Axis: Bold as Hate

Bernie Sanders sees in the global trend toward nationalism an "authoritarian axis", and proposes a new progressive international front to oppose it in an op ed for the UK edition of the Guardian

 At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, when the world’s top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 99%, we are seeing the rise of a new authoritarian axis. 

 While these regimes may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests. These leaders are also deeply connected to a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs who see the world as their economic plaything.

It remains a mystery what "democratic norms" are threatened by these elected leaders. Trump's calling out news organizations by name for their bias remains just that--and has the added misfortune of being accurate. In calling out the press for its treatment of him, Trump calls them out for their history of actively colluding to mislead a public they disdain.

Indeed, the media leveraging Trump's hostility toward them into an attack on freedom of the press follows a pattern so habitual they don't see it, the same one by which they make of a thug shot by a cop a national racism crisis, or of a baseless rape accusation a national college rape crisis.

Those of us who believe in democracy, who believe that a government must be accountable to its people, must understand the scope of this challenge if we are to effectively confront it.

 Those of us who voted, who demand our government be accountable, are who you confront.
I would be a lot more impressed with these never-ending screeds about Trump's threat to democracy if they at least acknowledged the irony of their position. Much less the paucity of evidence democracy or--please!--national unity are more threatened by Trump's populism than they are by his enemies. the same people who cut Bernie off at the knees when he threatened to make democracy meaningful on the Democratic side. How dare Sanders talk about a threat to democracy after submitting to that and now effectively allying with the same monied and entrenched interests that want to do it to Trump. Bernie can't see the irony for all the irony.

Megaphone-leveraging: Trump's imperious persona and combative style are portrayed as authoritarianism, when he's done nothing authoritarian, and is in fact so isolated he couldn't if he wanted, or knew how to go about it.

It should be clear by now that Donald Trump and the rightwing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. All around the world, in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, in Asia and elsewhere we are seeing movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to achieve and hold on to power.

This trend certainly did not begin with Trump, but there’s no question that authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the leader of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy seems to delight in shattering democratic norms.

Those shattered democratic norms are as fictional as the bed of shattered glass upon which Haven Monahan led his notorious gang-bang.

So let's hear about this global plot and how it works.

Three years ago, who would have imagined that the United States would stay neutral between Canada, our democratic neighbor and second largest trading partner, and Saudi Arabia, a monarchic, client state that treats women as third-class citizens? It’s also hard to imagine that Israel’s Netanyahu government would have moved to pass the recent “nation state law”, which essentially codifies the second-class status of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, if Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t know Trump would have his back.

An Obama Administration certainly would have opposed Israel's ethnostate law. As for Saudi Arabia, they are embarking on a possibly reckless course of liberalization that the Trump Administration is encouraging. Certainly there's more to this Vast Rightwing Conspiracy.

Other authoritarian states are much farther along this kleptocratic process. In Russia, it is impossible to tell where the decisions of government end and the interests of Vladimir Putin and his circle of oligarchs begin. They operate as one unit. Similarly, in Saudi Arabia, there is no debate about separation because the natural resources of the state, valued at trillions of dollars, belong to the Saudi royal family. In Hungary, far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán is openly allied with Putin in Russia. In China, an inner circle led by Xi Jinping has steadily consolidated power, clamping down on domestic political freedom while it aggressively promotes a version of authoritarian capitalism abroad.

Russian corruption is not new. Saudi Arabia's ownership of the country is not relevant to the new nationalism. China's nationalism is hardly new--and the socialist Bernie completely ignores its origins in the communist party. I agree with Sanders that there's a global trend toward nationalism in reaction to globalization. But in trying to paint it sinister, he draws comic connections worthy of Alex Jones; Orban to Putin to China to Saudi Arabia...

We must understand that these authoritarians are part of a common front. They are in close contact with each other, share tactics and, as in the case of European and American rightwing movements, even share some of the same funders. The Mercer family, for example, supporters of the infamous Cambridge Analytica, have been key backers of Trump and of Breitbart News, which operates in Europe, the United States and Israel to advance the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda. Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson gives generously to rightwing causes in both the United States and Israel, promoting a shared agenda of intolerance and illiberalism in both countries.

