Trump Will Rule By Threats and Intimidation

As Adolph Hitler rose to power, many conservative politicians and wealthy industrialist thought that they would be able to control Hitler and moderate his extremism.  History, of course, showed that these individuals were hubris filled fools.  A similar hubris has been on display among many Republicans, especially those like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, who throughout the GOP primary and presidential campaign have smugly thought that they could rein in Donald Trump.  Now, with Trump maintaining his own security forces - hired mercenaries, if you will - unlike any previous president or president elect and his clear intent to threaten and intimidate Republicans who oppose him, it is quickly becoming apparent that these members of the GOP are just as stupid as their German counterparts from over eight decades ago.  In some ways, it will be delicious to watch these Republicans be crushed by Trump.  The draw back, of course, is that such defeats will only increase Trump's authoritarian rule.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the nightmare Republicans have brought onto themselves and the nation.  Here are highlights:

Back when Republicans were fretting about Donald Trump’s ideological inconsistencies and lack of devotion to conservative orthodoxy, one might have predicted that if he became president there would be constant tension within the Republican world, as everyone sought to shape administration policy and maximize his or her own influence.

That looks to be true — just not quite in the way we thought it would be. Instead of conservatives outside the administration pressuring Trump to adhere to conservative principles, we may see a situation where the pressure moves in a different direction, enforcing unanimity behind Trump’s agenda, whatever it may turn out to be. Rachael Bade reports today that there’s already a system being constructed to punish anyone on the right who questions Trump:

Since the election, numerous congressional Republicans have refused to publicly weigh in on any Trump proposal at odds with Republican orthodoxy, from his border wall to his massive infrastructure package. The most common reason, stated repeatedly but always privately: They’re afraid of being attacked by Breitbart or other big-name Trump supporters. . . . . An editor at Breitbart, formerly run by senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon, said that fear is well-founded.

Bade tells an interesting story about one Republican congressman who made some mild comments about how there might at some point be areas of disagreement between Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill. He was skewered in Breitbart, then Sean Hannity — who has made himself into Trump’s Renfield — took up the criticism, and in short order the congressman was deluged with threats and abuse.

It’s awfully handy that the administration has Breitbart at its disposal, an influential (at least within the right) media outlet that can not only echo the White House line but also target dissenters for retaliation, supported by an army of online enforcers standing ready to take anyone who strays and make his or her life miserable.

What we’re seeing so far is a conservative movement that, whatever its prior feelings, is now utterly devoted to the greater glory of Trump. And the message is going out that anyone who objects is going to regret it. This is something conservatives have practice at — after all, the tea party movement spent a great deal of its time punishing those who showed any signs of insufficient devotion to the cause and maintaining unanimity through fear.

[N]ow, no matter what they thought before, members of the right are coming together around the idea that their goals demand unswerving loyalty to Trump. As Tim Alberta reports in National Review, conservative lawmakers “are understandably reluctant to preemptively criticize an incoming president who’s popular with their constituents back home — and who could jeopardize their political careers and livelihoods with a single retaliatory tweet.

[P]ublic dissent is going to be met with swift retribution. We know that Trump is hypersensitive to even the mildest criticism and intensely vindictive when it comes to those he feels have crossed him. It looks as though those tendencies are going to be embodied not just in his administration but also in the entire conservative movement.

 

The moral, of course, is that an amoral narcissistic bully should never be elected to any high office, particularly the presidency.  Sadly, what should have been so obvious to anyone rational was beyond the comprehension of angry white Trump voters that put emotion and their desire to reclaim their so-called white privilege ahead of all else, including the best interest of the nation.  We all will pay a high price I fear before this is all over.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

Are Americans Acting Like 1930's Germans?

