America: A Country in Free Fall

Back in December, 2019, many Americans had a false sense of security and stability even through the Trump/Pence regime and the Republican Party were hard at work to create a new Gilded Age with more and more of the nation's wealth concentrating in the 1% - or even 0.1% - of the population,  Unemployment was at a 50 year low yet real wages for the middle class when adjusted for inflation had risen little since 1970. Adding to the mix was Trump's never ending signaling to white supremacists and extreme right Christians (the two groups sadly overlap to a very large degree) the false message that they were being persecuted and needed to "take back America."  Those truly being persecuted were those hated by these angry whites and modern day Pharisees. And sadly, police across the nation continued to kill unarmed blacks even as ridiculous marijuana laws were disproportionately used to criminalize young black males (Virginia belatedly decriminalized possession for personal use just this year).   One could say that America was like the Titanic at 11:30 pm on April 14, 1912 - ten minutes before the iceberg strike - and now the Covid-19 has proved itself to be America's iceberg that is laying bare all of the problems that have simmered for years and which are exploding under the economic stress and racial injustice highlighted again by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  A column in the New York Times looks at America as its underlying problems explode to the surface.   Frighteningly, we have an occupant of the White House and a U.S. Senate majority that will only make matters worse.  Here are column highlights:

The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone. First the pandemic hit and hospitals in New York City were overwhelmed. The national economy froze and unemployment soared; one in four American workers has applied for unemployment benefits since March. Lines of cars stretched for miles at food banks. Heavily armed lockdown protesters demonstrated across the country; in Michigan, they forced the Capitol to close and legislators to cancel their session. Nationwide, at least 100,000 people died of a disease almost no one had heard of last year.

Then, this week, a Minneapolis police officer was filmed kneeling on the neck of a black man named George Floyd. As the life went out of him, Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe, echoing the last words of Eric Garner, whose 2014 death at the hands of New York policemen helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd’s death came only days after three Georgia men were arrested on charges of pursuing and killing a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, whom they saw out running. A prosecutor had initially declined to charge the men on the grounds that their actions were legal under the state’s self-defense laws.

In Minneapolis protesters poured into the streets, where they met a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country’s gun-toting anti-lockdown activists. On Wednesday night, peaceful demonstrations turned into riots, and on Thursday Minnesota’s governor called in the National Guard.

For a moment, it seemed as if the blithe brutality of Floyd’s death might check the worst impulses of the president and his Blue Lives Matter supporters. The authorities were forced to act: All four of the policemen involved were fired, police chiefs across the country condemned them and William Barr’s Justice Department promised a federal investigation that would be a “top priority.”

But on Thursday night, after a county prosecutor said his office was still determining if the four policemen had committed a crime, the uprising in Minneapolis was reignited, and furious people burned a police precinct. (One of the officers was arrested and charged with third-degree murder on Friday.) On Twitter, an addled Trump threatened military violence against those he called “THUGS,” . . . . [Trump] The president later tried to tamp down outrage by saying he was just warning of danger — the Trump campaign has hoped, after all, to peel off some black voters from the Democrats — but his meaning was obvious enough. This is the same president who on Thursday tweeted out a video of a supporter saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

The Trump presidency has been marked by shocking spasms of right-wing violence: the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va., the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the mass shooting targeting Latinos in El Paso. But even as the country has simmered and seethed, there hasn’t been widespread disorder. Now, though, we might be at the start of a long, hot summer of civil unrest.

So many things make America combustible right now: mass unemployment, a pandemic that’s laid bare murderous health and economic inequalities, teenagers with little to do, police violence, right-wingers itching for a second civil war and a president eager to pour gasoline on every fire. “I think we’re indeed in a moment where things are going to get a lot more tense before they get more peaceful,” said the University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson, . . . .

These demonstrations were sparked by specific instances of police violence, but they also take place in a context of widespread health and economic devastation that’s been disproportionately borne by people of color, especially those who are poor. “Sociologists have studied collective behavior, urban unrest for decades, and I think it’s safe to say that the consensus view is that it’s never just about a precipitating incident that resulted in the unrest,” Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences at U.C.L.A., told me. “It’s always a collection of factors that make the situation ripe for collective behavior, unrest and mobilization.”

[F]rustration is likely to build, because the economic ruin from the pandemic is just beginning. In some states, moratoriums on evictions have ended or will soon. The expanded unemployment benefits passed by Congress as part of the CARES Act run out at the end of July. State budgets have been ravaged, and Republicans in Washington have so far refused to come to states’ aid, meaning we’ll likely soon see painful cutbacks in public jobs and services.

But if America feels like a tinderbox at the moment, it’s not just because of pressure coming from the dispossessed. On Wednesday, the journalists Robert Evans and Jason Wilson published a fascinating and disturbing look at the “boogaloo” movement — “an extremely online update of the militia movement” — on the investigative website Bellingcat. “The ‘boogaloo Bois’ expect, even hope, that the warmer weather will bring armed confrontations with law enforcement, and will build momentum towards a new civil war in the United States,” Evans and Wilson write. They add, “In a divided, destabilized post-coronavirus landscape, they could well contribute to widespread violence in the streets of American cities.” . . . . People associated with the subculture had a significant presence at the lockdown protests, but some, motivated by hatred of the police and a love of bedlam, took part in the Minneapolis demonstrations as well.

Most American presidents, faced with such domestic instability, would seek de-escalation. This is one reason civil unrest, for all the damage it can cause to communities where it breaks out, has often led to reform. Change has come, said Thompson, when activists have “created a situation where the people in power actually had to act in order to bring back some meaningful public peace.”

