If you haven’t already, pick up the New York Times and read its front- page story, “90 Seconds of Rage on the Capitol Steps.” It’s a stunning account of just one of many assaults that took place on January 6, when the mob of Trump supporters launched an attack on the Congress with the intention of overturning the election and stopping the peaceful transfer of power to its winner, Joe Biden. In several thousand words, the Times tells the story of seven men who have been charged with assaulting Washington D.C.
I'm an old white guy and as liberal/progressive as they come. I have two brothers who are also old white guys - and Trumpsters. They (and their wives) have been brainwashed by Fox News, AM hate radio, and the cesspool that is the Facebook algorithm. I mourn my former relationships with them.
Lucian is right - the revanchist, proto-fascist, hateful right wing has always been with us.
Trump gave them permission to come out into the open. Now the internet gives them the ability to organize.
The Republican party is openly anti-democracy. They are welcoming any and all deplorables with an axe to grind. The deplorables are easily manipulated, spoiling for a fight, and heavily armed.
I'm not sure how or if further violence can be prevented but the first band of insurrectionists need to be made examples of.
They've always been there. They were the people in small towns, who grumbled at the loss of their jobs when the corporations sent them overseas to 'them foreigners', who didn't like that 'funny looking Arab family' moving in, who always stood for the National Anthem at the local football game and lost whatever power they had over the years but didn't know it until Trump came into the WH.
They're the neighbors who you know, the friends you often swap jokes with, but they're also the people if you're not the right color, the right religion, the right politics, that will make your life a misery.
And they're the ones Trump depends on for his votes. Staunchly Republican and white, they're also dying by the boatload from Covid because they are the ones who are ignoring the masking and vaccine mandates, who don't believe the virus is real, and who laugh at the rest of us who do.
They're dangerous and they're all over the country-and they're not going away. They're no longer ashamed of being found out. In fact that's why we're seeing them revolting against all that Washington is trying to do to improve our lives, because they know they're no longer in power and really no longer matter.
In its scope and violence, January 6 was shocking, but once the shock wore off, I wasn't surprised. January 6 was the apotheosis of the Trump administration, but Trump himself did not come out of nowhere. I've been thinking about my previous encounters with white rage, especially white male rage. The first was as a freshman at Georgetown University, ca. 1970. A mixed group of men and women undertook to integrate the obnoxiously vulgar all-male "Animal Section" that occupied the center-line bleachers at Hoya basketball games. The response: white male rage.
At large antiwar marches, far-lefty men would sometimes show up loaded for bear and try to provoke the police into beating up peaceful demonstrators. The theory was that this would radicalize us by showing us the true colors of The State. It showed me the true colors of the white male far left.
In subsequent years, at every large women's or lesbian/gay demo I attended, pockets of counter-demonstrators could be seen, often red-faced with outrage and carrying signs about Jesus.
I saw a lot of it on TV too, either when it was happening or years later. Go back and watch the films of white people opposing the integration of southern schools -- or busing in Boston. That was the sort of rage that stormed the Capitol on January 6. (There were plenty of white women screaming hatred in those films. Women weren't much in evidence at the Capitol that day. I'm not sure why not.)
Then go back further, to the earlier decades of the twentieth century and the last decades of the nineteenth. In those years white rage was directed almost entirely against Black people, but occasionally also at the white people who supported them. Records of those long-forgotten riots and rampages and lynchings are finally being recovered, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it's happening now. Because Trump didn't come out of nowhere, and too many of us weren't paying attention until we became the targets of that rage. I hope Lucian is right, that "ultimately the assault on the Capitol will turn out to be a good thing for us because it revealed a part of this country that we needed to see." The drive to un-see it is strong, but we can't give in to it.
ahh, again, LKTIV, you've been spot on in describing the maladies of our country.
It's my belief too that the dirty underbelly has always been there, since the land-grabbing colonists, slave traders, native american persecutionists, and up thru the KKK and various offshoots and permutations of white advantagists.
I believe that these vermin in the woodwork kept largely to themselves or in small, contained groups until the internet allowed them to stick their noses out and to start waving their colors.
Soon they could see and be emboldened to find others out there of their creed.
Now, the following is only my personal conspiracy theory, one that early on I'd been afraid to print, thinking some AI search net would send men in black to my door. Now of course these names are safe to put out there.
I think.
I had theorized that Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group, Brad Parscale (via Putin and Russia) data-mined enough info about the internet character profiles of the far flung and disparate tribal individuals to tailor advertisements and robot postings to herd them together in sufficient numbers to win decisive Electoral contests, hence putting Putin's Useful Idiot in office.
And ever-refining their abilities, the enemies of our democracy have since been very active fomenting insurrection as they did on Jan 6.