The previous post looked at the sins of the media in the 1920's and 1930's in acting in a manner that ultimately normalized Mussolini and Hitler until it was too late to stop the horror that they unleashed. But the media wasn't the only part of society that failed to stand up for the rule of law and decency. Much of the German population went right along with Hitler and the Nazi policies.  Later, many feigned ignorance about the worse atrocities and the death camps.  Now, frighteningly, many Americans are acting just as Germans did as Hitler rose to power and upended the constitutional order. Theorist Hannah Arendt described the phenomenon well and made it clear why we must hold our "friends" accountable: The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Friends ‘coordinated’ or got in line.” Many Americans are "getting in line" with no thought to the long term consequences.  Americans, especially on the right, like to see themselves as exceptional.  What we are seeing shows that many Americans are only too happy to close their eyes, get in line, and be guided by base instincts and hate and bigotry.  Germany ultimately paid a horrible price and millions lost their lives.  Are we headed toward a similar disaster?  Here are highlights from a piece in Huffington Post on this issue:

[R]eactions to Trump and his supporters have a way of separating ideas that usually move in tandem. Facts and truth are suddenly unrelated. Power no longer implies responsibility. Legitimacy and decency are now somehow passengers on separate ships. In this dynamic, People magazine can champion both the perpetrator and the victim and see no contradiction or betrayal. Lilla can use the victory of a campaign steeped in identity politics to highlight the ineffectiveness of identity politics. And Lerner can argue that a campaign “advanced” by sexism, racism and xenophobia can tell us much about the targets of that bigotry, i.e. that they need to behave differently, but little about the supporters of that campaign.

So, why the rush to defend Trump’s supporters? Why the self-recriminations? Why the willingness to stretch the bounds of legitimacy to accommodate Trump’s antics? Much has been written about Trump’s demagoguery and its similarity to totalitarian leaders of the past, but what about Trump’s opponents? Are many of us borrowing a page from totalitarianism without realizing it? Are we empowering him? Are we coordinating?

The word Gleichschaltung is often translated from the German as “coordination” and refers to the process of ― politically speaking ― getting in line. It often appears in books about the Nazi era. German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer and German journalist Joachim Fest wrote about the personal cost of coordinating in their respective memoirs. German author Sebastian Haffner and Americans including journalist William Shirer wrote about the propaganda and politics of coordination.   

German-born Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, in one of her last interviews, explains it best.

“The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Friends ‘coordinated’ or got in line.” And this coordination was not necessarily due to the “pressure of terror,” said Arendt, who escaped Germany in 1933. Intellectuals were particularly vulnerable to this wave of coordination. “The essence of being an intellectual is that one fabricates ideas about everything,” and many intellectuals of her time were “trapped by their own ideas.”

People rejected the uglier aspects of Nazism but gave ground in ways that ultimately made it successful. They conceded premises to faulty arguments. They rejected the “facts” of propaganda, but not the impressions of it. The new paradigm of authoritarianism was so disorienting that they simply could not see it for what it was, let alone confront it.

The faulty premise that empowered Hitler and helped place him in the German mainstream was called the Dolchstoss or the legend of the “stab in the back.” It argued that, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Germany was winning World War I only to have politicians surrender prematurely. 

Hitler, as a political figure, was the embodiment of this hack theory. While many rejected Hitler’s anti-Semitism and bellicosity, his deep sense of having been wronged by Germany’s surrender in World War I ― a war in which he fought ― gave him authenticity. It also created a hole in the German Republic’s legitimacy that he and his followers barreled through.

Before there were the camps and murders ― and the euphemisms to hide all of the camps and all of the murders ― there was this feel-good lie that should have been dismissed ― along with the people telling it, from the beginning.

In today’s United States, the suggestion that illegal immigration is the cause of the economic struggles of working-class whites is an American Dolchstoss. Mechanization, globalization and the decline of unions have affected working-class whites to a far greater extent than illegal immigration ― or immigration of any kind. And this is not an obscure fact or liberal talking point. Yet many who supposedly reject Trump’s scapegoating of illegal immigrants seem willing to concede it. 

In his 1940 book, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, Haffner explains this relationship between impression and propaganda, even for those opposed to the Reich. He writes, “Outside of Germany people often wonder at the palpable fraudulence of Nazi propaganda, the stupid incredible exaggerations, the ludicrous reticences concerning what is generally known. Who can be convinced by it? They ask. The answer is that it is not meant to convince but to impress. It addresses emotion and fantasy. Nazi propaganda seeks to create in our minds tenacious ideas and fantasies.”

