckered these crazies - including the followers of QAnon - to disrupt this nation with conspiracy ideation hog swill, as they mount threatening protests? (Oh, and sent death threats to medical specialists and Secretaries of State who certified their electoral votes for Biden) Rauch surmises it is exactly that hog swill that engenders acceptable "stories" that bind all the kook communities together - from the virus being a "hoax" (hence no need for lockdowns or masks) to the bunkum that the election was stolen. Paradoxically, then, such conspiracy bunkum has become the most effective community bonding fodder for the kooks and losers in the 21st century US of A.
Rauch conjectures that these lower economic strata folks - those awash in alienation - and for whom everything is spinning out of control, need conspiracy ideations for effective emotional support. This support is amplified when they see their orange MAGA mutt, errr..."savior", spewing such codswallop - which serves to reinforce their Trumpian identity. To lose that identity, say if Trump lost the White House (which he has in this universe) would be "like a personal death, an extinction", according to my psych post doc niece Shayl. This then is also why they are going nuts now and will likely reap actual violence when Biden is inaugurated on January 20th next year, e.g.
by William Rivers Pitt | December 10, 2020 - 6:54am | permalink
Rauch is also convinced (though I'm not) that this supposed "insider" info provides low status, pro -Trump folk a sense of superiority, i.e. : "I possess important information most people do not have". For those who feel powerless, this belief provides agency: "I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals." Which is total nonsense, since if you lack the actual knowledge - say showing climate change is real and devastating the planet- you have zero power to do anything, far less reject experts. All they will do is laugh at your ignorance and presumption to tell them what's what.
Nonetheless, as Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, these misplaced beliefs provide liberation, i.e.: "If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want." Well, that much is true, given that this bunch - bereft of real knowledge or insight - only has death threats and aggressive, in your face protests to bolster its lacking self-esteem.
But leave out all this theorizing for now. Thanks to an SPLC investigation (SPLC Intelligence Report, p. 24) we now have a good idea on whom to lay the blame for the fracturing of the country. That is, apart from Donald Trump and his Repuke enablers- top line members of his personality cult.
We learn that the clue to who's carrying out Dotard's agenda on the ground and spreading relentless lies about the virus as well as voter fraud, are a mix of far right nuts. The SPLC names the Proud Boys near the top, given (p. 25):
"Their lack of overtly racist symbols has given them a level of access to the Republican mainstream as well as a free pass for militant street activism that the Alt-Right can only dream of."
Once the anti-lockdown and then election fraud protests began, the Proud Boys took front and center after "realizing their value". Thus, the Proud Boys didn't organize or create the protests, but managed to exploit them for their own purposes. They are still doing it with the election fraud protests and likely will be near Biden's inauguration event on January 20th, given Trump ordered them to "stand back and stand by." We may mock Trump's lingo but the Proud Boys are taking it seriously and literally.
The SPLC expose also names FOX News as a bad media actor, even as the latest issue of The New Republic notes in its page 8 header: FOX Prepares For War, with subheader: 'How The Network Plans To Use Its Obama Playbook Against Biden'. This is not surprising given as New Republic columnist David Roth observes: "The single imperative of FOX is less to inform viewers than to keep them twitchy enough to sit through all those commercials for catheters and reverse mortgages for the next outrage hit." Adding that viewers (like Trump as well) "do not so much reason through the information they receive as respond to tone."
Therein lies the ability to create Trump cultists and fawning, know-nothing zombies. Deep thinkers need not apply! (You may overthink Tucker Carlson once having posed for a photo with the Proud Boys. ) In terms of the latter, we are reminded by the SPLC piece that FOX "was one of the loudest cheerleaders for aggressive protests". And it also: "promoted the Michiganders against excessive quarantine" Facebook page and its Lansing rally with armed thugs, goons. "
To the extent FOX is aligned with Trump in his endless grievance and mendacity parade, it is part of the problem fracturing this nation - like talk radio. It is then part of what needs to be controlled, else we've likely already lost this nation. If you have a media machine generating 10,000 zombies set against the election system per minute you will not be able to sustain a democracy - or a Republic. Recall here Benjamin Franklin's words when asked what kind of governing system we have: "A Republic, if you can keep it!"
One also must hold to account the mainstream corporo-media in general and the radically different way it treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right - which is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the current crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. I don't demand here the media pundits call this party "Repukes" or "Reeptards" like I do, though I believe it's fully justified (like "traitors"). But the media could at least be less respectful in a general way - by altering its tone toward more contempt.
These GOP misfits then merit every bit of the venom directed at them until the institutional party gets its act together. That includes its minions and pols showing more concern with the national welfare than projecting the party's power by overthrowing democracy. Even to the extent of committing sedition (the words of the Pennsylvania AG responding to the Paxton et al lawsuit) to undermine our electoral system in the service of the traitor Trump.
The announcement last night that 106 Reep House members have joined the Texas lawsuit by the criminal AG Paxton in a "friend of the court" brief is not a good sign. It shows me the Repukes deserve all the opprobrium I've heaped on them, epithets included.
In the words of former GOP strategist and now never-Trumper Steve Schmidt, last night on MSNBC:
"The Republican Party is an organized conspiracy for the purpose of maintaining power for self-interest and the self-interest of its donor class. There is no fidelity to the American ideal or American democracy."
As Lawrence O'Donnell added, "Seldom have so few words explained so much. They explain the hundred and six Republicans defying democracy because they have no fidelity to American democracy. And because they are members of an organized conspiracy for the purpose of maintaining power."
Why take this harsh stand? Because all other efforts - including appeals to sweet reason and civility - have failed. The GOP in its present incarnation is too shameless, treacherous and sycophantic to care. It has become a Trump personality cult with all that implies. In David Roth's words (ibid.): "Using FOX News like a human centipede to generate the furious confusion that powers its politics."
Hence, there’s no point even asking if the GOP can control its right wingnuts. It has no reason to. They are currently fulfilling the GOP's wishes, acting as an anti-democratic extension by spreading the Trumpite mind virus. They also are ready to spread more of the Covid virus. An AP/ NORC Public Interest poll presented yesterday in The Denver Post (p. 8) noted "50 % of Americans plan to not get the vaccine, and 43 % believe if they do they will be infected by the virus." This is a maddening stat but shows again the damage Trump and his GOP cohort have done by abdicating their responsibility to deal with Covid from day one.
Democrats will have to face the nasty fact they will be at war with the Repukes and their minions until the latter are broken of their addiction to Trumpism and the paralyzing fear of its deranged, brainwashed base. Until then, madness and unreason will reign in this country - as the Trump mind virus rages along with the physical virus of Covid.
Think of it like a patient confronting a malignant cancer, say like cancer of the liver or pancreas. And even after the primary cancer has been removed, there are still the secondaries to contend with. Say if the cancer has metastasized to other parts of the body, in this case the body politic. In this sense, Steve Schmidt may well be correct when he averred last night we may only have until the next election when our democracy is gone. Already those 106 House Repukes who signed onto the TX lawsuit have demonstrated they're no different from the Nazis who backed the Enabling Act- which destroyed the Weimar Republic. Think about that.
The names of all the Nazi Reep traitor rats can be found in the WaPo piece below:
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