Sheldon Adelson as white nationalist. Who knew? It makes one long for a real alliance of affinity between Isreali and American nationalists.

But the notion shared ideology means affinity between nations is wrong: democracies still compete with each other. Chinese nationalism does not naturally ally with American nationalism--quite the contrary. Isn't a lack of national cooperation the whole problem with nationalism, Bernie?

The truth is, however, that to effectively oppose rightwing authoritarianism, we cannot simply go back to the failed status quo of the last several decades. Today in the United States, and in many other parts of the world, people are working longer hours for stagnating wages, and worry that their children will have a lower standard of living than they do.

Yes. Immigration's role in this goes unmentioned, and it's the immigration issue above all that arouses anti-Trump fervor.

Our job is to fight for a future in which new technology and innovation works to benefit all people, not just a few. It is not acceptable that the top 1% of the world’s population owns half the planet’s wealth, while the bottom 70% of the working age population accounts for just 2.7% of global wealth. 

Immigration plays a role in this, no?

Together governments of the world must come together to end the absurdity of the rich and multinational corporations stashing over $21tn in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and then demanding that their respective governments impose an austerity agenda on their working families. 

Austerity programs. Who Imposes those?

It is not acceptable that the fossil fuel industry continues to make huge profits while their carbon emissions destroy the planet for our children and grandchildren.

Oil companies, just because.

It is not acceptable that a handful of multinational media giants, owned by a small number of billionaires, largely control the flow of information on the planet.

Careful there, mister, you're 'wading into InfoWars territory. Next thing you'll say is they conspire against Trump.

Whose Treason?

From that notorious anonymous op ed in the NYT

The dilemma — which [Trump] does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. 

Wait a minute. That part about working to frustrate parts of an elected leader's agenda sounds like democratic sabotage. It's the opposite, Anonymous says, without noting the irony

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office. 

Well then, which parts of said agenda are you thwarting? Are they anti-democratic or unconstitutional? Is there a secret agenda you're derailing? What are these extraordinary crimes for which you're exercising this extraordinary subversion? Because they are the only justification for what you just said you're doing, or for writing this. 
Otherwise this is treason.

For all the hyperbole, the various charges against Trump--that he's an autocrat, literally Hitler, enemy of the press--are based entirely on things he's said. Nothing he's done, nothing he proposes to do, has been unconstitutional or, for that matter, irrational or extreme.

The ill-informed mobs that turn out to protest certainly don't understand this, and it's not clear the respectable Resistance, for all its condescension, understands.

The nation was convulsed with Pussy Hat protests over Trump's flippant remarks on tape from years prior. He's been deemed the worst thing to happen to women since...ever.
Sure, his Supreme Court picks are NARAL's nightmare, but could have been expected from any conservative Republican, and coming from Jeb would not have had such unfortunate side effects as The Handmaid's Tale on HBO. The left continues to predicate much of its legitimacy on abortion rights, so their theatrics are understandable as desperate political strategy, but the idea Trump represents a unique threat to women is delusional.

His supposed hostility and threat to a free press, the "autocrat" charge, is leveraged from his bluster in exchanges with a press that had abandoned any pretense of objectivity toward him.
As a genuine populist leader--from the elite point of view demagogue--Trump called out a corrupt press; for shilling for Hillary, for gaslighting the public on immigration, trade, war. A press that pushes the social media companies, already complicit, to silence dissidents. But it isn't that the press is an ass: Trump has done nothing but use the bully pulpit with extraordinary effect.

Of course Anonymous and the NYT have gone to great lengths here; certainly we'll hear, finally, about Trump's secret plan to kill democracy and decency

 The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

That's it. Trump is not on board with the platitudes.

John Nolte in Breitbart:

Even if everything Woodward’s anonymous sources say is true… So what?

Even if everything the New York Times narcissist says is true… So what?

Look at what these failures and liars and grifters are trying to con you with… Because it has nothing to do with illegality, nothing to do with substance, and everything to do with style.

The corrupt establishment is colluding to head fake America into freaking out over Trump’s style while Trump delivers and delivers and delivers on the substance, on things that actually matter.

Trump has an erratic management style. So what? I’m supposed to care he burns people out, dresses them down, demands they do crazy stuff like at long last win one of these endless neocon wars?