In Haffner’s time, the tenacious ideas and fantasies were the subhuman images of the Reich’s enemies. Many Germans rejected the “facts” of this propaganda: that Czechoslovakia or Poland posed existential threats to Germany and the German people, but the impression of the propaganda remained. “The image,” Haffner wrote, “of the Czechs and Poles as a snub-nosed, unpleasant, dwarfish half-ape brandishing a revolver, whip or rubber truncheon at a number of barely clad women, children, and blond men bound to posts.” Who could trust such a person? Why risk it?

Trump’s propaganda about Mexican rapists and Muslim terrorists operates in a similar way. 

While on the campaign trail in February, Trump urged followers to “knock the hell” out of protesters, promising to pay their legal bills if they were arrested and charged. That same February in Fort Worth, he promised a crowd that he would “open up our libel laws” so that news outlets can be sued for writing “false” or “purposely negative” articles. In July, he urged Russia to interfere in the election on his behalf, later saying he was joking. In September, he urged still other supporters to “monitor” polling stations. In October, he promised when victorious to throw his rival, Hillary Clinton, in jail. And just recently he advocated revoking the citizenship of Americans who burn flags.

So, in the last year, Trump has flirted with or, maybe more his style, groped and pawed at totalitarianism, yet the advice from many is to “give him a chance” ― or to coordinate. 

“Divided government” became a trick card in Shirer’s 1960 history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when Hitler pushed through the Enabling Act and, “In five brief paragraphs,” took the power to legislate, approve treaties, and initiate constitutional amendments away from Parliament. A divided government essentially “committed suicide,” according to Shirer, and bequeathed its power to a dictator.  

There were many others, but “dominance” made them difficult to recognize. Joachim Fest writes in his memoir Not I, “At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such state crimes were the most natural thing in the world.” Those months would turn to years. Not the thousand years that Hitler had predicted, but enough to cause millions of deaths.

We should not waste our time or imaginations trying to reconfigure Trumpism to explain why all of the “good people” supported him. It is more important to see it for what it is and resist. Hopefully, they will join us. If not, it will not be necessary to call them names, they will have named themselves.

Some argue that America can survive four years of Trump and Trumpism.  I am not so confident that such is the case.  History tells us otherwise.

Is the American Media Repeating the Mistakes of the 1920's and 1930's

One of the most disturbing aspects of the rise of Donald Trump and his version of fascism in America is the manner in which a huge sector of the media and news bureaus have abetted him by falling for his manipulations of the press and television coverage and normalizing the abnormal and unconstitutional.  No matter what Trump does - for example, as Politico reports, he is now taking the unprecedented step of keeping his own security force - much of the media pretends that the "transition" of administrations is nothing out of the ordinary and that ever violation of traditions by Trump is merely a quirk of Trump's personality.  The media, both in America and abroad, made similar mistakes in the 1920's and 1930's and the consequences were horrific.  Here are highlights from Smithsonian that suggest that too many Americans refuse to learn about the past, perhaps because our public education system puts little value on the teaching and learning of history, which plays into the hands of demagogues like Trump.  Here are article excerpts:  

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”

Yet some journalists like Hemingway and journals like the New Yorker rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper’s, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini’s masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn’t resist him.

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid '20’s to early '30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate.

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get.

Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

History is repeating itself and most Americans simply do not seem to care. At least for now.  By the time they wake up, it will likely be too late.  Be very afraid.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Had the Perfect Description of Trump Voters

click image to enlarge

Although he was executed by the Nazis in 1945, German theologian and Nazi opponent accurately described the type of person who would rally to Donald Trump's standard - he had experienced the German equivalent - and now comprises the base of the Republican Party.   For those "friends" who don't know, Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident who was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned and later he was transferred to a Nazi concentration camp. He was executed by hanging on 9 April 1945 as the Nazi regime was collapsing.