But I further believe they are not yet done. I don't know if they are done with their useful idiot or if they are grooming another.
I would leave this country if I could. I don’t recognize it anymore. The government is led by stupid and corrupt politicians; this is no longer workable. I’m all for cutting off the southern tier and letting it go…and THEN build a wall at the new border.
Unfortunately, Drumpfers exist all over this country. While cutting off the southern tier worked for the first civil war, that will not work for this one.
Who will enforce the mandate? We have police in major cities suing to defymtye vaccine mandates being issued. Which side do you think they would be on in this division, and do you think they would willingly leave. I don't. I think they would stay and fight.
That’s exactly what their plan is—to take it all, like Nazis. I say, offer them a confederacy if that’s what they want—and get the hell out. It’ll end up like Pakistan and India, but without leaving an area of land to squabble over. Britain and an independent Ireland. If they want to be good neighbors, they’ll have an open border, otherwise, just stay the f&ck out. The dedicated Repugs all go—politicians, police—all of them.
It’s a fantasy. What is actually happening is a fascist takeover and no one has the spine to stop it. That Supreme Court is a stuffed farce; “citizens United” is a lie meant to give corporations votes and money-power. Corruption by the GOP is escalating and unanswered. Outright sedition is given a whitewash and violators only got a slap on the wrist. They should have been hung.
Thank you! I am so glad to see someone besides myself saying that these people are traitors who deserve the death penalty. George Washington hanged traitors, and I don't see why this form of punishment isn't still used for that crime.
These seemingly average folks were enrolled by Trump with his birth certificate nonsense around 10 years ago. He spoke to their long held belief and gave them permission to speak out by voting for him him, and, most recently, to assault our Capitol. They have been there all along, waiting for the very worst of us to come forward.
I can't help but notice how this description of t-Rump fanatics ALSO could describe the millions of otherwise "good" Germans who worshiped Hitler: "…described in superlatives by relatives and friends: perfect neighbor, devout churchgoer, attentive father, good guy." Just as those "good" people's goodness is entirely cancelled out by their adoration of Hitler, so the same good qualities in t-Rump's worshipers are totally negated by their adoration of t-Rump and what that adoration makes them do and consent to being done.
It is a chilling article because of the supposed normalcy of the people who committed these atrocities. Like the Jim Jones cultists who died for him, or the San Diego Area Heaven’s Gate cultists who died for aliens, or the mega church followers who make their pastors rich enough to buy Gulfstreams but won’t pay a nickel in tax to help the hungry among us. They are all victims of snake-oil salesmen. Sad.
The lack of money is the root of all evil: Raise the minimum wage to $14. an hour. Establish rent control as speculators have taken over the rental market and there's no control. Do away with qualified immunity for police and forbid police unions to conceal bad behavior. Create genuine sanctions against foreign tax havens and finally go after the purveyors of bunk on the radio, the internet and TV. Freedom of speech is not a suicide pact. Get serious, and Mitch McConnell and his billionaire friends will take a step back. Bullies are only as powerful as we allow them to be. None of this is easy and there always will be crazy white guys with confederate flags, but they are a minority. Trump is more grifter showman than fascist leader. Only a few Trumper's want to die in the streets, most of them want a better deal in life.
You are onto something here. The dominant American culture spreads everywhere via media and that gives an impression that, though varying perhaps one standard deviation to one side or the other from the mean, there is a homogeneous American culture. There is not. In fact media itself is fragmented. I can travel from Trumpistan to Portlandia just by pressing buttons on my remote.
I've wondered again and again, who the hell *are* these people? How did they stray this far from the heritage they and we presumably share? Actually, not just in the MAGA years, but ever since learning at a state university that although I didn't grow up with them, they hadn't been far away. Lo, in the very same issue of the Times with the harrowing piece Lucian discusses, Joe Klein revisits a 1989 history that sounds astoundingly relevant, "'ALBION’S SEED: FOUR BRITISH FOLKWAYS IN AMERICA,' David Hackett Fischer’s classic history of British migration to colonial America." Given my attention span, it's no wonder the existence of this 946-page book escaped me. Now I hope to take it on. If you didn't know either, look it up. "Joe Klein Explains How the History of Four Centuries Ago Still Shapes American Culture and Politics" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/books/review/joe-klein-explains-how-the-history-of-four-centuries-ago-still-shapes-american-culture-and-politics.html
So true. I think of them as the enemy in our midst. I am quite literally surrounded by them. I would rather know who they are than not!
yes
just this morning on her walk I eased my dog back from a yard which (still) posted a trump pence sign. I didn't want her to be hit with a projectile.