So what?

The elite has escalated the war again, seeking to manufacture a constitutional crisis out of tweets and hysteria.

Fake Views

Comes now the New York Times weighing in on Trump's South Africa tweet

Mr. Trump’s comment came after the Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented a late-night program on South Africa, including land seizures and homicides, and described President Cyril Ramaphosa as “a racist.”
The tweet gives prominence to a false narrative pushed by some right-wing groups in South Africa that there have been numerous seizures of white-owned land and widespread killings of white farmers. Some of those groups have brought their claims to the United States on lobbying trips.

The Devil's in the definitions, here of "widespread". There's a post-Apartheid tradition of farm invasions, with the South African government touting a recent decline which Afriforum, the white South African advocacy group, challenges

 According to AgriSA's statistics, farm murders decreased from 66 recorded incidents in 2016/2017 to 47 in 2017/2018. This was less than a third of the highs recorded in the late 1990s, when 153 murders were recorded in 1997/1998. The increase in attacks comes nowhere near the record high seen in 2001/2002, when 1 069 farm attacks were recorded. Farm attacks increased from 478 in 2016/2017 to 561 in 2017/2018... 

[Afriforum director] Roets said the biggest point of debate around farm attacks was their frequency. "If you want to compare the rate at which farmers are being attacked and killed, you need to compare your calculation, not to a rate at which people in South Africa are being murdered, but to a rate at which people in South Africa are being murdered, with the exclusion of social-fabric crimes."

White farmers are protected somewhat by their isolation--of course this leaves them vulnerable once the bad guys find them. But as most victims of violent crime are urban residents in close with criminals, the murder rate for farmers should be well below that of the rest of the population. White farmers aren't killing and raping each other.

The government of South Africa doesn't supply statistics and the international media's response to groups like Afriforum is to shrug and declare it all too mysterious:

The truth is, we don't know. We can't calculate a meaningful murder rate for farmers, because we don't know how many there are. 

Do we include all 810,000 people employed in agriculture? That gives a farm murder rate of 9.1 per 100,000 - much lower than the South African average. 

Or, do we restrict ourselves to the 32,375 commercial farmers counted in the country's last agricultural census in 2007? 

That's what AfriForum, a group that campaigns for the interests of Afrikaners in South Africa, appears to have done. 

It has estimated a farm murder rate of 156 per 100,000 that has been widely quoted in recent days.

I suspect using commercial farms gives you a better representation of white farms than the category of all agricultural workers. Indeed, the broader farm murder rate suggests when taking the threat to white farmers out of the equation living in rural South Africa is far safer than living in urban South Africa.

Below is the Tucker Carlson segment that supposedly inspired Trump's tweet.



It's excruciating watching Carlson and his guest from the Cato Institute invoke "racism" and the hoary "wrong skin color", as if it's the racism that condemns it ultimately.

Apartheid South Africa was as racist as the new South Africa. Clearly its racist aspect was necessary to its preservation. The old racist white South Africa was always going to outperform the new racist black South Africa. Racism has nothing to do with it. Calling out another man's racism is like calling out his bipedalism.

This focus on the racism of the ANC keeps us tethered, as always, to our own imagined sin of racism, providing the necessary moral equivalence. Apartheid's severe order or the ANC's miserable anarchy, one and the same.

The Times piece brushes off Carlson's assertions by noting the land seizures haven't actually started (white farmers are still able to get pennies on the dollar for land) and devotes the rest of its space to--what else?--Trump and Carlson's racism

Mr. Carlson, who has often used inflammatory language on issues of race on his show, has become one of Mr. Trump’s favorite Fox News hosts. Mr. Trump himself has made many racially explosive remarks, and political analysts say they expect him to continue using that language to firm up support among his conservative voter base, which includes vocal white nationalists and white supremacists.

Contrast the media's obscurantism around this issue with their credulity around, say, Iraq WMD, Syrian freedom fighters or Racist Beckys.

But they keep their eye on the ball. The point is to make this a political loser for Trump, a racism scandal. I suspect it will be another incidental win for Trump, as the press finds itself justifying, yet again, brown barbarity in the name of anti-racism.