Now, however, we have a president who doesn’t much care about warding off chaos. “In every other time when protest has reached a fever pitch because injustices very much needed to be remedied, the country ultimately tried to find a new equilibrium, tried to address it enough to reach some sort of peace,” said Thompson. “We now have a leadership that’s been crystal clear that it’s perfectly OK if we descend into utter civil war.”

Some of the tropes are familiar, but we haven’t seen this movie before. No one knows how dark things could get, only that, in the Trump era, scenes that seem nightmarish one day come to look almost normal the next.

Be very afraid.

Trump's Grip on the GOP is Causing Republicans to Flee

The Republican Party began its descent into becoming a moral cesspool long before Donald Trump declared he would run for office in 2015. It began with the slow infiltration of the party by Christofascists - perhaps the most racist and morally bankrupt group I've ever encountered - near the end of my time in the GOP and accelerated as white supremacists (often one and the same as the Christofascists) were also made welcome in the party.  Trump merely was the culmination of a moral rot - a cancer, if you will - that had been spreading and metastasizing for years.  Now, the cancer in the form of Trump and his base of support has a complete grip on the GOP.  The result is that, if one has a shred of morality and decency, it is becoming difficult or impossible to remain a Republican.  Those who have remained to date by deluding themselves that the GO still stands for limited government, fiscal and personal responsibility, and personal freedom (something that, in reality is questionable).  Now, the GOP is all Trump, racism, white supremacy and misogyny 27/7.  As a result, record numbers of the Congressional Republicans in the House are heading for the door.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the growing exodus.  Hopefully, Republican "friends" will begin similar soul searching. Here are highlights: 

Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell’s surprise retirement began with a President Trump tweet. 

Moments after Trump’s July 14 missive telling four U.S. congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries of origin, the congressman from Michigan phoned a fellow House GOP leader and asked him to get Trump to stop. “It’s the wrong thing for a leader to say,” he told the leader, whom he declined to name. “It’s politically damaging to the party, to the country.”

Three days later, Mitchell was awaiting a prime-time CNN appearance when he saw footage of Trump rallygoers chanting “send her back,” aimed at one of the congresswomen, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Stunned, Mitchell said he scribbled question marks on a notepad to silently ask an aide: “How do I even respond to this on TV?” 

But one of the final straws was the unwillingness of people in Trump’s orbit to listen. Mitchell implored Vice President Pence, his chief of staff, Marc Short, and “any human being that has any influence in the White House” to arrange a one-on-one conversation between him and the president so he could express his concerns.

It never happened. And 10 days after the Trump tweet, Mitchell — a two-term lawmaker who thought he’d be in Congress for years to come — announced his retirement.
“We’re here for a purpose — and it’s not this petty, childish b------t,” Mitchell, 62, said in an interview in early September. Pence’s office declined to comment.

Mitchell is among a growing list of House Republicans — 18 to date — who have announced plans to resign, retire or run for another office, part of a snowballing exodus that many Republicans fear is imperiling their chances of regaining control of the House in the 2020 elections.

And the problem for the GOP is bigger than retirements. Since Trump’s inauguration, a Washington Post analysis shows, nearly 40 percent of the 241 Republicans who were in office in January 2017 are gone or leaving because of election losses, retirements including former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), and some, such as Mitchell, who are simply quitting in disgust.

The vast turnover is a reminder of just how much Trump has remade the GOP — and of the purge of those who dare to oppose him. Former congressman Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost his June 2018 primary after challenging Trump; he’s now a Republican presidential candidate. Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.), the only Republican to accuse Trump of impeachable acts, quit the GOP in July citing the “partisan death spiral.” His political future is uncertain. The retirement numbers are particularly staggering. All told, 41 House Republicans have left national politics or announced they won’t seek reelection in the nearly three years since Trump took office. That dwarfs the 25 Democrats who retired in the first four years of former president Barack Obama’s tenure — and Republicans privately predict this is only the beginning.

Most of the departing Republicans publicly cite family as the reason for leaving. But behind the scenes, Republicans say the trend highlights a greater pessimism about the direction of the party under Trump — and their ability to win back the House next year. 

[Trump] The president has doubled down on an all-base strategy for his reelection campaign, making some Republicans ask whether Trump has put his own political future ahead of the long-term viability of the party . . . . “If the party doesn’t start looking like America, there will not be a party in America,” said Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), the only black House Republican, who announced his retirement in August.

House Republicans knew Trump was going to be a problem in the suburbs well before they lost 29 incumbents and their majority in the 2018 elections. In a private meeting at Camp David in early 2018, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tried to explain to Trump why the suburbs were key to the GOP keeping the House. 

“He has not been a net positive for suburban House Republicans, I mean, that’s a truism,” said former congressman Ryan Costello (Pa.), a moderate Republican who retired in 2018 rather than face a difficult reelection in the Philadelphia suburbs. “Down ballot, for the Republicans, you are basically judged by whatever [Trump] the president does, and not by what you do.” 

Even in leadership circles, there’s an admission that Trump isn’t helping the party in the suburbs. No one, however, is willing to say it aloud.

The aide said such knowledge has been driving many of the recent retirements: “I think a lot of members are pretty nervous that Trump doesn’t win reelection. And then we’re in the minority and we have a Democrat in the White House. . . . We’re in the wilderness right now, but if you lose the White House, then that is the extreme wilderness.”