One friend noted that "willfully ignorant" is less offensives that the term stupidity.  My response?  I am at the point where I'm not sweating it over offending those who want to take away my rights. Their ears and minds are closed to facts and reality.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

First Amendment Defense Act Would Be "Devastating" for LGBTQ Americans

I have addressed the issue of the disingenuously named "First Amendment Defense Act" before - one that "friends" who voted for Donald Trump, a/k/a, Der Fuhrer try to ignore - and the adverse impact it will have if passed by the Republican Controlled Congress and signed into law by Der Fuhrer as he promised Christofascists.  NBC News looks at some of the consequences of this effort to put Christofascist beliefs above the law and to provide a de facto establishment of extreme right wing Christianity as the nation's recognized religion. While clearly unconstitutional in a normal world, if Trump has the opportunity to stack the Supreme Court, there is no assurance that this foul law would be struck down if enacted.  As for Trump supporting "friends" will they get off their asses and tell Congress to defeat this bill?  I am, sadly, not holding my breath.  Here are article highlights: 

Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, through his spokesperson, told Buzzfeed they plan to reintroduce an embattled bill that barely gained a House hearing in 2015. But this time around, they said, the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) was likely to succeed due to a Republican-controlled House and the backing of President-elect Donald Trump.

FADA would prohibit the federal government from taking "discriminatory action" against any business or person that discriminates against LGBTQ people. The act distinctly aims to protect the right of all entities to refuse service to LGBTQ people based on two sets of beliefs: "(1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage."

Ironically, the language of the bill positions the right to discriminate against one class of Americans as a "first amendment" right, and bans the government from taking any form of action to curb such discrimination—including withholding federal funds from institutions that discriminate. FADA allows allows individuals and businesses to sue the federal government for interfering in their right to discriminate against LGBTQ people and would mandate the Attorney General defend the businesses.

Jennifer Pizer, Law and Policy Director at Lambda Legal, told NBC Out FADA "invites widespread, devastating discrimination against LGBT people" and is a deeply unconstitutional bill.

"This proposed new law violates both Equal Protection and the Establishment Clause by elevating one set of religious beliefs above all others," Pizer said, "And by targeting LGBT Americans as a group, contrary to settled constitutional law."

Pizer warned that the bill's language also left room for individuals and businesses to discriminate against unwed heterosexual couples and single mothers, because of the clause stating that "sexual relations are properly reserved" to marriage between a man and a woman.

"There cannot be even one iota of doubt that this bill endorses one set of religious beliefs above others, and targets people in same-sex relationships, married or not, as well as unmarried heterosexual couples who live together," Pizer said. "It's an unconstitutional effort to turn the clock back to a time when unmarried mothers had to hide in shame, and LGBT people had to hide, period."

Why Silence Equals Death in the Age of Trump

One of the things I worry about is the increased threats that LGBT individuals will likely face under the reign of Der Fuhrer, a/k/a Donald Trump, is the likely resurgence of anti-LGBT animus which will be eagerly fanned by Christofascists and their puppets in the Republican Party, including Der Fuhrer who seems to have sold his soul (or whatever approximates one in Trump's case) to secure the evangelical extremist Christian vote.  This has the potential to drive some members of the LGBT community back into the closet, particularly LGBT youth and those living in backward rural areas. For some, like myself and the husband, going back in the closet simply not an option.  We are simply too "out" and too well know by both friend and foe.  A piece in Vice makes the case of why we all must resist the urge to "pass" as straight or go back in the closet.  Long term, it is self-defeating even if potentially comforting in the short term.   Here are article highlights: 

Since the moment Donald Trump was elected president, LGBTQ Americans have joined with members of nearly every other minority group in fretting about which of their hard-earned advances might suddenly be blocked or rolled back. Among the concrete gains currently at risk are an executive order prohibiting discrimination by some 30,000 federal contractors, a government interpretation of existing law that guarantees transgender students the right to proper accommodations, and a widely-praised new military policy that ended years of senseless discrimination against LGBTQ service members. Not to mention the triumph of marriage equality in all fifty states, a legal status that would be difficult (though not impossible) to reverse.

It's perfectly understandable that LGBTQ people would focus on the concrete policies and protections that a Trump government might imperil. Yet there is another layer of gains—perhaps more subtle, but every bit as crucial to the improvement of LGBTQ lives—that are also put at risk by the rise of Trump and what he represents: the full-throttled freedom to be and express ourselves, as we truly are.

