Rising fascism in the US

(Thanks for that passage. I don't wish to derail this thread – I heard him interviewed back then and I was disappointed that, with all the real world problems and with his ability to clearly identify them, he was wasting his time in a cultural sideshow sideshow. If he'd called his book, "My Argument with Hitchins, Dawkins, and Harris" and left it there I'd probably have forgotten it by now. There's really nothing intrinsic to non-belief either.)

That's a very good post, hightor. I think perhaps I ought to clarify my earlier post to Lash where I said we really do grasp what has happened and how the present situation has come about.

By this, I was referring to a particular element - the rise of the conservative movement extremism in the US and it's effective current domination of the GOP. But that particular element exists within a broad complex of other influences, many of which you speak to.

I didn't mean to oversimplify, just to focus on a key element which we do understand quite well. Hoping that's clear.

Trump Dangles Pardons To His 2024 Insurrectionist Allies
By Jonathan Chait

When Donald Trump has probed the American political system for weaknesses that would allow him to subvert its democratic character, the tool he has returned to again and again is the presidential pardon. The pardon is the ultimate constitutional wormhole. It allows the chief executive to solicit almost any crime, a power which, in turn, destroys whatever protections offered by the rest of the framework designed by the Founders to restrain the office.

Trump returned to that power at his rally last night. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” he said at a Texas rally. “We will treat them fairly, and if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

During his term in office, Trump’s polling was quickly (and we now realize, inaccurately) dismal. Republican elites expected he would lose, the party would undergo a course correction, and future success would come to those Republicans who had the patience to keep their distance from his grossest excesses.

The January 6 insurrection was led by a militant radical vanguard acting on a plan that aligned closely with Trump’s own scheme to secure an unelected second term. The plot failed because it lacked broader party support: on that day, even the likes of Donald Trump Jr. and Sean Hannity blanched at the spectacle of a violent seizure of power.

But Trump himself never flinched. Instead he calculated, correctly, that he could force the party to move toward his own position. In the months that followed the insurrection, Republicans drew and then erased a series of red lines. First they would demand Trump’s resignation. When he refused to resign, they vowed to impeach him; they decided impeachment was unnecessary because Trump would vanish on his own; when he refused to vanish, they promised to support an investigation into the attack; then they decided to oppose the investigation as well.

These decisions have set off a vicious cycle within the party. As elite Republican resistance to Trump’s lies about the election disintegrated, the party’s rank and file came to support them, which in turn has made it all the more difficult for any Republican official to resist any element of his alt-narrative.

The party’s moving stance on the insurrection can be observed on both its ends. On the right wing, Trump’s loyalists have turned the insurrectionists into martyrs and developed new conspiracy theories to deny the crime. On its left side (“left” being defined here as simply demanding adherence to written laws), critics of the insurrection like Adam Kinzinger, Anthony Gonzales, and Liz Cheney are being hunted to extinction.

Republican officials have learned that defying Trump is not an investment in their future, but a near-guarantee of their own defeat. This context will shape the choices Trump’s loyalists will make during and after his next campaign, should he run.

As shambolic as Trump’s efforts to undermine the election may have been, the pardon power is a proven weapon to undermine the rule of law. He dangled and then issued pardons to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, his campaign back-channels to, respectively, the country that hacked his opponents’ emails and the organ that leaked them. Because Manafort and Stone both refused to cooperate with investigators, the ultimate extent of their culpability remains unprovable. As a result, however, the entire Republican party and even many outside observers concluded he has therefore been proven innocent.

Just consider the matter from Trump’s perspective. A few years ago, his own lawyers were advising him not to pardon Manafort. Such an act was considered potentially impeachable, and at minimum would make him look extremely guilty. Instead, to most of the world, it made him look innocent. Trump has little reason to see any danger of backlash by using this tool to reward his allies. And he has made clear that he views all the insurrectionists — including Ashli Babbit, who tried to smash through one of the last lines of defense where Congress was hiding — as allies.

The danger of his latest promise of pardons is not retrospective, it is prospective. The MAGA movement understands they have Trump’s full permission to secure his victory by any means necessary. Should he win, all their crimes will be pardoned. The only legal risk they face will come if they fail.

