Image by Susan Wilkinson.

Jonathan E.: Misplaced some data?

Computer Center Archivist: “The whole of the 13th century. Misplaced the computers, several conventional computers. We can’t find them. We’re always moving things around, getting organized, my assistants and I. This – this is Zero’s fault – Zero, he’s the world’s file cabinet; pity, poor old 13th century.

—Rollerball

In the original 1975 film Rollerball, the misplacement of history was a mistake, the “disappearing” of the 13th century an act of curatorial incompetence, not political calculation.

The Trump administration’s erasures are a deliberate whitewash of inconvenient American historical truths to create its vision of a white male cistopia. Currently, these erasures from federal websites include but are not limited to:

・William Harvey Carney, a former enslaved person who joined the Union Army during the Civil War and protected the American flag, became the first African American awarded the Medal of Honor

・the roughly1,000 Tuskegee Airmen who flew 1,578 combat missions and 15,533

sorties over Italy and Germany during the Second World War

・the 400-500 Native American code talkers whose codes, based on their Indigenous languages, were never broken by the enemy during WWII

・Ira Hayes, a Native American, one of six Americans who raised the American flag at

Iwo Jima

・the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed primarily of second-generation Japanese Americans, the most decorated unit in American military history

・Jackie Robinson, who, during his stint in the Army was ordered to sit in the back of

an Army bus and was threatened with a court-martial when he refused

・civil rights activist and Army veteran Medgar Evers, recipient of the Good Conduct Medal, European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal

・information on black^[1] and female soldiers interred at Arlington National Cemetery

The list of disappeared grows daily. So far, the only WASPs deleted have been the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots. Nor are these erasures restricted to race. Trans people, including Marsha P. Johnson and other transgender activists of color, have been erased from the Stonewall National Monument website; the National Park Service website has removed the TQ+ from LGBTQ+, diminishing what the site disingenuously celebrates as a “milestone in the quest for LGB civil rights” of sexual minorities by 3/5th. Dredd Scott, a member of another once fractionalized community whose rights were not recognized, must be spinning in his grave.

Instead of celebrating diversity, the Pentagon’s new policy is to scrub it from its websites – even an eponymously “gay” bomber. If this facepalm-inducing lunacy seems absurd to you, brace yourself. It’s not hard to imagine a future where even the iconic Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird is scrubbed from Air Force websites or “low-IQ” black stealth fighters, are replaced with white ones. After all, wasn’t it an incompetent Blackhawk helicopter that collided with an airliner over Washington, D.C.? Can you really put such idiocy past an administration that expects the public to believe that Trump was actually referring to the original 1798 Alien Enemies Act when he denied signing the executive order he issued to justify the deportation of immigrants to El Salvador?

This is what happens when your country is just not that into you – and, frankly, never has been. I suppose one could take some comfort in the fact that in the wake of public outrage, the Pentagon restored these expurgated items, claiming the deletions were not deliberate but simply a “mistake,” the work of errant algorithms. In the nuclear age, however, “oops,” “my bad” excuses cannot be tolerated; sometimes there are no second chances and the genie cannot be returned to the lamp (though one imagines in the age of MAGA-DOGE that if the genie were black, as Will Smith was in Aladdin and Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing, not only would the redcaps and Elonites desperately shove him back into the lamp but launch it at the sun on one of Musk’s “Starships,” provided it survives take-off). But this begs the question: why was the information targeted for deletion in the first place, and why did the DOD decide to comply?

Embarrassed by the public backlash, DOD officials quickly restored the links, but the damage had already been done. Even if these denials were plausible, even if the AI algorithm proved to be as stupid and racist as its users, someone in the chain of command still had to approve it, suggesting that rather than opposing the new policy, they sought an expedient means of implementing it. This should give pause to those who believe that anyone in today’s Pentagon has the spine to disobey an illegal order, particularly one issued by its commander-in-chief, the prospect of resistance made even more remote by Trump’s purge of judge advocate general (JAG) officers whose job is to ensure that commanders follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s white Christian nationalist DUI-hire Secretary of Defense, justified the JAG removals claiming had they remained they would have been “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Could it not be any clearer?

Hegseth has made it his mission to demonize D.E.I. policies:

I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength. I think our strength is our unity, our strength is our shared purpose, regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race, in this department we will treat everyone equally. We will treat everyone with fairness. We will treat everyone with respect. And we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission. That’s how it has been. That’s how it will be.

In other words, they will treat everyone as white until proven otherwise, white being America’s default mode, the unquestioned qualification for the recognition of history, personhood, and national worth.

Despite his self-avowed quest for national unity, Hegseth is complicit in policies that polarize the nation and target people of color, women, and trans people precisely because they are the “wrong” race and gender. White cistory is the only history and, thus, indelible. As far as respect goes, he has shown how much he respects women by disparaging their military service, writing in his book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, “Women cannot physically meet the same standards as men… Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.” Even if we accept this simplistic binary (one the President has made official by executive fiat), in which only men keep us free, where are the “Dads” who take risks to stand on principles this nation has struggled to realize rather than cave to the dictates of a whiny, incoherent man-child? Not, it appears, in the nation’s daddified, “positive masculinity”-infused armed forces. A few good men? Find them!

As for Hegseth’s view of blacks in the military, as Mike Prysner has recently written in CounterPunch, he has issued orders banning Black History Month activities and black student groups from military academies, fired former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles Q. Brown, and restoring the names of confederate traitors to Army bases.

However, the disappearing of black history is not confined to the military; it extends to America’s favorite pastime – baseball not racism – as well, with the MLB (that’s Major League Baseball, not Men Lacking Backbone, although it’s pretty much the same thing) announcing it will obey Trump’s orders and remove “diversity” from its Careers homepage. Meanwhile, a bevy of companies, as diverse, excluding their collective corporate whiteness, as the diversity they anxiously disavow – Victoria’s Secret, Warner Brothers, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, PBS, Google, Amazon, Amtrak, and the Smithsonian, ^[2] to name only a few – scramble to kill or “rebrand” their D.E.I. programs. In our colorblind-by-decree republic, how truly white of them.

But we also know the real concern of this “need to clean house,” as Hegseth has put it, is the fragility of the white male ego. “Turns out,” he writes, “all the ‘diversity’ recruiting messages made certain kids — white kids — feel like they’re not wanted.” As if all this historical cleansing will make kids of color and their transgender sisters and brothers feel right at home. Their fragility in a society that refuses to recognize their achievements let alone their humanity doesn’t matter and, ill-fated correctives aside, never did, which is why we are where we are.

Hegseth’s use of the phrase “to clean house” is revealing. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously defined “dirt” as “matter out of place.” In the minds of Trumpists, blacks, immigrants of color, women, and trans people are dirt that must be swept away to return America to its original pristine heteronormative whiteness. Make America Clean Again.

Hegseth, like White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who inadvertently spoke truth to corruption when she declared with characteristically smug Karenicity that the Trump administration is “fighting law and order,” has also let slip the truth:

I don’t have to tell you all that we live in very dangerous times in a world with ascendant powers who, if they had their way, would love to be on the rise and reject the forces and capabilities and beliefs of the West. America is at the forefront of that.

Ironically, under Hegseth and Trump, America stands at the forefront of rejecting the capabilities and beliefs of the west, though, sadly, this is not the first and only time. The point is made clear in a meme sent to me by a friend that shows the knowing, war-painted face of a Native American man above the caption: “THIS IS WHY YOU LEARN HISTORY. SO YOU’RE NOT SURPRISED WHEN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BREAKS PROMISES.” Assuming, of course, that this history will be taught.

As I wrote in CounterPunch in 2021, ”Until Americans realize that the contributions black and other people of color have made to America are inextricable from the nation’s history, they will continue to live in a comforting state of denial that erases anything that does not square with the fraudulent, monochromatic mythology white America manufactures to celebrate itself.

Myth, not history and memory, is the main concern of Elon Musk, who recently stated in an interview with FOX News’ Sean Hannity:

I thought the left, you know, Democrats, were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring. And yet they’re burning down cars. They’re firebombing dealerships. They’re firing bullets into dealerships. They’re just smashing up Teslas. Tesla is a peaceful company. We’ve never done anything awful. Uh, I’ve never done anything awful. I’ve always done productive things. So, uh, I think we just have, uh, a deranged … there’s some kind of mental illness thing going on here, ’cause this doesn’t make any sense.

Following the attacks on Telsa dealerships, another FOX News host, Harris Faulkner, hypothetically wondered if the protestors who vandalize Teslas would receive the death penalty if their owners “leave their children and pets in [their] cars” (itself a crime in several states). Apparently, Harris is unaware of the 232 confirmed cases of self-immolating Teslas (83 of which resulted in fatalities) and the non-hypothetical 674 deaths caused by Teslas. So if we’re going to dish out death penalties, shouldn’t Musk walk the green mile, too?