This focus on authentic, expressive liberty, on the power of words and other forms of communication to shape the reality of our lives in unique and profound ways, has been one of the most enduring contributions of queer thought to American culture. It has special resonance for LGBTQ people because many (though by no means all) of us are able to "pass" as straight or cisgender. Those queer feelings or desires that make us part of the LGBTQ community are largely internal; while external signs can be discernible—especially for some trans and gender-nonconforming people—in general, what we feel at heart is hidden unless we make it known or are outed.

The corollary to this ability to pass has been the insistence by anti-LGBTQ forces that being queer is a "choice," and that we already have the same freedoms as everyone else—all we have to do is decide to operate as straight or cisgender, and we'll realize, Wizard of Oz-like, that we can serve in uniform (if we repress or control our "confusion"), marry (someone of the opposite sex), or use a public restroom (that matches our sex at birth). The insistence that we "choose" to be gay or transgender is another way of saying that we don't actually exist as gay or trans people, that everyone is naturally straight or cis, and some of us simply have a gender or sexuality "problem."

The age of Trump, which has already unleashed a wave of hate crimes, will bring a whole new level of pressure to cover as a way to minimize our vulnerability to genuine harm, either by the government or the public. Now is the time to remind ourselves that there is no true liberty without insisting on the freedom to be, and express, who we really are. In the face of those who will demand that we repress our queerness, what's most important for the future of queer lives under Trump is that we continue to come out, stay out, and show that we exist. Short of doing that, we'll only ever enjoy our rights under the condition that we "cover" who we really are, and those aren't rights or freedoms at all. 

Of course, this challenge is nothing new for LGBTQ Americans, and we can look to our own history for guidance even in this unprecedented age. Queer people have always faced the choice of whether to assimilate as the price for acceptance or to insist on our right to be different. With the triumph of marriage equality, it often appears that the LGBTQ movement opted for assimilation over liberation. While there's truth to this, it is also true that nearly every major issue and policy our movement has tackled advanced not just our right to be like everybody else, but this broader ideal of expressive freedom—and not just for LGBTQ people, but for all Americans.

Ending the military's "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy was not about allowing or integrating gay people into the military; we were already there. Instead, it was about ensuring that we could come out and serve honestly, about no longer forcing us to lie or pretend or play a role as a condition of service. The same was true of the more recent elimination of the military's transgender ban and, in a wider sense, the Obama Administration's transgender school guidance and support for transgender equality.

Legal protections against anti-LGBTQ discrimination can be crucial to one's livelihood. But they are equally crucial to allowing us to acknowledge, and thus to be, who we are.

The importance of these expressive freedoms can also be grasped by considering why their opponents sought to repress them. The reason DADT was so insidious was that it singled out a particular group for unfair punishment, and then prevented that group from defending itself, asserting its existence, and thus fighting to secure its rights. The reason hate crimes are so reprehensible is because they are used to intimidate entire groups as a way to police our behavior and expression. This is why denying discrimination protections is so contemptible—because without job safety in coming out, millions of Americans stay mired in the closet, unable to show the world just how unthreatening we truly are. 

And without the freedom to marry, we were denied the opportunity to show the world that our love had the same worth and dignity as any other love. Keeping gay people silent and invisible—as war heroes and ordinary civilians—was key to preventing our advances. The creation of the closet reinforced the belief that, at best, we didn't exist, and at worst, we were a lurking threat to everything virtuous and worthwhile.

[R]eversal of these gains would make our lives far worse than they were before. Having increasingly built our lives around the freedom to express ourselves as we are, pressure to crawl back into the closet would not only be a harrowing loss, but would create all kinds of new hardships.

Rolling back state recognition of such relationships could mean imperiling legal protections for hundreds of thousands of children, and even severing ties between children and their parents.

In all these cases, advances in law have not been about social experimentation or political correctness; they have been about catching up with realities of American life. They were realities sometimes obscured by delusional or deceptive social conservatives hankering to return to an idealized America (back when it was, er, "great").