I'm an old white guy and as liberal/progressive as they come. I have two brothers who are also old white guys - and Trumpsters. They (and their wives) have been brainwashed by Fox News, AM hate radio, and the cesspool that is the Facebook algorithm. I mourn my former relationships with them.
Lucian is right - the revanchist, proto-fascist, hateful right wing has always been with us.
Trump gave them permission to come out into the open. Now the internet gives them the ability to organize.
The Republican party is openly anti-democracy. They are welcoming any and all deplorables with an axe to grind. The deplorables are easily manipulated, spoiling for a fight, and heavily armed.
I'm not sure how or if further violence can be prevented but the first band of insurrectionists need to be made examples of.
They've always been there. They were the people in small towns, who grumbled at the loss of their jobs when the corporations sent them overseas to 'them foreigners', who didn't like that 'funny looking Arab family' moving in, who always stood for the National Anthem at the local football game and lost whatever power they had over the years but didn't know it until Trump came into the WH.
They're the neighbors who you know, the friends you often swap jokes with, but they're also the people if you're not the right color, the right religion, the right politics, that will make your life a misery.
And they're the ones Trump depends on for his votes. Staunchly Republican and white, they're also dying by the boatload from Covid because they are the ones who are ignoring the masking and vaccine mandates, who don't believe the virus is real, and who laugh at the rest of us who do.
They're dangerous and they're all over the country-and they're not going away. They're no longer ashamed of being found out. In fact that's why we're seeing them revolting against all that Washington is trying to do to improve our lives, because they know they're no longer in power and really no longer matter.
Ah, Lucian. You’re a treasure.
In its scope and violence, January 6 was shocking, but once the shock wore off, I wasn't surprised. January 6 was the apotheosis of the Trump administration, but Trump himself did not come out of nowhere. I've been thinking about my previous encounters with white rage, especially white male rage. The first was as a freshman at Georgetown University, ca. 1970. A mixed group of men and women undertook to integrate the obnoxiously vulgar all-male "Animal Section" that occupied the center-line bleachers at Hoya basketball games. The response: white male rage.
At large antiwar marches, far-lefty men would sometimes show up loaded for bear and try to provoke the police into beating up peaceful demonstrators. The theory was that this would radicalize us by showing us the true colors of The State. It showed me the true colors of the white male far left.
In subsequent years, at every large women's or lesbian/gay demo I attended, pockets of counter-demonstrators could be seen, often red-faced with outrage and carrying signs about Jesus.
I saw a lot of it on TV too, either when it was happening or years later. Go back and watch the films of white people opposing the integration of southern schools -- or busing in Boston. That was the sort of rage that stormed the Capitol on January 6. (There were plenty of white women screaming hatred in those films. Women weren't much in evidence at the Capitol that day. I'm not sure why not.)
Then go back further, to the earlier decades of the twentieth century and the last decades of the nineteenth. In those years white rage was directed almost entirely against Black people, but occasionally also at the white people who supported them. Records of those long-forgotten riots and rampages and lynchings are finally being recovered, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it's happening now. Because Trump didn't come out of nowhere, and too many of us weren't paying attention until we became the targets of that rage. I hope Lucian is right, that "ultimately the assault on the Capitol will turn out to be a good thing for us because it revealed a part of this country that we needed to see." The drive to un-see it is strong, but we can't give in to it.
ahh, again, LKTIV, you've been spot on in describing the maladies of our country.
It's my belief too that the dirty underbelly has always been there, since the land-grabbing colonists, slave traders, native american persecutionists, and up thru the KKK and various offshoots and permutations of white advantagists.
I believe that these vermin in the woodwork kept largely to themselves or in small, contained groups until the internet allowed them to stick their noses out and to start waving their colors.
Soon they could see and be emboldened to find others out there of their creed.
Now, the following is only my personal conspiracy theory, one that early on I'd been afraid to print, thinking some AI search net would send men in black to my door. Now of course these names are safe to put out there.
I think.
I had theorized that Cambridge Analytica, SCL Group, Brad Parscale (via Putin and Russia) data-mined enough info about the internet character profiles of the far flung and disparate tribal individuals to tailor advertisements and robot postings to herd them together in sufficient numbers to win decisive Electoral contests, hence putting Putin's Useful Idiot in office.
And ever-refining their abilities, the enemies of our democracy have since been very active fomenting insurrection as they did on Jan 6.
But I further believe they are not yet done. I don't know if they are done with their useful idiot or if they are grooming another.
I would leave this country if I could. I don’t recognize it anymore. The government is led by stupid and corrupt politicians; this is no longer workable. I’m all for cutting off the southern tier and letting it go…and THEN build a wall at the new border.