“He’s turned [the GOP] into a personal vessel for his brand,” Curbelo said. “[Trump] The president seems to be doubling down on an all-base strategy; perhaps that can work for him . . . but it certainly makes it very difficult for Republicans to win a majority of seats in the House.”

Hurd, a former CIA official who would have faced a difficult reelection in a Democratic-leaning district, has been increasingly vocal about the direction of the party. He told a Republican LGBTQ group in June that the GOP wasn’t expanding in some places because unnamed people weren’t following “real basic things that we should all learn when we’re in kindergarten”: “Don’t be a racist. Don’t be a misogynist, right? Don’t be a homophobe.”

Hurd said in an interview. “It’s women in the suburbs, minorities and young people — those are going to be the key groups and key voters in 2020.”

El Paso Killer Echoed the Words of Conservative "Media Stars"

At work in the kitchen I will walk in and find on occasion that someone has set the TV to Fox News.  I typically turn it off or change thee channel rather that hear the lies and distortions spewing from the like of Laura Ingraham or other "stars" of the conservative media universe. Some of the things said are so outlandish that one has to wonder who believes the crap being said - certainly not the anchors who cannot possibly believe some of the things that are so far from even remotely true. The shooter in El Paso apparently not only listened to the lies but believed them and acted on them.  That's the conclusion in a piece in the New York Times that looks at the shooters "manifesto" and other writings.  Words have consequences, yet the shrills of Fox News and other conservative "news" sites care nothing about the potential for violence they are happily creating.  Just yesterday, the Orlando Sentinel reported as follows:

Richard D. Clayton, 26, of Winter Park, [a white supremacist] was arrested Friday after he posted threats to kill or do bodily harm on Facebook.  According to officials, the investigation began Tuesday after Clayton made a threat on Facebook saying: "3 more days of probation left then I get my AR-15 back. Don't go to Walmart next week." 

People are listening and some will frighteningly act in violent ways. Here are highlights from the Times piece: 

Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”

When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”

A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity.

There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

[H]is post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.

An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions.

“Calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people,” Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle,” said on her show on July 10. Days after the shooting, the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed a connection between words used by the gunman and by President Trump, saying: “If you use the term ‘invasion,’ that’s not anti-Hispanic. It’s a fact.”

In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media, the Times review found.

Sometimes the hosts are repeating [Trump's] the president’s signature phrases. Sometimes [Trump] the president appears to take his cues from television pundits. The cumulative effect is a public dialogue in which denigrating sentiments about immigrants are common.

Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts. The vast majority of those were spoken by Fox News hosts and guests, but some included clips of Mr. Trump using that language at rallies and other public appearances.

“It’s a bit of a vicious cycle,” said the conservative writer William Kristol, a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who has worked at Fox News and other networks. “Something is said on Fox News, and Trump repeats it, and that legitimizes it — and then someone else goes a little further.”

He added, “The use of what once would have been viewed as really extreme and inappropriate and sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes dehumanizing language is really striking.”

The Trump-friendly media world — from outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group and The Drudge Report to platforms like Breitbart News and Gateway Pundit — has used similar incendiary rhetoric. At the start of the El Paso suspect’s screed, he refers to the “great replacement,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on a French book that claims the migration of minority groups can lead to a “genocide” of white culture.

The El Paso suspect, who confessed to the mass shooting last week, claimed in the document he posted to be defending against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The words “invasion” and “invaders” appear six times in the text, a stark parallel to the language heard on conservative television and talk radio today.

Before the El Paso shootings, others with deadly or hateful motives used the same language. 

The man who is alleged to have killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October had expressed his contempt for “invaders” before he opened fire on the congregation with an AR-15-style assault rifle, the authorities say. During the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that left one woman dead, marchers shouted, “You will not replace us.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, a professor at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the shared vocabulary of white nationalists and many prominent conservatives was chilling. “Where that intersects with the Republican Party today,” he added, “is the Republican argument that the Democrats are in favor of immigration because that will give them a permanent majority.”

The overlap between fringe ideology and the words of conservative talk show hosts is not accidental, critics say. “They’re putting that into the zeitgeist,” said Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Fox News, who is now working for a news aggregator aimed at a progressive audience, Front Page Live.

“Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger,” Mr. Cameron added.

Days after the El Paso massacre, Mr. Carlson said on-air that white supremacy was “actually not a real problem in America” and likened it to a “hoax.”

Be very afraid of the seeds these irresponsible shrills and self-promoters are sowing.  

Trump's Warped and Dangerous View of America

Personally, I have never fully bought into the American exceptionalism myth.  Truth be told, throughout history, various nations have viewed themselves as exceptional and special: Great Britain, France, Russia, ancient Rome - the list goes on and on. That said, America has been unique in that its better angels have relied on concepts and ideals that more defined the nation than its ethnic make up or one prevailing culture.  At least until now in the era of Donald Trump and his racist and religious extremist base.  To Trump and his followers, it is all about skin color and one's ancestral origin.  Those of white European ancestry count while everyone else does not. As a prior post noted, evangelical Christians are all on board with this limiting view of who are "real Americans" and "leaders" like James Dobson and Tony Perkins are preaching it to the hapless followers who can only see common humanity in those that look like them and hold the same archaic and exclusionary religious beliefs.  Michael Gerson, a conservative who in my view, like many never Trumpers, was far too slow in condemning the racist trajectory that the Republican Party began to follow years ago now, laments what Trump's view of America means for the country and the future in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are highlights:

The celebration of American independence is supposed to be a unifying national ritual. But we are a country with profound differences over the meaning of nationhood itself.