John Nicholson was not most people’s idea of a god walking on Earth — unless it was the vengeful, Old Testament kind. The British army officer spent months as a prisoner of war in Kabul in 1842, then found the body of his brother mutilated in the Khyber Pass. At that point, his disdain for the people of South Asia hardened into hatred. Yet as he ascended the ranks of the army in northern India, observers noticed that his subjects did not merely tolerate their conqueror; they worshiped him. A devout circle of 250 Sikh sepoys trailed him everywhere, refusing government pay. They crept into his tent at night to prostrate themselves as Nicholson sorted through imperial paperwork and tried to ignore them.

Some years later, a Hindu holy man began preaching that Nicholson was an avatar of Brahma, a god he called “Nikal Seyn.” Muslims claimed that he was the reincarnation of the prophet Muhammad’s martyred grandson. When this ecumenical mix of worshipers prayed at Nicholson’s feet, he ordered them whipped, which only increased the fervor of their devotion. The god-man died during the Indian Mutiny in 1857; some of his followers were so distraught, they killed themselves.

The cult of Nikal Seyn is one of many stories that historian Anna Della Subin traces in her first book, “Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine.” It’s a fascinating exploration of the paradoxes of humanity’s religious instincts — and the power of followers to deify flawed mortals against their will. From South Pacific islanders’ worship of Prince Philip in the 1970s to Captain James Cook’s brutal end in 1779 at the hands of Hawaiians who seemed to take him for a death-defying deity, her narrative leaps backward and forward in time and finds the same sequence again and again: imperial subjects who extend and twist the logic of domination, declaring the White man in uniform to be a god — although it is not always clear why.

There are superficial deviations from this pattern: Jamaicans who marveled at National Geographic photographs of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and built the Rastafarian religion around him; an 11-year-old Indian boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, forced by White Theosophists to play messiah. Crowds of Mohandas Gandhi’s followers elevated him to divine status — to the horror of the Raj and Gandhi himself. Reports circulated that merely invoking his name could help a devotee locate a lost wallet or multiply the livestock in his flock. “Despite his belief in sacrifice, renunciation and non-harm, the Mahatma became a wrathful, vengeful god in the tales of his acts, raining feces on a lawyer who defied his call for noncooperation,” Subin writes.

But these cases, too, underscore Subin’s key themes: religion as a coping mechanism of the oppressed; White Protestant condescension toward colonized people deemed primitive; the power of followers to bestow charisma, regardless of a leader’s innate allure.

Subin is a gifted storyteller, especially when she dives into lesser-known tales of Indian colonial subjects plying the shrines of dead British officers with brandy and cigars, or a Japanese prophetess haunted by visions of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. While none of these cults evolved into major religious movements (with the exception of Rastafarianism), they shed new light on the dynamics of colonialism and misunderstandings between Westerners and the parts of the world they sought to dominate, or at least comprehend and partially control. To declare a foreigner to be an avatar of a Hindu deity is not at all the same thing as accepting him as a new Jehovah or Christ; it is as much an act of assimilation as subservience.

Subin deftly exposes the human urge to worship something, anything — especially forces we can’t understand. Underneath this rich narrative, however, lies a familiar formula and a long-standing debate about what religion really is. “Accidental Gods” follows an ideological playbook popular since the mainstreaming of Michel Foucault’s ideas in the 1980s: one that reduces religious and cultural phenomena to a story about power, usually racialized power.

“The political comes into being when we distinguish between men and gods, a line as primordial as that between friend and foe, and as old as Adam’s fall,” Subin writes. “Who decides who is a deity, and who is a man? Political power is the ability to create something out of nothing, just as God once labored to bring light and dry earth from the void.” The study of religion is what Subin calls “mythopolitics” — “how power is so often rooted in myth.” Pull back the curtain of complex rituals and mystical encounters, and you find merely another venue in which bad guys with power find ways to control good guys without it.

Religious practice is simultaneously at the heart of this book and a surface phenomenon: in the West, a pious varnish on imperialist prejudices, or in the East, a state of false consciousness that blinds believers to their own subjugation. Subin seems ambivalent. She defends these cults against Westerners’ mockery and insistence on putting unfamiliar ideas into Protestant boxes. Yet she also dwells on their tragedy, the agony of so much righteous energy channeled into worship of White male oppressors rather than revolution.

It is telling that “Accidental Gods” does not follow a strictly chronological order but jumps around in time. Toward the end of the book, after we meet an Indian farmer who carries around an icon of Donald Trump, a final section called “White Gods” brings chronological whiplash: Subin takes us centuries back to Columbus, Cortes and Cook and the self-serving myths of conquistador godhood. The organizing principle of “Accidental Gods” is not historical but theological. It culminates in the unveiling of white supremacy as the original sin that explains all human experience.