But Musk’s body count is not limited to those produced by his vehicular experiments. Somehow, he and his cheerleaders fail to acknowledge that his evisceration of USAID and his defunding of cancer research will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. A Boston University study estimates that internationally over 10,000 people have died of tuberculosis and tens of thousands more will contract the disease and die because of cuts to USAID’s tuberculosis prevention and response program. Similarly, it estimates that domestically over 28,000 will die because of cuts to Medicaid. Faulkner, however, is not recommending the death penalty for the perpetrators of these murders.

Despite these facts, Musk contends that Republicans are the “real” party of empathy and caring that have “never done anything awful.” Musk himself has never, ever done anything awful. He has simply been prone to misinterpretation and “awkward,” “autistic” “accidents”: A Nazi salute here, an endorsement of a far-right nationalist German political party there, a post that describes “as actual truth” an antisemitic statement proclaiming, Jews “as pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”

According to Musk’s father, growing up in apartheid South Africa, young Elon befriended “his black servants.” Today, he befriends twenty-five-year-old Marko Elez, the reinstated DOGE employee who bragged that he, Elez, “was racist before it was cool,” opined that he “would not mind if Gaza and Israel were wiped off the face of the earth,” and advocated the “normalization of Indian hate.” This last statement is apparently endorsed by Vice President JD Vance, who doesn’t think stupid posts “should ruin a kid’s [Elez was 24 at the time] life,” a rubric that Vance also appears to apply to the 78-year-old man-child he serves when he isn’t allegedly boffing ottomans or awkwardly telling audiences that Usha, his Indian-American wife, “has to smile, laugh, and celebrate … anything I say, no matter how crazy.”

No, Musk has never done anything awful, although, the victims of DOGE’s fraudulent “cost cutting” would likely disagree. If they could speak, the 1,5000 animals killed in his Neuralink experiments would probably beg to differ. As would the 6,000 black Tesla workers who filed a class action lawsuit against the company charging racism. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has sued Tesla for racial harassment and retaliation.

This is the same EEOC whose two Democratic members Trump fired, an act that has left it without a quorum since federal law requires no more than three individuals from the same political party to serve on the five-member commission.” Today, it has only two members, Trump-designated Acting Chair Andrea Lucas and Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, a Biden appointee. Under Trump and Musk, the EEOC, a nominally “independent” federal agency, now toting the MAGA line, warns that D.E.I. policies may be illegal.

There was a time when diversity was not anathema in America. Thirty-seven years ago, Mobil Oil took out a newspaper ad celebrating American diversity in response to racist statements uttered in 1986 by Yasuhiro Nakasone, then Japan’s nationalistic prime minister, that blamed blacks, Mexicans, and Hispanics for lowering America’s intelligence levels and in 1988 by Finance Minister Michio Watanabe, who suggested that black financial responsibility was a cause of America’s economic decline. The ad, proclaiming, “Our diversity is a strength: Let’s value it,” showed a round wooden puzzle with some pieces removed. “The American workforce,” it began, “is rapidly changing. Women, minorities, and immigrants now account for about 90 percent of the growth in the labor force. By the year 2000, they’ll represent about 60% of all the country’s workers.” It concludes, “Diversity makes good social sense. It makes good business sense. It makes America better.”

Three and a half decades later, corporate America seems less sure, more spineless. Today, as Trump, Musk, and DOGE dismantle D.E.I. policies, corporate America sits on its hands, thinking of ways to “rebrand” to the nomenclature to get around the algorithm that triggers website disappearances. Instead of standing up to the bullies, universities like Columbia collapse like dominoes, fearing the loss of federal grants. Mainstream broadcasters capitulate for fear of being sued, shifting around or outright firing black and minority anchors in the hope that their move to the right-adjacent “center” will increase their ratings and hat it will mollify the redcaps.

Where are the corporate ads against Trump’s anti-D.E.I. purge? Apparently, corporate America will call out racist foreign politicians but not domestic ones, particularly those who, when they aren’t out efficiently wasting taxpayer dollars cheating on the golf course, occupy the Oval Office. Tellingly, companies once embraced D.E.I. because they thought it was good for business (and, in fact, it was and is) – not because it was the right thing to do to solve America’s intransigent social and economic inequality. Now they abandon it to retain government largesse. Rather than follow any moral compass, they follow the money. Well, that’s capitalism for you. Or is that against you?

Viewing the Mobil Oil ad at the time, I wondered whether the puzzle was coming together or falling apart.

Now, three decades later, I know.

Notes

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

[2] This is not the first time the Smithsonian has engaged in historical cleansing. In 1994, in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII, a planned exhibition of the Enola Gay, one of two B-29 bombers that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, its National Air and Space Museum underwent its own historical cleansing. The Smithsonian removed discussions about the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to protests from veteran groups and conservative members of Congress who claimed the exhibition portrayed Japanese as victims and brought the war to a quick end. In 2003, historians protested again when a newly planned exhibit featuring the bomber failed to address the controversy surrounding the bombings and their devastating consequences. Today, the National Air and Space Museum website provides information on the bomber that, while briefly acknowledging previous protests and debates about past exhibits, primarily focuses on the technical aspects of the aircraft and does not delve into the details of the bombings and their human toll. These events took place, however, before the bomber was “outed.”

The post Erasure, Historical Cleansing, and the Disappeared appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.

An AI-generated image shared on Twitter by the Republican-controlled United States House Committee on the Judiciary on September 9, later retweeted by Elon Musk, with the caption “Protect our ducks and kittens in Ohio!”

The Jews and Hitler come to mind
The thought of slavery far behind
But white paranoia is here to stay
The white boy’s scheming night and day

—Gil Scott-Heron, “The King Alfred Plan” (1972)

“This is your choice America. “If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. Simple as that. Elect Joe Biden and America becomes the Third World. Elect Donald Trump, and America remains America. That’s it, America. Two choices. Choose your future: Third World or an American Century.”

—Stephen Miller

“If you import the Third World into your country, you are going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. It’s not racist, it’s just fact.”

—Donald Trump Jr., original thinker and rumored founder of Talking Point USA

Turning on the news (an increasingly depressing addiction) is like tuning in to an episode of the late, great Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, but without the moralistic denouement.

In 1967, novelist John A. Williams wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, in which he mentioned the King Alfred Plan, a CIA plan to relocate America’s black population to concentration camps that was inspired by the McCarren Internal Security Act of 1950 and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations from 1956 and 1971. The King Alfred Plan is fictional.However, Trump’s plans to massively detain and deport “illegal” immigrants are more than just “concepts,” as portions of Project 2025 make clear, and his threats to impose martial law and jail his political opponents suggest that those plans are not limited to “illegals.”

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they for the Haitians….” You get the idea.

The problem is that to realize this scenario for the 21st century requires a new rationale. With the rise of the media-infotainment complex, internal revolution no longer looms as a perceived threat. A new, imaginary threat must be created in its place, one that ignites racist fears rekindled by the gradual emergence of an increasingly black and brown America, a rising tide of color that would make Lothrop Stoddard blanch. The real threat to white America comes not from black militants but from pet-hungry Haitian masses yearning to breed free. This is the narrative that Trump and company have fabricated to satiate a white paranoia that, if left unchecked, promises to cleanse America of its increasingly maligned racial and ethnic diversity.

Moral panic begets existential angst, which the surreal mendacity of MAGA contrives to stoke. About 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians live in Springfield, Ohio, out of a total population of around 60,000. While media reports have stated that many were granted Temporary Protective Status that allows them to live in the U.S. on a limited basis until conditions in Haiti improve, according to CNN, those residing in Springfield have come there because of its low cost of living and employment opportunities. They are there legally and of their own volition, not “shipped” there en masse like slaves by the Biden-Harris administration. And far from turning Springfield into a Third World city, they have, according to its business owners, helped to revitalize it economically. While some problems remain, as one might expect with any city undergoing rapid demographic change, instead of recognizing the contributions Haitians have made to their community, Trump and his xenophobic minions threaten them with deportation.

Indeed, never one to be dissuaded by facts, Trump not only inflates the number of “illegal” Haitian immigrants in Springfield to 32,000 but claims they doubled the population “in a period of a few weeks.” After spreading the lie that Haitian migrants are abducting and eating Springfield’s dogs and cats, alleged couch-humper JD Vance cautions, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But in true ends-justifies-the-means fashion, Vance assures us that his lies are righteous: He merely wanted to point out the real problems Springfield is facing that the “fake news” refuses to cover. In short, his goal was to combat “no” news with his own patented brand of fake news. Sadly, he has succeeded. According to NBC News, 1,100 posts on X, formerly Twitter, mentioned the pet-eating rumors on September 6; the next day, there were 9,100. After Vance took up the rumor on September 9, the number climbed to 47,000. The lie seems to be working, at least among Republicans. According to a Newsweek poll, 52% of likely Trump voters believe Haitians are eating pets, compared to only 8% of registered Democrats.