Unfortunately, Drumpfers exist all over this country. While cutting off the southern tier worked for the first civil war, that will not work for this one.
Let there be a mandate—those who stay have to pledge allegiance to this democracy. Enforce the laws for treason/sedition.
Who will enforce the mandate? We have police in major cities suing to defymtye vaccine mandates being issued. Which side do you think they would be on in this division, and do you think they would willingly leave. I don't. I think they would stay and fight.
That’s exactly what their plan is—to take it all, like Nazis. I say, offer them a confederacy if that’s what they want—and get the hell out. It’ll end up like Pakistan and India, but without leaving an area of land to squabble over. Britain and an independent Ireland. If they want to be good neighbors, they’ll have an open border, otherwise, just stay the f&ck out. The dedicated Repugs all go—politicians, police—all of them.
It’s a fantasy. What is actually happening is a fascist takeover and no one has the spine to stop it. That Supreme Court is a stuffed farce; “citizens United” is a lie meant to give corporations votes and money-power. Corruption by the GOP is escalating and unanswered. Outright sedition is given a whitewash and violators only got a slap on the wrist. They should have been hung.
I agree. I just don't think youmsee going to find enough people willing to enforce your proposal.
Thank you! I am so glad to see someone besides myself saying that these people are traitors who deserve the death penalty. George Washington hanged traitors, and I don't see why this form of punishment isn't still used for that crime.
got my bugout planned. vancouver, b.c. hope they don't build THEIR wall til I'm safe on that side
These seemingly average folks were enrolled by Trump with his birth certificate nonsense around 10 years ago. He spoke to their long held belief and gave them permission to speak out by voting for him him, and, most recently, to assault our Capitol. They have been there all along, waiting for the very worst of us to come forward.
I can't help but notice how this description of t-Rump fanatics ALSO could describe the millions of otherwise "good" Germans who worshiped Hitler: "…described in superlatives by relatives and friends: perfect neighbor, devout churchgoer, attentive father, good guy." Just as those "good" people's goodness is entirely cancelled out by their adoration of Hitler, so the same good qualities in t-Rump's worshipers are totally negated by their adoration of t-Rump and what that adoration makes them do and consent to being done.
It is a chilling article because of the supposed normalcy of the people who committed these atrocities. Like the Jim Jones cultists who died for him, or the San Diego Area Heaven’s Gate cultists who died for aliens, or the mega church followers who make their pastors rich enough to buy Gulfstreams but won’t pay a nickel in tax to help the hungry among us. They are all victims of snake-oil salesmen. Sad.
Don't waste your pity on those people by calling them sad. The t-Rumpsters are nothing but vicious bigots and deserve NO sympathy from anyone!
Audiea1 min ago
The lack of money is the root of all evil: Raise the minimum wage to $14. an hour. Establish rent control as speculators have taken over the rental market and there's no control. Do away with qualified immunity for police and forbid police unions to conceal bad behavior. Create genuine sanctions against foreign tax havens and finally go after the purveyors of bunk on the radio, the internet and TV. Freedom of speech is not a suicide pact. Get serious, and Mitch McConnell and his billionaire friends will take a step back. Bullies are only as powerful as we allow them to be. None of this is easy and there always will be crazy white guys with confederate flags, but they are a minority. Trump is more grifter showman than fascist leader. Only a few Trumper's want to die in the streets, most of them want a better deal in life.
ReplyDelete
You are onto something here. The dominant American culture spreads everywhere via media and that gives an impression that, though varying perhaps one standard deviation to one side or the other from the mean, there is a homogeneous American culture. There is not. In fact media itself is fragmented. I can travel from Trumpistan to Portlandia just by pressing buttons on my remote.
Trump gave them their voice. Thank you Lucian for this important over view
Being part of a mob has a way of overcoming our inhibitions and we do things that would never occur to us under "normal" circumstances.
Excellent article.
I've wondered again and again, who the hell *are* these people? How did they stray this far from the heritage they and we presumably share? Actually, not just in the MAGA years, but ever since learning at a state university that although I didn't grow up with them, they hadn't been far away. Lo, in the very same issue of the Times with the harrowing piece Lucian discusses, Joe Klein revisits a 1989 history that sounds astoundingly relevant, "'ALBION’S SEED: FOUR BRITISH FOLKWAYS IN AMERICA,' David Hackett Fischer’s classic history of British migration to colonial America." Given my attention span, it's no wonder the existence of this 946-page book escaped me. Now I hope to take it on. If you didn't know either, look it up. "Joe Klein Explains How the History of Four Centuries Ago Still Shapes American Culture and Politics" https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/books/review/joe-klein-explains-how-the-history-of-four-centuries-ago-still-shapes-american-culture-and-politics.html
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