Former president Donald Trump suggested in a statement Sunday night that then-Vice President Mike Pence should have “overturned” the election on Jan. 6, 2021, as he presided over the counting of electoral college votes by Congress.

Trump has expressed frustration before that Pence did not use his role to try to reject the votes of several states that Joe Biden won. But the language in Sunday’s statement was among Trump’s most explicit in publicly stating his desire. ...

“If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?” Trump said in his statement. “Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”

There has been no evidence of widespread fraud in any states in which Biden prevailed, despite repeated claims by Trump to the contrary.

... ... ...

For a nation that’s awakened every morning for nearly two years to a Groundhog Day of pandemic and paranoia, the scenes from Donald Trump’s latest comeback rally on Saturday at a fairground in the East Texas flatlands of Conroe could certainly numb the American mind with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

The mile-long line of Trump fanatics, braving the January prairie chill to see the twice-impeached ex-president and passing rows of vendors, including the occasional Confederate flag. Then the viral clips of the true believers — the woman in her Trump 2024 hat expounding that the “Joe Biden” currently in the White House is fake and that the real one was assassinated at Gitmo in March 2019, another woman peddling a book containing all of Trump’s tweets before he was banned from Twitter, and the guy peddling doses of the quack COVID-19 cure Ivermectin while lashing out at anyone wearing a mask for trying to “save Grandma.”

As darkness fell and the crowd swelled to the thousands, the sound system blared the late Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the same tune that had electrified Trump’s most diehard followers at the D.C. Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021. Over at the zealously pro-Trump One America News Network, or OANN, analysts awaited the 45th president as their antidote to what they called “the divisiveness” of President Biden’s first year, insisting in the words of Liz Harrington that “Trump will unite us.” But more mainstream outlets like CNN were busy obsessing on the possible retirement of football’s Tom Brady, having decided — wisely — after Jan. 6 not to cover Trump’s words live but to only revisit his rallies if he actually makes any news.

Hey, guys ... Trump made some news! Unfortunately.

In fact, the man who’d occupied the White House little more than one year ago delivered one of the most incendiary and most dangerous speeches in America’s 246-year history. It included an appeal for all-out mayhem in the streets to thwart the U.S. justice system and prevent Trump from going to jail, as the vise tightens from overlapping criminal probes in multiple jurisdictions. And it also featured a stunning campaign promise — that Trump would look to abuse the power of the presidency to pardon those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

It’s impossible for me to understate or downplay the importance of this moment, and I hope that my colleagues in the media — who too often over the last year have craved or even pretended about a return to the politics of “normal,” when we are nowhere near normal — will wake up and see this. Of course, Biden’s presidency deserves our full scrutiny, with praise for what’s gone right (an economic boom) and criticism for what’s gone wrong (broken promises on climate and student debt). But while Biden is seeking to restore democratic norms, a shadow ex-president — unpunished so far for his role in an attempted coup on Jan. 6 — is rebuilding a cult-like movement in the heartland of America, with all the personal grievance and appeals to Brownshirts-style violence that marked the lowest moments of the 20th century. On the 89th anniversary of the date (Jan. 30, 1933) that Adolf Hitler — rehabilitated after his attempted coup — assumed power in Germany, are we repeating the past’s mistakes of complacency and underestimation?

Amid the predictable reiterations of the Big Lie that Biden’s legitimate 2020 election was stolen and his other narcissistic blather, Trump’s lengthy speech in Conroe contained three elements that marked a dangerous escalation of his post-presidential, post-Jan. 6 rhetoric. Let’s digest and analyze each of them:

— For the first time, Trump — if somehow elected again in 2024 and upon returning to the White House in January 2025 — dangled pardons before people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he told the rally, adding: “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” The statement raises as many questions as it answers — for example, was he including many or all of the more than 700 mostly low-level insurrectionists, or sending a message to his higher-up friends like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows and others who could be subject to criminal probes?

But two things are clear. The first is that Trump — facing probes over Jan. 6 in Georgia and possibly from the U.S. Justice Department — is committing a form of obstruction of justice in full public view, since the future possibility of a pardon offers an incentive to stay on the ex-president’s good side and not testify against him. The other is that abusing the constitutional power of a presidential pardon — intended by the framers for grace and true clemency — to clear the jails of his political allies is banana republic-type stuff, the ultimate rock bottom made inevitable when Trump was allowed to abuse his pardon powers while in office 2017-21.