Who cares if his lies inflame racial tensions, increase divisiveness, and result in violence. Violence only matters when it (incompetently) targets MAGA’s marigold messiah. The left must curb its violent rhetoric; the right, however, is free to threaten poll workers, state attorney generals, and Democratic presidential candidates with impunity and treat actual incidents of political violence as hammer-fisted jokes.

Rumors, however, have consequences, if not for the people who spread them, then for those who are their victims. Certain groups are the go-to group for smears, even when there would seem to be no immediate benefit to slandering them. Jews have long been the victims of blood libel, a virulent canard that survives today in the guise of QAnon conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, adrenochrome harvesting, and Hollywood/media-controlling globalists. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, rumors that a black^[1] man had attempted to rape a white woman ignited a race massacre that saw the total devastation of the town of Greenwood, then known as Black Wall Street, and the death of 300 black residents. In 1923, a similar rumor resulted in the same fate for Rosewood, a prosperous black community in Florida, resulting in the deaths of anywhere from 8 to 150 people.

Racist, xenophobic slander is not confined to America. An ocean away, in Japan, in the wake of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, rumors that ethnic Koreans were poisoning wells led to the slaughter of over 6,000 Koreans. But like old soldiers, old rumors never die; they just hibernate until circumstances reawaken them. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the rumor was resurrected, this time blaming both ethnic Koreans – and blacks. According to The Asahi Shimbun, ten years later, in 2021, following another earthquake and as Japan was recovering from the pandemic, the trope reappeared on Twitter, this time accusing Black Lives Matter, whose marches in Japan prompted accusations it was responsible for an uptick in COVID, of poisoning wells in Fukushima Prefecture.

So far, the rumors in Springfield have not resulted in any deaths. They have, however, produced bomb threats, closed schools, and led to marches by neo-Nazi groups like Blood Tribe, with whom, in the guise of the bearded, pseudonymously named incel “Nate Higgers” (real name Drake Berentz), the rumor began, and Trump’s favorite militia, the Proud Boys. None of this seems to have phased Vance, who has not only tripled down on the debunked claim but amplified it and, echoing the words of the man he himself once called “America’s Hitler” and who opined that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” insists that “skyrocketing” levels of HIV, TB, and other communicable diseases are poisoning the blood of Springfield, a claim public health officials deny.

Smears, like cancers, are malignant. Not content with slandering Haitians, Vance has moved on to Africans at large, reposting an online article that they are grilling cats in Dayton. One waits to learn from Vance what end justifies this meme. No doubt, it stems from his fear, stoked by the words of his dementing mentor, that the once great U.S. of A. will become a “shithole” country if immigrants – undocumented and legal – are allowed to “invade” its porous borders unless, of course, they are Silicon Valley billionaires from the Global North who help launch the careers of cushiony venture capitalists and can be solicited to bankroll their mendacious political campaign. Ironically, all the while, Vance, through his vile, dehumanizing rhetoric, digs a latrine of lies deep enough to bury his beloved America under several feet of excreable bullshit. Vance’s partner in grime, the self-described “feisty Jewess,” “investigative reporter,” and right-wing influencer (or is that racist influenza – her anti-black, Islamophobic delusions appear to be more infectious than Springfield’s alleged HIV-infected Haitians), Laura Loomer has taken things to a new, if not particularly surprising, low by claiming Haitians are eating humans. Who needs imaginary cannibals like Hannibal Lecter when you can conjure up wholesale old racist tropes of anthropophagous Africans and other “sand monkeys”? One can only imagine what Goebbels would have made of the Big Lie if social media had existed during the Third Reich and Elon Musk, today’s giddy platformer of “white paranoia” and self-proclaimed wannabe Taylor Swift impregnator, was minister of propaganda. In fact, as early as March, Musk was already platforming the Haitians-are-cannibal trope on X.

Then again, Vance may be right. Perhaps you have to make up shit for the mainstream media to focus on it. Still, ironically, Vance’s slurs have done little to highlight Springfield’s “real,” since the media is now justifiably preoccupied with covering Vance’s slanders and the palpable harm they have inflicted upon the community. Not only Haitians in Springfield but across the nation, including, New Jersey, New York, and Tulsa. If he intended to shock the media into reporting on real issues affecting the community, he missed the mark by a light year, as the media’s focus has shifted to coverage of the malignant idiocy of his claims, kitschy, AI-generated memes of scared kitties and puppies, and pet-eating song parodies.

But these are distractions. The vileness of these allegations, their utter looniness, and the unnerving yet somehow nervously amusing recklessness with which Trump and his acolytes mindlessly and unrepentantly regurgitate them have made them and the vicious attacks on their political opponents all the more the focus of attention. There may have been two failed assassination attempts on Trump, but that in no way mitigates the vulgar character assassination aimed at Kamala Harris and other black Americans in positions of power, let alone the death threats they continue to receive. Although the media has covered Loomer’s odious attacks that Harris will stink up the White House with curry (actually, the last time curry was in the White House, it was a cause of celebration) and that salaciously paint her as an opportunistic fellatrix. Even in the normative vulgarity of MAGA America, repeating baseless blowjob allegations and racist talking points lie outside the comfort zone of most mainstream newscasts. Instead, it has devoted less attention to her toxic podcasts against black women, or the fact that last year she posted to X an inflammatory image of a black man wearing a “Niggas 4 Trump 2024” T-shirt presenting the white supremacy hand sign. (No, it isn’t the usual suspects – Bryon Donalds, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, or Mark Robinson – but, she writes, a “friend” and “supporter.”)

Mocking Kamala Harris as a “pretend black” who speaks ebonic-inflected English when talking with her rachet homegirls, the “unleashed” social media gadfly, her voice buzzing in a high-pitched nasal that makes one wish she would dog whistle her caustic hate instead of torturing listeners with her eardrum-shattering screed, rants on X:

“I’m an independent black woman, and I don’t need no man. And I’m gonna get whitey. I’m gonna get whitey, and I’m gonna lock Donald Trump up, just like Letitia James, right.”

And she goes, “Now y’all go and elect me and I’m gonna lock him up. We’re gonna get Trump.” Like the way they talk, and their little DEI Shanequa voices. They all have the same voice. I’m talking about Kamala Harris, uh, Letitia James, and Fanny Willis. Like meritless DEI Shanequas talk the same way. Very obnoxious, the way that they talk.

Loomer, the Alice Jolson of vocal blackface, continues:

Kamala Harris who of course pretends to be black, also pretending to have a, uh, black urban accent, which is pretty racist and offensive, cause look at the way she talks. She tries to use this like real ghetto talk and it’s like, okay, “You think that all black people talk like that, Kamala? You think dat we all talk like dis and we want to ax question? That we don’t know how to speak proper English? You know, we don’t ask questions, we ax. We gonna talk about this, home girl?”

 I mean, really, honestly, it is so disrespectful and racist to black people. So there’s a lot of educated black people out there that don’t talk like that. Okay, there’s a lot of black people out there who know how to speak proper English that don’t go around speaking jive. “You feels me? We wuz kangs! I’ll tell you home girl, but we get this done together, my friend, you feels me? You feels me, when we get this done together? You feels me? You feels me, home girl? We wuz kangs! You feels me? I worked at McDonald’s. I used to smoke weed. Listen to Tupac in my, in my college room.” [Squeals.]

Loomer, in case you have forgotten, called the late Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee a “ghetto bitch.” This is the person who has Trump’s ear, the good one.

Where was Marjorie Taylor Greene, our champion of racial tolerance, when we needed her? No doubt, out desperately searching for Jewish space lasers in Jasmine Crocket’s eyelashes and combs through peach tree dishes of Gestapo soup. Well, at least the pot has called the kettle black, albeit belatedly, something Vance has yet to do, though his reluctance has nothing to do with an aversion to hypocrisy. Instead, he interprets Loomer’s insult as a distracting, relatively benign commentary on “dietary preferences,” adding that he “makes a mean chicken curry.” Apparently, he is oblivious to the fact that curry is not a dish commonly associated with self-professed Ivy League hillbillies with alleged preferences for Ikea Esseboda two-seaters and $14.88 Mike Lindell pillows. When Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker pressed him if the statement offended him because his wife is Indian American, Vance deflected again, stating that while he disagreed with the statement, it was not because it was racist but because “whether eating curry at your dinner table or fried chicken (yes, he went there), things have gotten more expensive thanks to [Harris’] policies.” When asked to react to Trump’s questioning of Harris’ racial identity, as he had in an earlier CNN interview, Vance redirected the inquiry to paint Harris as a “chameleon,” defending Trump’s statement as “totally reasonable.”