People in more typical countries — such as Belgium, Japan and Russia — are attached primarily to a unique piece of earth, a unique language, a unique culture and (perhaps) a unique ethnicity. Their celebration of nationhood is the celebration of particularity. One may become a naturalized citizen of such a country, but it is less clear what it means to become Belgian, Japanese or Russian. If possible, it would require total immersion in national distinctiveness.

This is how the current U.S. president appears to view his native land. President Trump’s Fourth of July remarks did make reference to the abstract promises of the Declaration of Independence, but he mainly praised his nation as a place and a power. . . He talked about the nation’s military victories, but not much about the nation’s character. He seems to love America because it is his country and a powerful country, but not because it is a country with a calling.

Contrast this with the national story told by Ronald Reagan or Franklin D. Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy or George W. Bush. American ideals — while growing out of a specific culture — are transcendent and universal. . . . It wins a global competition of ideals because it accords most closely with the durable dreams of humanity for liberty and justice.

This differing emphasis has dramatic implications. If the United States is primarily a normal nation, united by a common culture, then it is diluted by outsiders and weakened by diversity. In this circumstance, cultural differences lead inexorably to conflict and disunity. A nation defined primarily by culture or ethnicity is a fortress to be defended.

“America has never been united by blood or birth or soil,” said George W. Bush in his first inaugural address. “We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American.”

And if our main source of national unity is cultural, then the composition of America’s foreign-born population would matter greatly. According to Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Trump expressed disdain for immigrants from countries such as Haiti and said, “We should have more people from places like Norway.” It is difficult to separate such statements from their racial context. In this view, a national culture largely shaped by white European migrants is better carried forward by white European migrants.

This conception of nationhood can descend quickly into dehumanization. If Hispanic migrants are defined as a threat to national security and national identity, then it becomes easier to separate crying children from their parents. It becomes easier to store migrants in overcrowded, unhealthy conditions. And it becomes easier — following the tragic drowning of a father and daughter trying to cross the Rio Grande — to blame migrants for their own desperation.

A broader definition of American identity does not require the decriminalization of all border crossings, or the abolition of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It does require the construction of a humane asylum system that treats oppressed and frightened people with respect. It forbids the dehumanization or cruel treatment of migrants under any circumstance. And it embodies the generosity of spirit on which American greatness depends.

Trump Has Given a Green Light for Attacks on Gays and Non-Whites

Some of my ancestors on my maternal side arrived in what is now the United States between at least 170 and 220 years ago and I have ancestors who are army veterans in wars from the Civil War, WWI and WWII.  For many blacks in Virginia, their ancestors began their forced immigration here in Hampton, Virginia 400 years ago.   And large swaths of America's Southwest were once part of Mexico.  Yet, in Donald Trump's America, at least in the minds of his bigoted and racist supporters, the only "real Americans" are white, right wing Christian heterosexuals.  And let's not forget Trump's statement that there were some "very fine" people among the white supremacists who terrorized Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.  Now, seemingly even black celebrities need to be fearful in Trump's America as evidenced by the attack on Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the Fox television show “Empire" in Chicago.  This is not OK and should not be "OK" with anyone decent and moral - including Republican "friends." A piece in the New York Times looks at this disturbing incident (not the shouts about "MAGA country"): 

Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the Fox television show “Empire,” was attacked in Chicago early Tuesday morning by two people who yelled racial and homophobic slurs and wrapped a rope around his neck, according to the police, who said they were investigating the incident as “a possible hate crime.”

Smollett, who is black and publicly came out as gay in 2015, was walking on a downtown street when two people approached him and yelled the slurs, according to a statement from the Chicago Police Department. The attackers then began hitting Smollett in the face and poured an “unknown chemical substance” on him.

One of the attackers also wrapped a rope around Smollett’s neck before the duo fled.
“Given the severity of the allegations, we are taking this investigation very seriously and treating it as a possible hate crime,” the police statement said. In a follow-up interview later in the morning, The Sun-Times reported, Smollett told the police that the attackers yelled “this is MAGA country,” a reference to President Trump’s campaign slogan.

The newspaper also reported that the F.B.I. was looking into a letter sent to Fox offices in Chicago last week that contained threatening language toward Smollett and a white powdery substance.

On Tuesday night, the police said in a statement that the area where Smollett said the attack occurred had “very high density of city and private surveillance cameras.” Detectives had viewed hundreds of hours of video but “unfortunately, thus far we have not found any helpful information on a suspect or a suspect’s vehicle to be able to share,” the statement said. The police were widening their search to cameras from surrounding areas.

20th Century Fox Television and Fox Entertainment released a statement on Tuesday expressing outrage at the attack and saying that the “entire studio, network and production stands united in the face of any despicable act of violence and hate.” Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker both wrote on Twitter that the attack was an “attempted modern-day lynching,” and Booker urged the House to take up a bill passed by the Senate that enhances penalties in lynching cases. Hate crimes have been rising in recent years; According to the most recent nationwide data from the F.B.I., they increased 17 percent in 2017 from the year before.

Of the more than 7,100 recorded incidents attributed to prejudice in 2017, roughly 60 percent were caused by biases involving race, ethnicity and ancestry. About 16 percent were attacks on sexual orientation.

Hate crimes are generally underreported. The F.B.I. survey was based on self-reporting from more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies.

If you support Trump/Pence, you support this type of ugly agenda, like it or not.