— In a sign that Trump is increasingly worried about the overlapping probes — the remarkable evidence uncovered by the House Jan. 6 Committee that will likely be referred to the Justice Department, the Fulton County grand jury investigation into Georgia election tampering, and the unrelated probe into dodgy Trump family finances in New York, he explicitly called for mob action if charges are lodged in any of these jurisdictions. Said Trump: “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had ... in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”

Of course, the last time that Trump used his megaphone to summon a large crowd (”Will be wild!” he famously tweeted) was last Jan. 6, and we all remember how that “protest” turned out. Experts call Trump’s practices here “stochastic terrorism” — broad statements in the media that are meant to stoke spontaneous acts of violence, in this case to intimidate the prosecutors or even the grand jurors who are weighing charges against Trump. While his Jan. 6 exhortations were the prelude to an attempted coup, Trump’s incendiary remarks in Conroe sound like a call for a new civil war — naming both the locales and the casus belli.

— But let’s take a step back and drill down on arguably the most important and alarming word in Trump’s statement: “Racist.” At first blush, it seems to come out of left field, in the sense of what could be racist about looking into a white man’s role in an attempted coup or his cooked financial books? Except that it happens that three of the key prosecutors investigating Trump — the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, and new Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg — as well as the chair of the House committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, are all Black.

Thus, it’s both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president’s cult. In tying skin color into his call for mobs in Atlanta or New York, Trump is seeking to start a race war — no different, really, from Dylann Roof. Roof used a .45-caliber Glock handgun, while Trump uses a podium and the services of fawning right-wing cable TV networks. Sadly, the latter method could prove more effective.

What happened in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday night was not politics. A politician seeking to regain the White House might craft a narrative around Biden’s struggles with inflation or with COVID-19 and make a case — no matter how absurd, given Trump’s failings on the pandemic and elsewhere — that he could do better for the voters. But increasingly Trump is less a politician and more the leader of a politics-adjacent cult. He does not want to make America great again so much as he wants to keep Donald Trump out of prison, and the most narcissistic POTUS of all time is willing to rip the United States in two to make this happen.

Trump’s chief weapons are fear and intimidation. To save American democracy, the people tasked with getting to the bottom of a former president’s high crimes and misdemeanors — on Capitol Hill and in those key courthouses — must be ready for the violence that Trump is inciting, and must summon the courage to finish their job. My fear is that Trump’s speech in Conroe will live in infamy — but the only reason it happened at all is because we have not held Trump to account for attempting to wreck American democracy on Jan. 6 ... not yet. Now, Trump has told us in no uncertain terms how he plans to break the nation this time. We can act forcefully to stop his new insurrection and punish his past crimes — or we can sit back and let the comet of autocracy strike.

The Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale has become a bestseller on Amazon, after a Tennessee school board banned it.

[...]

As news of the McMinn ban spread, Maus shot on to multiple top 10 lists in Amazon book categories. As of Monday morning, The Complete Maus was second in Amazon’s overall bestseller category. In history, it ranked first. In second world war history, Maus I, the first installment of the novel, also ranked No 1. Variations took the first, second and third spots as bestsellers in literary graphic novels.

Efforts have also emerged to make Maus more accessible to students. One professor at a North Carolina college offered eighth-grade and high-school students in McMinn county a free online class.

“In response to Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II being removed from the schools by McMinn county, Tennessee school board members, I am offering this free online course for any McMinn county eighth-grade or high school students interested in reading these books with me,” said Scott Denham of Davidson College.

“I have taught Spiegelman’s books many times in my courses on the Holocaust over many years,” he added, on his website.

Richard Davis, owner of the Nirvana Comics bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, offered to loan The Complete Maus to any student. Davis also set up a GoFundMe campaign to buy additional copies. Created with a target of $20,000, it had raised more than $80,000 by Monday.

“Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece is one of the most important, impactful and influential graphic novels of all time,” the page said. “We believe it is a must-read for everyone.”

like serve the goddam people.

"We can act forcefully to stop his new insurrection and punish his past crimes — or we can sit back and let the comet of autocracy strike."

So... what do you think will happen? I don't know enough about the various players to hazard a guess, but I'm interested in others' opinions.

So... what do you think will happen?