In some ways, the current political plays less like a Twilight Zone episode than a compilation of scenes from Amazon Prime’s The Boys, with Trump cast as Homelander, Loomer as Stormfront, and, given his rumored proclivities, Vance as Tek Knight, which might explain his awkward campaign visit to a donut shop.

Can a group sue for racial defamation? Can Haitian immigrants file a defamation lawsuit against Trump, Vance, and Loomer? Perhaps, although it would probably change nothing. Still, in a kinder, “Never Again “world, Loomer, as a member of a group that was the original target of blood libel, might be expected not only to refrain from such slanders. Then again, because Haitians and Africans aren’t Jews, some consider it inappropriate to label the abuse directed toward them “blood libel.” Not that this necessarily matters to Loomer, given the fact that she notoriously celebratedthe white nationalist “hostile takeover” of the GOP with neo-Nazi chum Nick Fuentes. “Free spirits” like Loomer are free to spew such libels through filler-filled DSLs – which, judging by the similarly inflated lips of Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle, are the price of admission women pay to gain entry into the Trump clan – while they vulgarly accuse Harris of literally sucking up to power.

These are the perks for those who identify with whiteness in hive-minded MAGA America. Loomer, however, is not alone in her calumny. Stephen Miller, Trump’s follicle-deprived, erstwhile chia pet, political advisor, and Roy Cohn clone, whose ancestors fled Jewish pograms in Belarus, presses for travel bans on Muslims and massive detentions and deportation of immigrants, both undocumented and legal. While a student at Duke University, he accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and co-founded the Duke Conservative Union with neo-Nazi and Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally organizer Richard Spencer. Spencer, it should be recalled, in 2018, advocated that the U.S. enslave Haitians a year after Hurricane Irma devasted their country instead of providing relief and today promotes the creation of a white ethnostate for the “dispossessed white race.”

On X, Miller complained, without a scintilla of self-aware irony, about Trump’s dismal performance in the debate with Harris. It is worth quoting at length:

The Democrat Party has subjected President Trump to eight years of dehumanizing eliminationist rhetoric, vile slanders, an endless parade of sinister hoaxes, financial warfare, civil lawfare, spying, framing, defaming, raiding, and a weaponized Democrat justice system hellbent on jailing the opposition leader while wildly portraying him as an enemy of democracy –even going so far as to criminalize GOP legal advice.

In recent days, the Democrat Party and its officials – the same ones who let Hamas-loving mobs terrorize Jews – desperate to win the election, began forcefully trotting out the repugnant Nazi/Hitler smear, the vilest lyingest, most detestable smear of them all, whipping their followers into a frenzy.

What message do you think it sends to the violent, deranged or unstable when this language is used? And what kind of predicate does it establish for the future?

Kamala even made the infinitely-debunked Charlottesville Hoax a centerpiece of her rehearsed debate lines, which of course ABC let go unchallenged [….]

Kamala’s entire campaign narrative has been that Trump [… ] is a threat to Democracy, spending untold millions to program this message into impressionable minds.

After an assassins’ [sic] bullet came within a millimeter of violently taking Trump’s life, did the Democrats stop? Did Kamala stop? Did the leftwing media pull back?

No, their rhetoric only became more reckless and unhinged.

And now there has been a second assassination attempt.

A second assassination attempt. To vote for Kamala is to vote to endorse the Democrat Party tactics that have created such a frightening and dangerous environment. And it would be a vote to cement the idea that anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda is an enemy of the state who can be bankrupted, jailed and persecuted.

President Trump has put everything on the line for us again and again. It’s not enough just to vote for him. You have to organize. You have to register everyone you know. You have to get your block, your neighborhood, your church, your entire social network, to mail in their ballots en masse.

We are counting on you.

All of us are counting on you.”

The fascist doth project too much.

There’s much to deconstruct here, but let’s begin with the conclusion. Aren’t Trumpists opposed to mail-in ballots? As for Democrats inciting violence, Trump is not known for being reluctant to incite violence, as is evident in the way he handles protesters at his rallies, the fact that he encourages police to rough up suspects – excluding himself, of course – his desire to have peaceful demonstrators protesting police violence shot, and his “jokes” at the expense of Paul Pelosi.

Miller suggests that the media distorted Trump’s “good people on both sides” statement on Charlottesville, dismissing its media reports on it as another “hoax.” In fact, Trump “denounced” the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville the same way Bill Clinton denied having sex with Monica Lewinski – semantically. Charlottesville aside, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to unequivocally denounce racist rhetoric, past and present, whether from Fuentes, Kanye West, or Loomer, none of which he has utilized. Instead, he denies knowing who they are or disingenuously declares unfamiliarity with what they have said.

Miller condemns Democrats for perpetuating hoaxes, while the presidential and vice presidential nominees of his own party publicly spew debunked lies about Haitians, lies amplified by Loomer, who, not to be outdone, has, in true birther fashion, also posted a copy of Harris’ birth certificate, declaring that Harris isn’t black because it lists her mother as “Caucasian” and her father as “Jamaican” and that she is “the descendent [sic] of slave owners” on her father’s Irish side, as if this makes her, what, white? News Flash, Laura: A lot of black people are descendants of white slave owners; in “one-drop rule” America, that does not make them white. Still, if Loomer is a birther “literalist,” one wonders how she can insist that Harris is an “Indian” given her mother’s listing as “Caucasian,” unless it is because, according to U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), Asian Indians, while technically classified as “Caucasian,” are not legally white and were barred from becoming U.S. citizens until 1946, the latter decision one which Loomer would most likely like to see reversed.

But we’re still in Twilight Zone territory, that liminal space between insanity and inanity where not only do Haitian migrants dine on an assortment of domesticated delicacies, but children go off to school one gender and return home another, and prisons perform transgender operations on incarcerated “illegal aliens.” Forget The Apprentice, Trump is auditioning to host the reboot of Fear Factor.

The prospective Fuehrer-for-a-day’s arsenal of lies grows more bizarre every day. Not only does the would-be emperor of the U.R.A. (United Reich of America) have no clothes, he has revealed himself to be a rambling, flatulent, incontinent racist with a spray-on tan and a molting hair weave. Yet despite his monotonous tantrums, incessant whining, and petulant Mussoliniesque pouts, he is still considered mature enough to again serve as commander-in-chief.

If Harris shows even the slightest sign of emotion, she is hysterical; Trump, in contrast, no matter how bombastic and belligerent his responses, is seen by his idolaters as manly, steely-eyed reason personified. Yet, during the debate, the “low IQ” Harris, in the immortal words of former RNC chair Michael Steele, “spanked that ass.” The best that Trump’s supporters can come up with to explain their messiah’s failure is to claim that ABC gave Harris the questions in advance and she was wearing Nova H1 audio earrings.

In a normal world, rumors that Haitians are eating dogs and cats would be hard to swallow; groundless accusations of rigged elections and audio devices hidden in jewelry would fall on deaf ears.

You can’t make this shit up. Then again, they have and they do.

Note

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

The post They Eat Humans, Don’t They? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“You don’t have to ask me how someone is. You can see how they are by what they say and the comments they make.”

—Kara Young, biracial former girlfriend of Donald Trump

“Beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.”

—Benjamin Netanyahu on how to deal with Palestinians.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

—Kamala Harris

Americans live in a state of denial. We reject the evidence of our senses, even when it is screamed at us clearly and unambiguously and paraded starkly naked before us. We bow to the deceit and manipulation of the wealthy and powerful, turning off our critical thinking and recalibrating our moral compass, all the while avoiding the truth about what we have become and what this change says about us. Not only does this betrayal of conviction impact equity and democracy at home, it also affects those living abroad whose lives are devastated by its dehumanizing and destructive consequences and the paralysis of those who fail to challenge it.

Donald Trump notoriously boasted that he could shoot someone in public view and not lose any voters. While his criminal acts have so far not included homicide, ironically, there is some truth to this statement from the self-professed “brilliant weaver” of towering tales.

Every day, in every way, Trump tells us who he is — and gets away with it. Whatever skeletons he kept in his closet have largely been exposed. We know his playbook, which Trump returns to with the feverish regularity of an obsessive-compulsive. However, it appears he has caught the corporate media off guard. Recently, it has been sounding the alarm over Trump’s insistence that the 2024 election is being rigged against him. However, he began beating that drum as early as the 2016 election, when he declared he would accept the results only if he won. Sadly, he did. Now, eight years later, after rejecting the results of the 2020 election, he repeats the claim as he runs in another election. Though newsworthy, there is nothing new here.

Another chapter in Trump’s voluminous playbook is birtherism. Given Kamala Harris’ melanated ancestry, did anyone doubt that Trump would resuscitate this old canard once she declared her candidacy? When racism was on the fringe, people believed it could be contained, but the fringe has moved closer to the center. What was once the Tea Party has hulked into MAGA and taken over the Republican Party. Conservative political organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) make no attempt to conceal their racism, which they would like to see elevated to national policy.