The GOP is Now the Party of Neo-Confederates

Two things link the campaigns of Corey Stewart in Virginia (which thankfully failed) and that of Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi which will be decided tomorrow: both are neo-Confederates.  In the case of Stewart, he unabashedly wore the neo-Confederate mantle.  A second piece in the Washington Post that dovetails with the previous post looks at the reality of what the Republican Party has become: a party of racists and neo-Confederates.   For my Republican "friends" who have used the myth of the GOP being the party of fiscal responsibility, the 2017 Trump/GOP tax bill that blew a gaping hole in the federal budget, that fig leaf has withered and is gone.  It's time they either flee the GOP or admit to who and what they really are.  Changing the GOP from within is no longer possible. Here are column excerpts:

The far left and far right have long been warning about neocons taking over the Republican Party. Turns out they are right. Only the “neocons” in question aren’t the neoconservatives — a small group of intellectuals, in whose ranks I have often been included, who have espoused a values-based foreign policy and a centrist domestic policy. Many of us have left the GOP in disgust over the rise of Trumpism. The neocons who are now in the ascendancy are the neo-Confederates who have been encouraged to come into the open by President Trump’s unabashed appeals to racist and xenophobic prejudices.

A defining moment in the Trump presidency was the violent rally by tiki-torch-carrying white supremacists in August 2017 to protest plans to take down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville. Three people died, but rather than condemn far-right terrorism, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides,” and he actually sided with the white nationalists in their desire to keep intact the “beautiful statues and monuments” honoring the Confederacy.

It is no surprise, then, that Trump will be in Mississippi on Monday to campaign for Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in her Nov. 27 runoff election against Democratic challenger Mike Espy. Trump calls her “an outstanding person who is strong on the Border, Crime, Military, our great Vets, Healthcare & the 2nd [Amendment].” She also has strong ideas about the War Between the States . . . .

Hyde-Smith’s attachment to the Confederacy makes sense, given her upbringing. The Jackson Free Press reports that she attended a private, all-white “segregation academy” created so white parents would not have to send their students to school with African Americans. A photograph in a 1975 high school yearbook shows her as a cheerleader next to the school mascot, who is dressed as a Confederate general and waving a Confederate battle flag. Hyde-Smith sent her own daughter to another “seg academy.”

In 2014, Hyde-Smith was photographed posing with a Confederate hat and a rifle at the Jefferson Davis homestead in Biloxi. “Mississippi history at its best,” she enthused on Facebook. And just this year, she appeared to joke in a state still scarred by its history of lynching that she would be in the “front row” of a “public hanging” if invited to do so by a supporter.

Hyde-Smith is a neo-Confederate troglodyte and a former Democrat who now feels right at home in the Trump Party. She is hardly alone. The defeated Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia, Corey A. Stewart, pals around with white supremacists, defends the Old Dominion as the state of “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson” and says the Confederate flag “is our heritage, it’s what makes us Virginia, and if you take that away, we lose our identity.” This self-described “proud Southerner” was born and raised in Minnesota, suggesting that his reverence for the Confederacy is rooted in hatred, not “heritage.”

The same can be said of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), the most openly white-supremacist member of Congress. He used to display a Confederate battle flag on his desk, even though 13,000 Iowans died while fighting for the Union.

While few Republicans are as flagrant in supporting white supremacy as King, many others dog-whistle to the same constituency. Gov. Kay Ivey was just elected in Alabama after running a commercial in which she bragged of standing up to “special interests” and people “up in Washington” who want to take down Confederate monuments. She also attacked “out-of-state liberals” for messing with the state’s heritage, echoing segregationist Gov. George Wallace’s 1960s-era complaints about “outside agitators.”

It is hard to remember that Republicans were once the Party of Lincoln. But in the 1960s they sold out their birthright to court Southern voters smarting over desegregation. . . . . with his pandering to white grievances, Trump has abetted the rise of the neo-Confederates.

Seeing Through Republican Deceptions

One of the most disturbing aspects of politics over most of the last two decades is the manner in which working class whites have voted against their own economic interest and supported the Republican Party which offers them noting other than pandering to their prejudices and bigotry.  In short, these voters are played for fools as the GOP pushes policies and tax cuts that favor the wealthy and allow big corporations to cut corners on safety regulations.  With the 2018 midterms upon us, we are seeing past GOP deceptions taken to a whole new level of dishonesty and open racism.  The days of dog whistle messaging are gone and open white supremacists and Christian extremists (the two tend to overlap significantly, in my view) are embraced.  A column in the New York Times by a Nobel Prize winning economist looks at this latest round of GOP lies and deceit.  Here are column excerpts:

Until recently, it looked as if the midterm elections might be defined largely by an argument about health care. Over the past few days, however, the headlines have been dominated instead by hatred — hysteria over a caravan of migrants a thousand miles from the U.S. border, and now the attempted assassination of multiple prominent Democrats.

But whoever sent the bombs and why, the caravan hysteria is no accident: creating a climate of hatred is how Republicans avoid talking about health care. What we’re seeing in this election is a kind of culmination of the strategy the right has been using for decades: distract working-class voters from policies that hurt them by promoting culture war and, above all, racial antagonism.

