Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

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Caruso: CNN Uses Private Hiring Info From Years Ago to Attack Conservative Commentator Over Criticism of Network

 

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And the Failed "md's" fav song is Shania Twain's "Man I feel like a Woman"

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Stanley’s new book, “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” [is] a timely study of fascist politics past and present.

Stanley examines how modern authoritarian and nationalist—“fascist,” if you like (Stanley obviously does)—politicos have used and subverted purportedly democratic electoral politics to gain power. He finds 10 common themes animating fascist ideology and propaganda:

1. Invocation of a mythic national past marked by racial, ethnic, religious and/or cultural purity—a supposedly glorious history to which the nation needs to return.

2. Propagandistic use of outwardly virtuous ideals (including anti-corruption, democracy, liberty and free speech) to advance abhorrent ends that contradict those ideals.

3. An anti-intellectual assault on education, universities, science, expertise and language, accompanied by charges of Marxism and “political correctness” against liberal and leftist enemies and the advance of simplistic nationalist and authoritarian ideals. This is fertile soil for the deadly denial of climate change that has occurred and for such absurd claims as the notion that whites are now more damaged by racism than are black, Latinx and Native American people in the U.S.

4. An insidious attack on truth and on people’s ability to perceive and agree on truth. Regular and repeated obvious lying is combined with the advance of conspiracy theories and the promotion of “news as sports” and demagogic strongmen as “stars.”

5. An ugly faith in natural hierarchies of worth and a rejection of equality as dangerous, unnatural, Marxist and liberal delusion.

6. An aggrieved and counterfeit sense of victimhood among dominant “us” groups (racial, ethnic and/or religious) that feel threatened by having to share citizenship, resources and power with minority groups (“them”). This ironic victimology feeds an oppressive nationalism devoted to maintaining “natural” hierarchies and uniting “chosen” but supposedly oppressed racial, ethnic, religious groups (whites in the U.S., Christians in Hungary, Hindus in India, and so on.) against the supposedly false claims and unjust demands of “them”—those designated as “naturally” inferior others.

7. A stern embrace of law and order that targets minority others (“them”) as criminal threats to the safety and security of the majority (“us”).

8. Sexual anxiety about the threat supposedly posed by minority, criminal and alien others to “our” traditional male roles, status and family values.

9. A loathing of cities seen as racially and sexually corrupt, ethnically impure, sexually perverse, parasitic criminal zones loaded with a polyglot mass of some inferior, nation-weakening “them.” By contrast, the rural countryside is lauded as the noble wellspring of virtue, strength, self-sufficiency and racial-ethnic purity. The rural heartland/fatherland/motherland/homeland is the sacred and foundational “blood and soil” preserve of “us.” It is the noble native soil of the “volk”—the true ancestral people who embody the spirit of a once-grand nation that needs to be made great again through the defeat of liberal and supposedly leftist elites who have been giving the nation’s resources and power away to naturally inferior others (“them”).

10. A sense of the chosen-people majority (“us”) as hard-working, upright, virtuous and deserving, combined with the notion of demonized minorities and others (“them”) as lazy, dissolute, shifty and undeserving.

Trump has checked the boxes on Stanley’s list of core fascist themes. Consider Trump’s:

· Three-year-old ballcap slogan, “Make America Great Again” (likely lifted from empowered Hungarian fascists’ call to “make Hungary great again”).

· Claim to be “drain[ing] the swamp” while filling his administration with thoroughly corrupt swamp creatures.

· Designation of his authoritarian racist and hate-filled campaign rallies—events where he denounces reporters as “enemies of the people” and even applauds repressive violence against them and others—as “free speech” demonstrations.

· Climate-science denial and taste for conspiracy theories.

· Relentless totalitarian mendacity and endless nonsensical assertions, utterly devoid of evidence.

· Constant leveling of the charge of “fake news” against any reporting or commentary that questions his political agenda and purported greatness.

· Absurd advance-pardon of a racist sheriff who built Nazi-like internment and work camps for Latinx arrestees.

· Savage punitive separation of Central American children from their migrant parents at the southern U.S. border.

· Defense of white supremacists who marched through the University of Virginia campus, chanting “Blood and soil, Jews will not replace us” (Heather Heyer, a young woman protesting the fascists, was killed at that 2017 event).

· Obvious underlying belief that African-Americans, Latinx, Native Americans and women are inherently inferior to white men and unworthy of respect and equality.

· Repeated claims that leading black personalities are “low IQ,” “stupid” and the like.

· Repeated and barely coded racist appeals to “law and order.”

· Repeated false description of immigrants as rapists and other kinds of terrible criminals, not to mention “animals.”

· Mad executive order claiming to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of U.S. citizenship to people born on U.S. soil.

· Clear disdain and distrust of scientists, real expertise, intellectuals and independent judges and lawyers.

· Repeated reference to the predominantly white and agrarian, small-town heartland as the real soul of the nation and his related special taste for holding demagogic, fascist-style rallies in heavily white, rural, red-meat, red state regions.

· Regular false description of centrist and liberal corporate Democrats as “the left” and as “socialists.”

That’s just a short list of how Trump’s rhetoric and conduct has lined up with the noxious politics of fascism, which holds power in a shocking number of nations today. (Stanley might have added a special chapter on hypermasculinist militarism and misogyny, both major Trump themes. Perhaps, too, it is time to start thinking about eco-fascism—the special dedication fascists show for assaulting livable ecology.)


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Meanwhile, it seems clear that, as Ferguson says, “[T]he Republican Party is never going back to where it was before Trump, even if the establishment succeeded in putting Pence in his place. In politics, the ‘New Abnormal’ is, alas, the new ‘Normal.’ ” So it will remain, unless and until the creeping fascist party still mostly in power in the U.S. is seriously opposed by an actual and authentic popular opposition that goes after the extreme inequality that provides essential soil for the poisonous new fascist politics of the 21st century.

 

[xy5jn0]

Fashion Tip: The Failed "md" would look good with purple hair too.

 

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[Michael Scally MD]

 

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Who or What Is Really Responsible for the Huge Forest Fires in California?

Idiot climate change tree huggers

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

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[Michael Scally MD]

NORTH WATERBORO, Maine — The only light in the house came from the glow of three computer monitors, and Christopher Blair, 46, sat down at a keyboard and started to type. His wife had left for work and his children were on their way to school, but waiting online was his other community, an unreality where nothing was exactly as it seemed. He logged onto his website and began to invent his first news story of the day.

“BREAKING,” he wrote, pecking out each letter with his index fingers as he considered the possibilities. Maybe he would announce that Hillary Clinton had died during a secret overseas mission to smuggle more refugees into America. Maybe he would award President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage in denying climate change.

A new message popped onto Blair’s screen from a friend who helped with his website. “What viral insanity should we spread this morning?” the friend asked.

“The more extreme we become, the more people believe it,” Blair replied.

He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

 

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CNN Panel: White Women Trump Voters are Racist and Heavily Invested in White Supremacy

No purple haired uglies in Trumps voters

 

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[Michael Scally MD]

 

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[Michael Scally MD]

1980!!! Reagan ...