Setting its sights on Harris, the NFRA has taken Trump’s birtherism a step further, claiming, based on its “originalist” (read bullshit) interpretation of Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, that even though she was born in America, Harris is ineligible for president because her parents were not naturalized citizens at the time of her birth. (This would also apply to Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, no doubt to the orgasmic delight of Ann Coulter.) Not content with this vile sophistry, the NFRA goes so far as to quote the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott ruling, claiming that Harris cannot be a U.S. citizen because her ancestors were enslaved blacks. (Aside from the fact that the NFRA’s interpretation of the article is flagrantly incorrect and ignores the fact that the 13th and 14th Amendments overturned the ruling, one might wonder why the organization chose not to play this trump card when Harris became vice president four years earlier, as the position also requires natural-born citizenship.)

The racist xenophobia expressed here is as obvious as it is hurtful. Imagine growing up as a black and brown child in America only to realize that your country is just not that into you and where racial progress is measured in terms of the evolution of racial epithets—from calling black people “niggers” to “rebranding them “DEI hires.” Then again, in the eyes of NFRA, it is not their country and never will be.

This is, after all, MAGA’s raison d’être—to time-slip the nation back to an age when America was great and, as Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in the Dred Scott decision, blacks had “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” These are the same fragile white souls who ban teaching unbowdlerized American history in classrooms because they fear it will damage the self-esteem of white children. No wonder Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 want to abolish the Department of Education to perhaps replace it with the Department of Truth Social.

Despite these threats to governance and the psychological well-being of the people of color these attacks target, the media spends too much time debunking Trump’s distractions. Just when you think the media might catch up, Trump ejects some chaff to throw them off his trail. Given Trump’s history of bragging about his enormous ratings and the size of his rallies after Biden’s inauguration, was it really news that Trump would display a chronic case of Crowd Envy? We already knew Trump is a size queen, although he apparently does not measure up to his own exacting standards, which may account for his many insecurities.

Speaking of chaff, Trump would also have us believe he is a “stable genius” who knows more than anyone about everything and everyone. He knows more about military strategy, taxes, construction, campaign financing, infrastructure, ISIS, the environment, drones, technology, trucks, Facebook, the courts, steelworkers, the Kurds, trade, nuclear weapons, lawsuits, debt, politicians, and even the circumstances of Barack Obama’s birth. He is an expert not only on racial determination but also on assigning qualities appropriate to each race. As he testified in 1993 before a congressional hearing on Native American gambling, Trump knows what “Indians look like,” going so far as to call Connecticut’s Mashantucket Pequot, a tribal nation with multiracial ancestry, whom he was engaged in one of many casino gaming disputes he had with Native Americans, “the Michael Jordan Indians,” and to dismiss their indigenous roots.

Some thirty years later, Trump now assures us that he knows who is East Indian. Indeed, it wasn’t all that long ago that Trump, a connoisseur of the finer aspects of biracialism, could discern which attributes biracials inherited from each parent. In her 1997 book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman details how Trump claimed that his biracial model girlfriend at the time, Kara Young, inherited her beauty from her black mother and her intelligence from her white father.Apparently, “low IQ,” biracial Harris —who Trump has admitted is “beautiful” like his plagiarizing spouse, though not “better-looking” than The Don himself—is also intellectually challenged, presumably due to her lack of superior white genes.

The reality is Trump’s ability to read race and ethnicity like tea leaves is as reliable as his exceptional memory: He once claimed to have received a copy of Mein Kampf from a “Jewish friend,” although it turns out the book was a collection of Hitler speeches, and the friend was not Jewish.

When matters turn contentious, under pressure, Trump’s omniscience is superseded by his self-avowed ignorance, and he suddenly transforms into an orange-skinned, blue-suited Sgt. Schultz. When asked, he knows nothing about David Duke, the Proud Boys, Nick Fuentes, Lev Parnas, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, any of the 18 women who have accused him of sexual assault, Mein Kampf and its 21st-century sequel Project 2025, and who shot the disgraceful Arlington National Cemetery campaign video and posted it to TikTok.

Like his endless litany of lies and unchecked racism and sexism, Trump’s cognitive decline is in full view to even the most myopic of political observers. Even so, corporate media seems to be pulling its punches, perhaps because, like the assaulted Arlington employee, it fears possible future retaliation should he win in November.

Again, none of this is a state secret. Trump has not attempted to conceal his authoritarian plans for the nation, even announcing that he would “terminate parts of the Constitution,” wants to be “dictator” (albeit for “only one day”), and will “fix” things so that no one will “have to vote again.” These statements cannot be easily dismissed as mere braggadocio and jokes.

With every delusional, gaslit utterance, Trump proves himself mentally and emotionally unstable, someone who not only should not have access to the nuclear codes but, given his interminable, vindictive, fact-free rants, to the media, old and new. Unfortunately, even though the proverbial Framers of the Constitution anticipated the need to remove presidents from office if they were unable to carry out their duties, they failed to include a constitutional provision that would have kept demented candidates out of the White House. In an ideal world, where voters can distinguish fantasy from reality and choose leaders who share that ability, this would not be necessary. That, however, is not the world we live in.

True, as Politico’s Alexander Thompson has suggested, America may have already unknowingly elected mentally ill presidents. Indeed, not only are there sufficient grounds to believe, according to Bandy X. Lee and 36 other psychiatrists and mental health professionals, that Trump was cognitively impaired during his first (and hopefully only) term in office, but also that his condition has progressively deteriorated since leaving office. Yet despite these concerns, he is the Republican nominee, and polls show him virtually neck-and-neck with his Democratic rival. Long gone are the days when an enthused howl could end your political career. Trump, however, is free to grunt and groan and produce whatever bizarre, cacophonous noises he pleases and remain the darling (at least publicly) of the GOP and about a third of the country.

Despite the transparency of Trump’s behavioral quirks and seditious aspirations, he has yet to face any consequences. Impeachments have come and gone, as have attempts to remove him from the ballot in several states; trials pend indefinitely. Yet through all of this, the Felon of Fifth Avenue not only remains at large but is free to run for president in a race that remains obscenely close for a country that ostensibly embraces the rule of law and struggles to judge people by the content of their character and not the orange of their skin. Adding to these ironies is the possibility that, ignoring the dangers looming before them, like Germans in 1933, Americans may ultimately vote to end our democracy. Germany’s decision invited genocide. In America, a genocide precedes it, though its victims are located oceans away.The death of American democracy may be the price Americans pay for their myopia. But another group of people is already paying an existential price for our folly.

A critique of Israeli policy may seem out of place in an anti-Trump polemic. Still, the core problems remain fundamentally the same: American regard for both Trump and Israel tends to deny the evidence of things heard, seen, and performed, often ad nauseam. Despite the overwhelming evidence of corruption and atrocity, despite statement after statement from Israeli officials dehumanizing Palestinians, despite report after report of war crimes and human rights violations, including the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees and the detention and mistreatment of thousands in the West Bank and Gaza, despite the evidence of things not only seen but endlessly reiterated, the American-supported genocide in Gaza continues unabated in plain sight.

Those Americans who buck this trend are doxxed, expelled from universities, and fired. Those who call out Trump’s Bigly Lies and stand against him face a similar fate should he win in November and exact his promised retribution.

Almost a year has passed since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel that has left some 1,200 Israelis dead, resulted in the deaths of 35 hostages, and incurred the genocidal wrath of Israel that has led to the slaughter of over 40,000 Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Gazans, famine, and the outbreak of polio. Even without daily graphic reminders of the carnage, the intent of Israeli leaders is clear. From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, they have repeatedly and unequivocally expressed their hatred for Palestinians and their plans for Gaza and the West Bank, all while making no secret of their opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state and exposing American support for a two-state solution as a hollow ruse, a piece of performative art worthy of a Parisian mime. They know that America, which has proven itself unable even to persuade Israel to commit to a ceasefire, will do little to pressure its “most important ally in the Middle East” to accept a plan that might create such a state.

U.S. leaders, including Harris, have declared their unconditional commitment to the existence of the Israeli ethnostate; their support for a Palestinian state has been more equivocal, limited to an idea, not the creation of an actual entity. For all the much-ballyhooed hope, joy, and diversity conspicuously displayed at the DNC convention in Chicago, the faces of Palestinian American families affected by the genocide in Gaza were nowhere to be seen, their voices deliberately silenced. Their absence from the stage is odd given the fact that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, Chicago is home to more Palestinian Americans than any city in the country. Yet despite sending 29 uncommitted delegates to the convention and touting the party’s diversity, organizers refused to give them a speaking platform on stage, effectively gagging them, apparently, for fear that to do so would cast a pall on the feel-good optics of party joy and unity. No one wants a Debbie Downer to spoil all the fun, particularly if, unmuzzled, Debbie’s pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide voice prompts pro-Israel donors to withhold their contributions. (God forbid that the Harris go the way of Liz Magill, Claudine Gay, and Minouche Shafik.) American diversity is its strength so long as Palestinian Americans are excluded and American complicity in genocide remains comfortably out of sight.