When it comes to substance, the modern conservative policy agenda, which centers on cutting taxes and tearing up the social safety net, is consistently unpopular. By large margins, voters want to raise, not lower, taxes on corporations and the wealthy. They overwhelmingly oppose cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

So how do Republicans manage to win elections? Partly the answer is that gerrymandering, the Electoral College and other factors have rigged the system in their favor; Republicans have held the White House after three of the past six presidential elections, despite winning the popular vote only once. And they will probably hold the House unless Democrats win by at least 6 percent.One way they have traditionally gotten there is with red-baiting, portraying any and all progressive policies as the next thing to Communism. More than half a century ago, Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. (It didn’t.) A few days ago, the Trump White House issued a report equating Medicare for All with Maoism.

Another key tactic involves lying about both their own positions and those of their opponents. During the administration of George W. Bush, the lies were relatively subtle by current standards, involving things like pretending that tax cuts favoring the rich were actually aimed at the middle class. These days, the lies are utterly shameless.

But lies about policy, while they may confuse some voters, aren’t enough. Hate has always been part of the package.  Let’s not romanticize the past. When Reagan talked about welfare queens driving Cadillacs, or a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy steaks, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Under Trump, however, the strategy of hatred has gone to a whole new level.  For one thing, after decades of cloaking its strategy in euphemisms, the G.O.P. is back to letting racists be racists.

At the same time, the mainstream G.O.P. has gone all in on the kind of conspiracy theorizing — tinged with anti-Semitism — that used to be restricted to the fringe.  And it’s hard to see calling the news media “enemies of the people” as anything other than an incitement to violence.

So will this ramped-up strategy of hate work? It might, in part because those same news media still dance to the haters’ tune. Take the story of the migrant caravan. The right’s hysteria is obviously insincere; it’s clear that it is hyping the story to take attention away from health care and other substantive issues: Never mind pre-existing conditions! Look at those scary brown people!

[I]f this strategy of hate works in the midterms, the right will pursue it even more avidly. Don’t expect anyone involved to experience any pangs of conscience. Indeed, after CNN and several prominent critics received bombs in the mail, Trump blamed … the media.

I have seen the future, and it’s full of menace.

Why White Resentment Defines the GOP, Including in Virginia

Gillespie who has adopted Stewart's white nationalist agenda

When I was active in the Republican Party quite a few years ago I suspect that there were racists and white supremacists in the Party, but no one voiced such views.  Indeed, it would have been considered improper and would have labeled one as unacceptable.  But then the evangelical Christians began to slowly infiltrate and hijack the local city and county committees - they were stupidly voted onto membership by the establishment types who in their hubris thought they could control this unwashed types - and the dog whistle appeals to racism began to multiply.  True, Richard Nixon was the architect of the "Southern Strategy" in 1968, but racism had not become an openly visible staple of the Republican Party.  With the rise of Donald Trump, any reticence about displaying one's bigotry and support for white supremacy seems to have evaporated.  Indeed, more and more GOP candidates are employing it as their main campaign platform.  Here in Virginia, GOP gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart embodied this ideology.  Now, Ed Gillespie has adopted this tactic.   I am not saying that every Republican is a racist, but nowadays that label would seem to apply to the majority of Republicans as a piece in Slate argues: 

Seven months into his presidency, Donald Trump is deeply unpopular. In Gallup’s latest poll of presidential job approval, he’s down to 34 percent, a level unseen by most presidents outside of an economic disaster or foreign policy blunder. In FiveThirtyEight’s adjusted average of all approval polling, he stands at 37 percent. 

And yet, few Republican lawmakers of consequence are willing to buck him or his agenda, in large part because their voters still support the president by huge margins. What we have clearer evidence of now is why. From polling and the behavior of individual politicians, it’s become harder to deny that people support the president not just for being president, but for his core message of white resentment and grievance—the only area where he has been consistent and unyielding.

Nearly 70 percent of Republicans say they agree with Trump on the issues. And 78 percent of Republicans say they approve of the president’s overall job performance. Republicans who have bucked or criticized Trump, like Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, have jeopardized their political futures as a result.

You also see the degree to which white racial resentment is a key force among Republican voters. Most Republicans, remember, agreed with President Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he held both sides—white supremacists and counter-demonstrators—responsible for the chaos that claimed the life of one anti-racist protester.

[A]cross a number of questions gauging racial animus, Republicans generally (and Trump supporters specifically) are most likely to give answers signaling tolerance for racism and racist ideas. Forty-one percent of Republicans, for example, say that whites face more discrimination than blacks and other nonwhite groups (among strong Trump supporters, it’s 45 percent). 

In 2014, Ed Gillespie ran for Senate as a Virginia Republican in the mold of figures like John Warner and Bob McDonnell . . . . Gillespie tried to run that campaign in this year’s Republican primary for governor, and he might have won without trouble if not for the presence of Corey Stewart, an otherwise obscure county official who backed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and challenged Gillespie as a Trump-like figure. Vocally standing in defense of the state’s Confederate monuments, Stewart ran as the candidate of white anger and racial resentment, and he almost won, losing by fewer than 5,000 votes.

Gillespie learned his lesson. In an August ad against his Democratic opponent Ralph Northam, he blasts “sanctuary cities.” In the past month, he’s hired a former Trump campaign aide—Jack Morgan, infamous for his warning that the country is on the brink of a second civil war—and has pledged to defend Confederate statues from local efforts to remove them.

There’s nothing about partisanship that forces a figure like Gillespie to go beyond simple Trump support to embracing the most inflammatory, racially reactionary parts of his appeal. In theory, it should be possible to maintain allegiance to Trump without pantomiming the resentment that fuels his presidency. But this isn’t true in practice. Signaling allegiance to Trump requires embracing white identity politics, because those beliefs reflect the views of many Republican voters.