The Alt Right is Dead; Long Live the Alt Right

This Atlantic piece by Adam Serwer, "White Nationalists are Winning", is a torrent of paranoid hyperbole from the bugman's id, but gets the important part right.

A year after white nationalists in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!,” their message has been taken up and amplified by Fox News personalities. Tucker Carlson tells his audience that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” Laura Ingraham says that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes” as a result of “both illegal and sometimes legal immigration that progressives love.” They echo the white-nationalist claim that America is at risk because the nation is growing more diverse, an argument that treats the mere presence of nonwhite people, citizen or noncitizen, as an existential threat to the country. White nationalists like Cantwell are cheered to hear their beliefs championed on Fox. Cantwell wrote last year that Carlson “is basically telling white America to prepare for war as directly as he can get away with while remaining on Fox News.”

This was written before today's own goal for the anti-American left, turning a failed rally of twenty people into a story of deluded thousands chasing imaginary Nazis. Some of Jason Kessler's critics on the right predicted a turnout of a few dozen "losers" resulting in humiliation for the right. They got the first part right, at least, but misidentified the losers. It's as if no one is in charge on the left, ultimately. Whatever constitutes the leadership of the left right now is riding the whirlwind of demagogy it's conjured. The irony just keeps coming--the alt right was felled in Charlottesville because of a failure of leadership, or so we're told.

Whatever becomes of the alt right it will have effected a shift in the Overton Window that could make the difference in the end.

But the alt-right and its fellow travelers were never going to be able to assemble a mass movement. Despite the controversy over the rally and its bloody aftermath, the white nationalists’ ideological goals remain a core part of the Trump agenda. As long as that agenda finds a home in one of the two major American political parties, a significant portion of the country will fervently support it. And as an ideological vanguard, the alt-right fulfilled its own purpose in pulling the Republican Party in its direction.

The alt right isn't dead, it's metastasizing.

The left took over America by capturing the moral high ground without ever once apologizing for its militants. Radical elements were key to its advance and remain key, as we saw today, to its defense. The right would do well to emulate that. Just as the left holds the Vietnam War and racism make the violence understandable, if not justifiable, likewise the far less violent fringe on the right is a predictable result of the open campaign of displacement against whites.

If the presence of a radical fringe on the right prompts the sort of embarrassing displays the left put on today, policing that fringe is doing for your enemy what they haven't the self control to do for themselves.

For all its concern over what's embarrassing the right forgot the left has no shame.

Implicit Civil War

After General John Kelly called out Frederica Wilson by name he called her out by implication:

 I'll end with this: In October -- April, rather, of 2015, I was still on active duty, and I went to the dedication of the new FBI field office in Miami. And it was dedicated to two men who were killed in a firefight in Miami against drug traffickers in 1986 -- a guy by the name of Grogan and Duke. Grogan almost retired, 53 years old; Duke, I think less than a year on the job. Anyways, they got in a gunfight and they were killed. Three other FBI agents were there, were wounded, and now retired. So we go down -- Jim Comey gave an absolutely brilliant memorial speech to those fallen men and to all of the men and women of the FBI who serve our country so well, and law enforcement so well. 

There were family members there. Some of the children that were there were three or four years old when their dads were killed on that street in Miami-Dade. Three of the men that survived the fight were there, and gave a rendition of how brave those men were and how they gave their lives. 

And a congresswoman stood up, and in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there and all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call he gave the money -- the $20 million -- to build the building. And she sat down, and we were stunned. Stunned that she had done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned.

There is a further implication to be drawn, and I have to wonder if it occurred to the general. There is a cruder style in black politics as in black life, a certain obliviousness. You're not supposed to notice three commonplaces in America: black mediocrity, black malice and black buffoonery. There is also an unspoken rule that criticizing any of these in an individual black person is asserting the existence of one or more of these. The general dares to glance upon two of three--and the lady's hat covers the buffoonish angle already. In calling out the congresswoman's ability along with her decency the general enters a moral free-fire zone. But he's armed with his story, and it's powerful. Trump is fighting back in areas where it wouldn't have even occurred to previous Republican or conservative politicians.