Harris has called the scale of suffering in Gaza “heartbreaking,” while failing to acknowledge the role America’s moral abrogation has played in shattering those hearts and much, much more. “So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety,” she laments, failing publicly to recognize that those hungry innocents are fleeing bombs made in the U.S.A. and an IDF funded by American taxpayers, including Palestinian Americans, a fact that should ensure their right to voice their concerns about the suffering in a public forum that putatively celebrates representative democracy. In 2023, speaking at a White House ceremony for the advancement of economic and educational opportunities for Hispanic Americans, Harris stated, “None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.” Sadly, the DNC chose to deliberately obscure some contexts and silence those who would provide them.

But then, what did one expect? The former president uses “Palestinian” as a racist slur against his political enemies. White House officials mourn the deaths of innocent Israelis but portray the deaths of innocent Palestinians, when they are recognized at all, as the inevitable price of war, and 100 days into the conflict, express America’s determination to have Israeli hostages returned to their families but say nothing specifically about the 24,000 Palestinian lives taken at that point in the conflict. Where are the congressional hearings to parse these statements, preserve the safety of Palestinian Americans, and ensure the rights of peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters?

It speaks volumes when it takes the eradication of nearly 2% of the population in Gaza for President Biden to finally admit that “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Why is it that it took some ten months for him to come to this realization? Although some have welcomed this statement, woefully belated as it is, it fails to acknowledge the obscene disproportionality of the killing and suffering.

In America, as in Israel, Palestinian lives don’t matter. The pain of Palestinian Americans who have lost family, relatives, and loved ones in the conflict, the plight of hundreds of thousands of Gazan refugees, and the rape, torture, and death of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli detention centers escapes the notice of mainstream media and mainstreamed politicians, revealing once again that Palestinian lives are inconsequential.

Israeli leaders rain dehumanizing racist rhetoric and lethal ordnance upon Palestinians. Still, they are not held responsible for their actions because doing so would lead to accusations of antisemitism, just as criticizing Trump and his cult for their racism and sexism is cynically framed as anti-white misandry.

In America, even if Trump loses in November, the dogs have been let loose; the damage already has been done, setting the stage for another January 6 and, perhaps, far worse. In Gaza, even if a ceasefire is eventually declared, its pulverized shell, the benighted product of moral indifference and political self-servitude, will remain, a shell-shocked elegy to the dead whose exact numbers have yet to be determined and may never be. In both cases, one did not have to be Cassandra to see what was coming, if only because it was already in plain sight.

Note

[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.

The post In Plain Sight: The Evidence of Things Seen appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John G. Russell.

Photograph Source: DonkeyHotey – CC BY 2.0

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

—Ruby Freeman, Georgia election worker

“Hey, you stupid slave nigger…You are in our sights, we want to kill you. If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch.”

—Abigail Jo Shry, Texas Trump cultist’s threat to Judge Tanya Chutkan

“They must serve as examples for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

—Donald Trump on the Central Park Five

“Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

—Richard Nixon,

Revenge porn is the GOP’s new black.

“I am your retribution,” Donald Trump, America’s bloated, bloviating Batman, declares.

“We’re going to start slitting throats on day one,” promises Ron DeSantis, glitchy governator of Florida, the state where history goes to die, and being comatose is touted as a virtue.

Meanwhile, in congressional hearings, the queen of laptop porn, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, parades explicit photos of a naked Hunter Biden and his redacted junk to score MAGA points against President Joe Biden. This conduct is relatively tame for the rabid Greene, who has labeled Pelosi a “traitor,” advocated for her assassination, and spread baseless innuendos when a homicidal home intruder fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer.

It seems that Trump and his supporters will not be satisfied until MAGA cultists take down his political enemies and, ultimately, the country.

They are encouraged by Trump, who has always spoken, unfiltered, the language of vengeance and violence. In 1989, as a real estate mogul, he demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five, the Exonerated Five since 2002, although Trump, who was found liable for sexual assault in the E. Jean Carroll case, refuses to acknowledge their innocence or to apologize. As a 2016 presidential candidate, he boasted of sexually assaulting women and condoned an attack on a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his campaign rallies. As president, he “joked” that police should rough up suspects they take into custody and once asked former Defense Secretary Mark Esper why White House demonstrators protesting the murder of George Floyd couldn’t just be shot.

Trump’s language, however inciteful, is protected by the First Amendment. His actions are not. And while Trump is many deplorable things – racist, psychopath, pathological liar, xenophobe, misogynist, and cis-supremacist – a fool is not one of them. He may notoriously boast that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” but, like the mafia dons he channels, he knows that rather than risk the consequences of committing such an act himself, it’s best to leave the dirty work to others. That is what minions and co-conspirators are for. After all, this is the bone-spurred no-show who promised his followers on January 6 that he would join them at the Capitol.

Despite his threats and intimidation, Defcon Don remains an imperiously impervious and untouchable pariah who, his 20-minute, whirlwind excursion to the Fulton County Jail aside, may never see the insides of an actual jail cell. The norms of the criminal justice system simply do not apply to him: mugshots are optional, perp walks are negotiated, arraignments are breezily expedited. Does anyone doubt that, unlike social media influencer Kai Cenat, if Trump had conjured up a flash mob in front of Trump Tower for a giveaway of mugshot¹ NFTs and a riot broke out, he and his followers would have been allowed to leisurely broker their arraignment dates, not arrested on the spot?

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, more than 400,000 Americans are currently being detained pretrial – but not the quadruplely indicted Trump. In Georgia, the “billionaire” braggart’s bond was set at a mere $200,000, $300,000 less than that of his former fixer Michael Cohen who was convicted of hush money payments to a porn star on Trump’s behalf. One would think that conspiring to subvert democracy is a more serious offense.

Trump has already orchestrated one insurrection and is determined to incite another. Yet he remains not only a free man but the GOP presidential frontrunner, converting his many indictments into political currency. Of the eight “law and order” Republican presidential hopefuls on the debate stage in Milwaukee, all but two declared they would support Trump for party nominee even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” These duplicitous defenders of the Constitution see nothing wrong with backing a man for president who has proven himself incapable of upholding and protecting it.

After much stalling, it appears that with Trump’s Georgia booking our system of justice is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before, including two impeachments and a civil case, only to see him evade accountability.

This matters little to his supporters who hold his First Amendment rights and their Second Amendment rights more important than the rule of law, despite the threat of inciting stochastic terrorism Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric poses to the nation.

Trump has made no secret about whom he deems to be his enemies. His words have already endangered the lives of Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, New York County D.A.Alvin Bragg, New York A.G. Letitia James, and Washington, D.C. Judge Tanya Chutkan. Encouraged by their puppet master, Trump supporters wasted no time doxing the Fulton County grand jury. That most of his targets are black and women should surprise no one.

Fulton County Jail’s nominal “inmate” No. P01135809 has been repeatedly warned about his threats. Yet despite a few tentative toe-dips in the shallow pool of judicial equity, everything so far indicates that Trump is above the law, where he will remain so long as optics takes precedence over principle and the equal application of justice.

The optics of concern here is not that of a two-tiered justice system. Rather, it is that the sight of Trump’s conviction and imprisonment would send the wrong message to the world that America has become a Third World “shithole country.” Sadly, concern over such optics overrides any about the fate of our democracy should his crimes go unpunished.

Some seem to think that Trump’s disgrace and humiliation are punishment enough. The media point to the dilapidated, overcrowded conditions of the Fulton County Jail, which are good enough (or bad enough) for mundane criminals but apparently too “extreme” for the former president. Crocodile tears fully primed, the media mouths concern about the “nightmarish public health” conditions at the jail, fully aware that the odds of Trump spending a night – or any time – behind its bars are nil. And even if Trump were incarcerated, does anybody believe that he would be treated like any other inmate or come to share the same fate as LaShawn Thompson, whose body was found “dehydrated, malnourished, and infested inside and out with insects”? Or would maggot removal be added to the roster of duties of the Secret Service?

For some, the optics of Trump’s booking and scowling mugshot might inspire optimism that the system is finally beginning to work. But we have gone through the motions before with Trump, only to witness the gravity-defying farce of trickle-up justice. Of course, it has yet to be proven in a court of law that Trump conspired to steal the election, but the question remains: What consequences will he face if and when it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he has? Moreover, what happens if Trump is convicted of his felonies in New York and Georgia but wins the Republican primary and the general election? Will he be imprisoned? Will the big house become the new White House?