White identity politics have always been dominant in American life, one of the key forces that shape much of the nation’s political and social landscape. It’s not that Trump is new; it’s that he’s explicit, and in making his open appeal to white identity and its supposed endangerment, he has raised its salience. Before Trump, white resentment was part of Republican politics. In the age of Trump, it increasingly defines it.

Ed Gillespie Panders to White Nationalists, Underscores Unfitness for Office

As predicted shortly after the Virginia GOP primary in June, 2017, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is making a hard play at prostituting himself to white nationalists and racists in the Virginia Republican Party base who voted for Corey Stewart and nearly sent Gillespie to defeat.  The same effort also serves to pander to those in the Virginia GOP base who voted for Der Trumpenführer, an individual who remains highly unpopular in the vote rich urban crescent that extends from the Northern Virginia DC suburbs through Richmond and to Hampton Roads.  The catch 22 for Gillespie is the reality that the more he makes himself the candidate of the white supremacist/Christian right extremists of the GOP base, the more he underscores why he is abhorrent to the vote rich urban crescent and unfit for office.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Gillespie's telling efforts at self-prostitution to what I view as "white trash," Neo-fascists and open racists.  Here are excerpts:

The Post reports:

Ed Gillespie hired a blunt-spoken veteran of Donald Trump’s campaign and sharpened his rhetoric on Confederate monuments in recent days, as the establishment Republican running for Virginia governor seeks to win over Trump voters.

This is as repulsive as it is predictable. The former lobbyist and former adviser to President George W. Bush had already hardened his stance on immigration to keep up with Trump Republicans. Then came his near-loss in the GOP primary to Corey A. Stewart, who beat the drum (with Morgan’s help) on the Confederate statue issue. The politically expedient move, Gillespie seems to have concluded, is to nail down his base and make certain those Stewart voters turn out in November.

Expedient does not mean smart, however. . . . . The notion that he’s really a Corey Stewart Republican — as he tries to campaign on a forward-looking economic agenda — is going to give voters whiplash.

Moreover, Republicans’ problem in Virginia in statewide races is that they are increasingly out of step with the moderate voters, white-collar workers, government employees and minorities who populate Northern Virginia counties. That population now dwarfs GOP strongholds in the southern and western parts of the state. Republican candidates who run up huge deficits in votes in Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and Arlington counties simply cannot make up the votes elsewhere. That’s why McDonnell was the last Republican to win a statewide race.

Now Gillespie is giving those Northern Virginia voters — Republicans included — every reason to run the other way. They do not think of themselves as sons and daughters of the South; they are socially liberal or moderate and fully engaged in the information economy. Gillespie is making himself into a political Neanderthal from their perspective.

No wonder Virginia’s state Democratic Party leaped at the chance to bash Gillespie. Kevin Donohoe, Democratic Party of Virginia spokesman, told me, “For eighteen days, Ed Gillespie has refused to condemn Donald Trump’s shameful reaction to the violence in Charlottesville. Now, Gillespie is proving just how willing he is to pander to Corey Stewart extremists by trying to fundraise off of this issue.” 

This in a nutshell is the story of the GOP in Virginia and the country at large. Too afraid to oppose race-baiters and white-grievance mongers such as Trump, they adopt a “If you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. In doing so, they forfeit their own integrity and make the entire party offensive to everyone else — even to those who might embrace some of their economic positions. If Trump can turn Ed Gillespie into a Confederate flag-waver, then the GOP really has lost any claim to be the Party of Lincoln.

Just as disgusting is GOP Attorney General candidate John Adams who is vitriolically anti-LGBT, a champion of special rights for Christofascists and who has made a career out of representing extremists, the wealthy and large corporations at the expense of average citizens.  Don't be fooled by Adams' feigned moderation or wearing of religion on his sleeve. 

Fascism Comes to America

While there is uncertainty as to whether or not he said it, legend has it that author Sinclair Lewis remarked that “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross.”  Whether or not Lewis actually made the statement, what we are witnessing first under the campaign of Der Trumpenführer and now under his regime aided by Christofascist Mike Pence certainly shows the truth of the statement.  Evangelical Christians and those who claim to be "real Americans" rallied to Trump and remain his most reliable base.  Meanwhile, as happened in Germany in the 1930's too many other citizens are looking the other way as racist self-styled patriots and the falsely pious strike against the constitutional rights of others. Trump has played to the rage of far too many whites over their perceived lost white privilege.  Meanwhile, evangelical Christians have sworn loyalty in exchanges for promises to put them above the law under the guise of "religious liberty" and to make the lives of LGBT Americans - long the Christofascists favorite target for abuse - as hellish as possible.  A column in the New York Times looks at this frightening phenomenon which was highlighted by Trump's pardon of an avowed white supremacist on Friday.  Here are column excerpts: 

As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up when they questioned those charges. Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified.

Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a “concentration camp,” where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.

And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump, who had already suggested that Arpaio was “convicted for doing his job,” pardoned him.

By the way, about “doing his job,” it turns out that Arpaio’s officers were too busy rounding up brown-skinned people and investigating President Barack Obama’s birth certificate to do other things, like investigate cases of sexually abused children. Priorities!

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

Trump’s motives are easy to understand. For one thing, Arpaio, with his racism and authoritarianism, really is his kind of guy. For another, the pardon is a signal to those who might be tempted to make deals with the special investigator as the Russia probe closes in on the White House: Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.