The good news is this: If these expressive freedoms are vulnerable to reversal, they are ultimately extremely difficult to roll back. . . . Even trying to block further advances will be increasingly tough, given the number of Americans from all backgrounds and political affiliations who now know and love someone who is LGBTQ.

What's needed now is solidarity among all these groups who prize and rely on expressive liberty for a life that's worth living. We've spent too many hundreds of years being forced to pretend we were something we're not; we all know how repressive, demeaning and inimical that was to the genuine pursuit of happiness. What's also needed is a redoubling of our own commitment to combatting our fear, to fighting the urge to repress or to pass or to cover, even when dangers confront us. If the LGBTQ movement (and its compatriots) have given the world anything worth protecting, it's been this invaluable contribution to the Enlightenment ideal that individuals must be truly free to be themselves, and the unforgettable lesson that silence, indeed, equals death.

 #NotMyPresident.  I will personally, never, ever be closeted again.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 2

The Normalization of Hatred in Trump's America Continues

I suspect that history, if it focuses on the truth and not just the spin of Trump and his apologists will conclude that an irresponsible news media played a huge role in putting a dangerous narcissist in the White House. His calls to rally to hatred and bigotry were not properly exposed or opposed thanks to among other things the media obsession of false equivalency.  Under Der Fuhrer alt-right figures have slithered out from under the rocks where they long existed and Christofascist extremists are slated to hold numerous cabinet seats.  None of this is normal and, not too many years ago would have been viewed as reprehensible.  But not any more.  And now A&E is launching a program about the Klu Klux Klan that may have the effect of further normalizing this foul and toxic organization.  A piece in Salon looks at this unsettling new "show." Here are highlights:

[S]tarting Tuesday, Jan. 10, we’ll get a weekly look inside the lives of several families headed by members of the Ku Klux Klan called “Generation KKK.” Giving racism a platform, even under the guise of increasing the public’s awareness of its existence, is all the rage now.

Granted, that’s not the purpose of “Generation KKK.” In a Sunday New York Times article, A&E’s brass and the “Generation KKK” producer explained that the show has been in the works for more than a year and a half. That’s basically right around the time that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign began capitalizing on the sublimated bigotry and racial tension that’s been coming to the fore of our national dialogue.

Between the Klan’s rebranding of its intentions — it’s just about white pride now, never mind that inconvenient history of domestic terror and murder — and openly leaving literature on doorsteps in communities around the nation, the white supremacy organization has been steadily mounting its own campaign of normalizing hatred.

But this series exists, in part, because those efforts are working. The Southern Poverty Law Center has estimated that the number of independent Klan chapters across the United States was at 190 in 2015, a rise from 72 in 2014 and its membership may be as large as 8,000 people.

Two of the initial episodes of “Generation KKK” reveal a loftier intent than what the provocative title implies in that they immediately set up the series’ mission as one of anti-racist activism, focusing closely on the members of Klan families who want out — mostly mothers and children — as opposed to exposing the rituals and intentions of leaders such as Steven Howard, the imperial wizard of the North Mississippi White Knights.

“Generation KKK” may have a noble purpose, much in the way A&E’s “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath” has also served as a piece of anti-Scientology advocacy programming (albeit one that also happened to net the channel its highest-rated premiere in two years). But it’s also joining a channel that currently airs “Duck Dynasty,” the unscripted series that follows the delightful high jinks of the Robertson family including its homophobic patriarch Phil Robertson, who remembered the Jim Crow South as an idyllic period when black people had no complaints in a GQ profile.

Most people understand what the Klan stands for and the conditions that make it ripe to recruit new members — poverty, disillusionment with the political system and a class-imposed practice of keeping the poorest fighting among themselves by scapegoating minorities, for starters.  And if they don’t understand those conditions, they at least, hopefully, understand what the Klan stands for.

Meanwhile, the number of people who don’t know that, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center does, is dishearteningly large. And maybe this series will lead to greater exposure and understanding of the groups that are fighting the good fight.

 And for those who don't know, the KKK is also vitriolically anti-LGBT.  Just saying . . . .