Of course he doesn't necessarily see it that way. But it doesn't matter. In framing Trump as essentially racist the left has made every engagement with him a racial controversy--especially a row with such as the congresswoman, whose street cred appears solid. When she sallies forth to engage it has to be seen as an assault by black America on white privilege. Previous Republicans thought there was no winning such engagements. Trump sees there's no losing them.

It's on.

Sorry, black America. It's just not cute any more.
There has been a cost to our condescension. Humoring black America has necessitated the degradation of standards of behavior culturally and politically, and is inseparable from the other strands of the Narrative choking out the last of our common decency. I suspect the general, like a lot of us, is making these connections too:

It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That's obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life -- the dignity of life -- is sacred. That's gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. 

Women and life don't get a lot of respect in the black community. Respect, for that matter, doesn't get a lot of respect there, where disrespect drives the daily carnage.

The Trump Administration continues to stun the left by fighting back. How fitting and proper that George W Bush would show up today of all days. His real cowardice is revealed in the fact he fought back politically everywhere but in the rigged game of racial resentment--and here he was invoking it.

Posturing as a tough guy by sending American boys to Iraq was nothing--and forgiven, as we see. Says an awful lot about the continuing power of the black privilege narrative.

Catching the Pitch

Reality's Trump-et

Is this Washington Post article trying to imply Donald Trump's recent comments on Sweden's Muslim problem provoked Muslim rioting afterwards?

Just two days after President Trump provoked widespread consternation by seeming to imply, incorrectly, that immigrants had perpetrated a recent spate of violence in Sweden, riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern suburbs of Sweden's capital, Stockholm.

It's unlikely the Post writer's opening with "[j]ust two days after" is an affirmation of Trump's larger point after all. Would that it were. I wonder if he considered just how much better it works as such. I've given up hope on his ilk recognizing how absurd their defenses have become: we're to believe that Sweden's Muslims being provoked to riot over the gaffe of a US president--despite Sweden's own establishment coming so quickly their defense--isn't in itself cause for alarm. They've been spinning so long they don't know whether they're coming or going.

I don't think Trump is playing "4-D chess" with the opposition, beyond placing himself in position to get lucky by being right on the larger point--here, Muslim immigration degrading Europe--while being imprecise enough to leave himself open to "fact checking" and spin that has to wrestle openly with that broader point and wither under the inevitable dramatic refutation such as Sweden's most recent Muslim rioting.
Because Trump is right about an ongoing catastrophe the opposition press renders itself plausibly accurate and comically irrelevant (here, nothing major or dramatic happened "last night in Sweden", but just wait a couple of days). Trump isn't playing the opposition press, reality is.

As for "widespread consternation", in the US it's no wider than the Acela corridor. In Sweden, if the Post's somewhat cravenly implication is to be taken seriously, "consternation", for Sweden's Muslims, is expressed by burning cars, attacking police and general rioting. The source of their consternation leading to "bouts of anger" (phrasing designed to prevent further consternation, perhaps) can be attributed to that universal constant, the inadequacy of the host population to integrate newcomers.

At the very least these efforts to refute by pointing out an irrelevant lack of precision force the opposition press to expose that which it would rather leave completely in the dark. Optimal for them would be complete ignorance; the mere act of "fact checking" Trump's latest constitutes a severe degradation of their position. Emphasis added below:

The neighborhood, Rinkeby, was the scene of riots in 2010 and 2013, too. And in most ways, what happened late Monday night was reminiscent of those earlier bouts of anger. Swedish police apparently made an arrest around 8 p.m. near the Rinkeby station. For reasons not yet disclosed by the police, word of the arrest prompted a crowd of youths to gather.
In 2015, when the influx of refugees and migrants to Europe from Africa, the Middle East and Asia was highest, Sweden took in the greatest number per capita. By and large, integration has been a success story there, save for incidents such as Monday night's, which have taken place in highly segregated neighborhoods.

Integration has been successful except where it isn't (here, and there, and over there...) and where there is segregation which is all over (notice how assimilation isn't even mentioned any more--that failure is no longer even recognized as such--you're a racist for even thinking it's a failure). It's gotten so they can't even get out a coherent sentence. "Protests were peaceful until some started rioting" is the template.
Trump is Br'er Rabbit, reality is the briar patch.