Finally, standing up for white people who keep brown people down pleases Trump’s base, whom he’s going to need more than ever as the scandals creep closer and the big policy wins he promised keep not happening.

What makes it possible for someone like Trump to attain power and hold it is the acquiescence of people, both voters and politicians, who aren’t white supremacists, who sort-of kind-of believe in the rule of law, but are willing to go along with racists and lawbreakers if it seems to serve their interests.

There have been endless reports about the low-education white voters who went overwhelmingly for Trump last November. But he wouldn’t have made it over the top without millions of votes from well-educated Republicans who — despite the media’s orgy of false equivalence or worse (emails!) — had no excuse for not realizing what kind of man he was. For whatever reason, be it political tribalism or the desire for lower taxes, they voted for him anyway.

Given the powers we grant to the president, who in some ways is almost like an elected dictator, giving the office to someone likely to abuse that power invites catastrophe. The only real check comes from Congress, . . . how many of them besides John McCain have offered full-throated denunciations of the Arpaio pardon?

The answer is, very few. . . . . Ryan did better than most of his colleagues, who have said nothing at all.

This bodes ill if, as seems all too likely, the Arpaio pardon is only the beginning: We may well be in the early stages of a constitutional crisis. Does anyone consider it unthinkable that Trump will fire Robert Mueller, and try to shut down investigations into his personal and political links to Russia? Does anyone have confidence that Republicans in Congress will do anything more than express mild disagreement with his actions if he does?

As I said, there’s a word for people who round up members of ethnic minorities and send them to concentration camps, or praise such actions. There’s also a word for people who, out of cowardice or self-interest, go along with such abuses: collaborators. How many such collaborators will there be? I’m afraid we’ll soon find out.

I have no intention of being a collaborator.  I'm not so sure about "friends" who voted for this foul and dangerous individual for reasons I still cannot grasp. Time will tell, but I am not optimistic.  

Arizona Republic: Trump Meant to Empower White Nationalsts

If one traces Donald Trump's history, it soon becomes obvious that the man is a racist and has been one for decades. Be it racial discrimination 40+ years ago in Norfolk, Virginia, his fanning of the birtherism insanity against Barack Obama, or his accusations against young blacks in New York City all of whom were acquitted of any wrong doing, the man has shown himself to be a bigot time and time again.  Hence, his effort to establish a false equivalence between white supremacists and Neo-Nazis as in contrast to those who oppose racism and fascism should come as no surprise.  Now, with his pardon on Joe Arpaio, a man who engaged in brutal civil rights abuses Hispanics, Phoenix's Arizona Republic, a leading Arizona newspaper is calling Trump out for what he is in fact and stating the obvious: Trump is seeking to empower white nationalists and Neo-Nazis.  Here are editorial highlights:

While America was talking about tearing down monuments that offend historically oppressed people, Donald Trump effectively erected yet another one.

His pardon of Joe Arpaio elevated the disgraced former Maricopa County sheriff to monument status among the immigration hardliners and nationalists in Trump’s base.  This erases any doubt about whether Trump meant to empower them after the violence in Charlottesville.

Arpaio is their darling. Arpaio is now back on his pedestal thanks to their president.  This insult wasn’t a surprise. Trump told us it was coming during his rally-the-base speech in Phoenix Tuesday.  But that doesn’t lessen the sting or diminish the significance of Trump’s decision to put Arpaio back on the national stage.

Maricopa County had a bellyful of this showboat sheriff and voted him out of office last year. A federal court found Arpaio in criminal contempt for ignoring a judge's order in a long-running case over racial profiling of Latino motorists.  It was a dose of hard-won justice for a too-flamboyant sheriff who showed little respect for the Constitution as he made national news as an immigration hardliner – and let real crimes go uninvestigated.

Donald Trump’s pardon elevates Arpaio once again to the pantheon of those who see institutional racism as something that made America great. Many will characterize it as a slap to the Latino community – and it is. The vast majority of Latinos in Arizona are not undocumented, yet they all fell under heightened scrutiny as Arpaio honed his image.

The pardon was a slap to those who worked through the judicial system to make Arpaio accountable, too. It robbed the people hurt by his policies of justice – even before a judge could mete out a sentence. The pardon was a sign of pure contempt for every American who believes in justice, human dignity and the rule of law.

Arpaio was riding high in 2010 when then-Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070, a draconian law written to intimidate people. Then Arizona came to its senses. It recognized the dangers of scapegoating – or at least the economic risks of alienating a growing demographic group.

Then came Trump. He resurrected Arpaio’s rhetoric and made a hit on the national stage. He used Arpaio as a warm-up act during campaign rallies and modeled his own speeches on Arpaio’s rambling populist routine.

After Trump was elected, many hoped he would abandon his habit of appealing to the worst instincts of disaffected white Americans who have been left behind by economic changes that had little to do with undocumented immigration.  

Trump spent last week demonstrating that he wants to be president of the few.  By pardoning Arpaio, Trump made it clear that institutional racism is not just OK with him. It is a goal.  That should trouble every American who believes that our duty as a nation is to continue working on behalf of equal justice.

In another piece, the Arizona Republic looks at how the  Arpio pardon threatens the rule of law in America and gives us a preview of how Trump will use the pardon of family members and political cronies to thwart the Russiagate investigation.  What is most disturbing, is that a majority of Republicans support this trashing of the rule of law.  And let's not forget that evangelical Christians remain Trump's most loyal supporters.  Both groups have underscored their moral bankruptcy.