The threat remains that if Trump is not convicted, he will run for president in perpetuity if only to stay out of prison. As early as August 2020, years before his serial indictments, Trump telegraphed his intent to cling to the presidency “4eva.” The means to thwart his authoritarian ambitions exist, but their use will require a measure of political will that those currently in a position to act lack.

Some comfort may be taken in the fact that legal scholars have revisited the theory that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the so-called disqualification clause, which bars elected officials who have violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and engaged in insurrection against the United States from running for and holding political office, could be invoked to derail a Trump dictatorship that would see him and his allies enact political retribution against individuals and institutions responsible for his present predicament.

Realpolitik, however, reveals that its successful use is far from guaranteed. Except for New Mexico County Commissioner Couy Griffin, attempts in 2022 to invoke the clause to remove insurrectionist Republican officials from office have uniformly failed. In Georgia, the non-profit group Free Speech for the People invoked the clause in a suit to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene’s name from the ballot there. Similar campaigns were launched against North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, and Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar. None succeeded. And while Republican New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan is reportedly listening to those advocating use of the clause to block Trump’s name from appearing on ballots in his state’s presidential primary, and Florida lawyer Lawrence Caplan has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, it is unlikely that other Republican secretaries of state will cooperate in these efforts and far more likely that they will move to stymie them.

Still, a bevy of legal scholars and jurists, including Lawrence Tribe and J. Michael Luttig and William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, have argued that the disqualification clause is “self-executing,” claiming violators are automatically disqualified from running for and holding political office and that disqualification does not require a criminal conviction. As Luttig explained on CNN,

All officials, federal and state, who have a responsibility to put on the ballot candidates for the presidency of the United States…are obligated under the Constitution to determine whether Donald Trump qualifies to be put on the ballot. That is, they must determine themselves whether he is disqualified from being listed on the ballot by Section 3. Now, here’s how this will work: Any secretary of state or other state election official who’s charged with that responsibility will make the determination. Now, whether that person decides that former President Trump is qualified or whether he or she determines that he is disqualified by Section 3 and therefore doesn’t list him, that decision will be immediately challenged in federal court, and it will quickly move to the Supreme Court of the United States, where this decision will have to be made prior to the 2024 election.

Nonetheless, some serious doubts temper any optimism. Congress, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, can remove the disqualification, something it has done twice: In 1872, in the name of national reconciliation, it enacted the Amnesty Act, which lifted restrictions barring former Confederates from voting and holding office, and in 1898, it voted to end Section 3. The only other time Congress invoked the clause was in 1919 when it refused to seat socialist Victor Berger for his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, a decision that was later overturned (Berger eventually served three terms). On the other hand, in the 1970s, Congress passed joint resolutions to grant Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis posthumous Section 3 amnesty. Here, too, the aim was national reconciliation in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War. According to New York City Bar, there is currently no congressional legislation to enforce Section 3.

Given its rightwing majority, placing one’s faith in the Supreme Court seems criminally naïve. Aside from the fact the initial intent of the clause has repeatedly been nullified by a desire for “national unity,” and with rumors of impending civil war now indelibly a part of the zeitgeist, it seems unlikely that Congress or SCOTUS will rise to the challenge.

Note

1. The Fulton County mugshots have proven anticlimactic, as they are little more than mostly dour DMV portraits. I had envisioned front view and side view shots, height backdrops, and handheld slates with names and inmate numbers on them. But I guess what’s good for Young Thug is good for Old Thug and his gang of eighteen.

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Photograph Source: Lord Jim – CC BY 2.0

What? What is happening?

–Fox News anchor Sandra Smith on hot mike after a guest denies media projections that Joe Biden had won the presidential race.

This election was lost by the Democrats. They cheated. It was a fraudulent election. They flooded the market. They defrauded everybody on ballots…. This is a very important moment in the history of our country. They’re bad people. They’re horrible people. And they’re people who don’t love our country.

—Donald Trump, on speaker phone, gaslighting to applause from Republican state lawmakers gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Okay, I’ve lost track. Which constitutional crisis is this?

As I wrote previously, Donald Trump, our amoral Midas and unrepentant super-spreader of both COVID-19 and corruption, befouls everything he touches, including our far from perfect democracy, grabbing at ballots as if they were random vaginas, with the leadership of the GOP letting him get away with it because he is their star performer.

And get away with it he does. To be sure, the dozens of legal challenges he has initiated have been thrown out, but that hasn’t prevented him from launching new ones and pursuing other avenues to reverse his election defeat.

If anything, Trump sells himself as a man of his word, which is reportedly why his reality-challenged base loves him, although of late, less certain that they do, he has felt compelled to plead with them to “like me.” Judging from the results of the election, which was depressingly far closer than the mainstream media initially projected, they responded to his plea. Not only did they vote for him this time around, they continue to cling to the lie that the election was a fraud.

The shock of defeat appears to have dimmed some of the golden boy’s luster as well as whitened his faux blond hair and lightened his spray-on tan. Still, not only has Trump not conceded, he has, at current count, mounted over thirty-eight unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn the election or, at best, stall his ouster from office. Undaunted, the self-avowed stable genius’s latest Wile E. Coyote move has been to pressure Republican state legislators to choose pro-Trump electors when the Electoral College convenes this month. Having apparently failed at that, his only hope now is a Supreme Court Hail Mary. It doesn’t matter that he may fail; it’s the smoke, mirrors, and gaslight that ultimately count. None of this suggests that Trump is even remotely entertaining conceding.

In fact, it’s highly likely Trump will never concede, despite media speculation that his reticence is actually yet another of his three-dimensional chess gambits, the current one, according to some pundits, designed to make possible his own Murdock-like media empire to sustain his brand until he (or one of his felonious spawn) runs again in 2024. All this Occam razor-rejecting media confabulation refuses to accept the simple fact that toddler Trump is throwing a tantrum and that the true intent of his intransigence is to remain in power by any means necessary.

So, let’s Sweeney Todd this nonsense and cut to the gist. Well before the election, Trump telegraphed that he would not accept its results, repeatedly insisting that if he lost, it would only be because the election was rigged. Thus, the perilous situation in which America now finds itself, while new, is not news. This does not mean that Trump’s media kingdom has not already arrived. However, instead of offering endless hours of dishonest reporting, it specializes in alternate reality television, which is why we have had to sit through four seasons of “Celebrity Dictator.” The question is, will it be renewed for four more? Short answer: Quite likely.

As if to assure us that fears of a Trumpanista coup are not so delusional after all, Mike Pompeo confidently asserted before reporters that Trump will serve a second term, election results notwithstanding. Or should we assume that our piously rapturous secretary of state is merely pulling our leg, for surely, like his master, he has seen the indelible writing on the wall, or more precisely, on 80 million ballots, no matter how much Trump and his enablers try to scrub them clean.

No, Trump and his minions appear deadly serious in their maneuvering to hijack not only the election but our already frangible democracy. The seriousness of all this shouldn’t blind us perfidy of pardoned felon Mike Flynn recommending that Trump suspend the Constitution and declare martial law , or of Joe diGenova, another Trump loyalist, declaring that fired DHS election security official Chris Krebs be executed for debunking the myth of rampant voter fraud.^[2]

The yes-men and yes-women who serve(d) and protect(ed) Trump possess varying reserves of sycophancy. When he has exhausted their reserves or grown impatient when they finally screw up enough courage to challenge him, he fires them and swaps them for even more egregious bootlickers. Case in point: He has fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and other high-ranking Pentagon officials. Esper notoriously had held his tongue when Trump invaded Lafayette Square for a tear-gassed fueled, Bible-brandishing photo op. A few days later, he announced that he would oppose Trump if he attempted to invoke the Insurrection Act that would allow him to deploy federal troops in response to civil disturbances.

Upon learning of his termination, Esper (“Yesper” to his critics) ominously warned, “Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real yes man. And then God help us.”

Memo to Esper: God is dead, or, draping herself in the First Lady’s notorious hand-me-down, too preoccupied to really care.

But we should. For we have good reason to.

It’s not as if the nation hasn’t faced this particular potential constitutional crisis before. As Seymour Hersh wrote in The Atlantic in 1983:

In April of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public-affairs official who had served in the Johnson White House, telephoned [Defense Secretary James] Schlesinger…. Laitin broached some of his fears: Was it possible for the President of the United States to authorize the use of nuclear weapons without his secretary of defense knowing it? What if Nixon, ordered by the Supreme Court to leave office, refused to leave and called for the military to surround the Washington area? Who was in charge then? Whose orders would be obeyed in a crisis? “If I were in your job,” Laitin recalls telling Schlesinger, “I would want to know the location of the combat troops nearest to downtown Washington and the chain of command.” Schlesinger said only, “Nice talking to you,” and hung up.

Afterwards, Schlesinger was reportedly so concerned about the potential for a coup that he phoned the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ask that none of them respond to any order from the White House involving the use of military force without informing him first. As Hersh writes, “Schlesinger’s overriding concern, in case a [Constitutional] crisis did arise, was that the armed forces would follow their inherent loyalty to the Commander-in-Chief.”

It is doubtful that Esper’s replacement, Christopher Miller, and other newly appointed Trump loyalists in the military share Schlesinger’s concerns.

Significantly, while the media have expressed concern over the consequences Trump’s recent overhaul of military brass may have on the projection of U.S. military power overseas, it has demurred on what it may mean for America domestically. Perhaps, say the pundits, Trump will attack Iran – which would be an odd decision on his part since he has actually moved to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has, to give the devil his due, succeeded in keeping America out of wars, albeit if more by accident than design. But, as the assassination of the lead scientist on Iran’s nuclear project makes clear, he may opt to roil the waters via proxies.

Still, we’ve been conditioned to expect U.S. presidents to play their wag-the-dog card, though usually before an election, not after they lose one. As if to oblige, American presidents love to rain terror in perpetuity on their perceived overseas enemies. What these pundits appear reluctant to acknowledge the prospect that Trump may be planning to sic his military loyalists on his American enemies or, forever the showman/strongman, project the appearance that he will. Given Trump’s penchant for imperiously petulant behavior, can we really expect that he won’t enact the very scenario that Laitin and Schlesinger worried about almost a half century ago and toward which Esper’s invocation of divine intervention seems to point? Moreover, even should Trump fail to enlist sufficient military support for his coup, can we dismiss the possibility that he will seek to mobilize white militias and white supemacist-infiltrated law enforcement agencies to his treasonous cause?

Nixon plotted to convince his enemies that a mad man occupied the White House; Trump, a real sociopath, has struggled to convince both his enemies and allies that he is a “stable genius.” However, for all his Machiavellian machinations, Nixon, in defeat, opted not to adopt a scorched earth policy. Trump, on the other hand, gives every indication that in his fall from power he has decided to do precisely that, and take democracy down with him.

Four years into the Trump presidency, it’s about time we took him at his word. With Trump, to borrow the words of another sociopathic Donald – Rumsfeld, there are no “unknown knowns,” only “known unknowns.” That is, we know Trump will do something despicable, even if we don’t exactly know what it will be.

Trump has lied to us so often that when he does actually tell the truth, we simply can’t tell. (Does the Washington Post even continue to count his lies anymore? If so, how long before they reach COVID-19 fatality levels?^[1]) The mainstream media seem to doubt whether our pouty propagandist really means when he refuses to concede. It’s all show, a stunt, another con from the master grifter. After all the hours of Goldwater rule-violating armchair psychoanalysis of Trump’s alarming sociopathic tendencies, the media now tell us never mind. Trump’s behavior and the constitutional crisis it has ignited are simply another poorly scripted episode of the political dramedy/satire House of Trump and its uproarious spin-off, The Fart of the Steal (starring Rudy Giuliani). Their assumption: Our democracy will triumph despite these challenges.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Some three weeks after the election, between trips to the golf course, Trump still squats in the White House, shitting on civility and tradition. And while some of his enablers appear to have grudgingly come to their senses, announcing that they will cooperate with the transition and privately urging him to concede, Trump emphatically has not.

But what if Trump does concede after all, or is forcibly expelled from office? What happens then? Apparently, nothing of consequence. Biden and other establishment Democrats have let it be known that they have no intention of launching federal investigations of Trump, lest the move “further divide the nation,” preferring “to heal” it rather than enforce the rule of law. (Certainly, I’m not the only one to find it ironic that while Democrats fret about exacerbating national division, Republicans, many of whom have won reelection using the same election process that elected Joe Biden president, have no qualms — nor sense of irony — about arguing that the election was a sham, as if their own groundlessly questioning of its legitimacy will somehow unite Americans.) The last thing America needs, these Democrats tell us, is another Civil War, but if the history the nation’s past dealings with treachery is any guide, monuments to Trump may one day replace those to Lee and Davis, serving as yet another example of the cowardly and pragmatic accommodation with which our political elites reward treacherous behavior in order to “heal” the nation’s scars. Why bother to worry about Trump pardoning himself when those “horrible people” who “stole the election” will, essentially, through their curative and adhesive mercy, produce the same outcome.

Remember, this is the same Democratic establishment that under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi once suggested that Trump was not worthy of impeachment – because, get this, it would be “divisive”! And then botched the process once it did.

But really, should we expect anything less considering the anticlimactic fates of our nation’s previous unindicted war-criminal presidents? Should we take any comfort in the fact that they were given a “stay-out-of-jail” card not only as they waged illegal wars in foreign lands but, in doing so, against the very Constitution they had sworn to protect? True, if Trump does not pardon himself before leaving office or resign and have Mike Pence to do so for him, he will still potentially have to face state charges for his crimes. But does anyone seriously believe that if convicted he will see the inside of a prison cell? The rampant inequities that plague our legal system and the politically opportunistic and fear-inspired need to mollify Trump’s rabid supporters suggest otherwise.

But that’s the least of our worries. The real concern is the prospect of a divided nation where Proud Boys (or is it now “Proud Goys”?) and militias lurk on “stand by.” In a cautionary open letter to General Mark Miley, who accompanied Trump during his siege of Lafayette Square and later publicly apologized for it, Army officers John Nagl and Paul Yingling write:

[T]he clock will strike 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021, and Donald Trump will be sitting in the Oval Office. The street protests will inevitably swell outside the White House, and the ranks of Trump’s private army will grow inside its grounds. The speaker of the House will declare the Trump presidency at an end, and direct the Secret Service and Federal Marshals to remove Trump from the premises. These agents will realize that they are outmanned and outgunned by Trump’s private army, and the moment of decision will arrive.

At this moment of Constitutional crisis, only two options remain. Under the first, U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne. Under the second, the U.S. military remains inert while the Constitution dies. The succession of government is determined by extralegal violence between Trump’s private army and street protesters; Black Lives Matter Plaza becomes Tahrir Square.

At this point, whether Trump concedes or not is moot. The damage is done. According to a Reuters/Ipso opinion poll, 52% of Republicans believed that Trump “rightly won” the election, while only 29% believed Biden did. Similarly, a Vox/Data for Progress survey of likely Republican voters found that 73% of likely Republicans said suspicions of voter fraud prompted them question Biden’s victory, 55% believed that Biden benefited from voter fraud, and 65% agreed with Trump’s decision not to concede. In effect, Biden will begin his term as a lame duck.

In the end, even if, without formally conceding, Trump finally vacates the White House (after, possibly, signing his own pardon), and we manage to finesse ourselves out of yet another constitutional conundrum, and even if circumstances force Trump to trade in his marigold tan for an orange jumpsuit, division and denial will continue to mark the next four years, and beyond. Indeed, even if Trump fails to maintain his hold on the White House, his legacy will linger. For while a few of his Republican allies may privately disapprove of his behavior, most still publicly support him, believing that he and the hateful divisiveness he arouses comprise a winning strategy for an increasingly melanin-phobic America.

So even in his loss, Trump wins. And that is the exorbitant price we will have to pay for Trump’s art of the steal.

Notes.

1) It does. As of September 11^th, the number stood at 23,035 “false or misleading claims.” But that was two months before the election and the avalanche of lies that followed it. One also wonders: Does the Post count just the lie or is the number of times it is repeated added to the total? Or, to paraphrase the axiom mouthed by various dictators and propagandists, does the same lie repeated often enough become a single lie?

2) Maybe diGenova, is on to something.

The post Grab ’Em by the Ballot: The Art of the Steal appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The President has never lied to the American public on COVID.

–White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany

It doesn’t bother me. I don’t feel like he was ever lying to anybody.

— North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer

I’d be careful about using the word “lie.” “Lie” implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.… [W]hen Donald Trump says thousands of people were on the rooftops of New Jersey on 9/11 celebrating, thousands of Muslims were there celebrating, I think it’s right to investigate that claim, to report what we found, which is that nobody found any evidence of that whatsoever, and to say that. I think it’s then up to the reader to make up their own mind to say, “This is what Donald Trump says. This is what a reliable, trustworthy news organization reports. And you know what? I don’t think that’s true.”

–Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerald Baker on how the media should present Trump’s “falsehoods,” January 3, 2017

Donald John Trump is a murderous liar whose atrocities the American people continue to abide. Finally, after months of silence, mainstream media pundits and editorials are beginning sense the danger he poses to the republic, as they question whether Trump will voluntarily leave the White House if he is voted out of office, a necessary outcome if America is to maintain the illusion that it is still a democracy. In order to set itself on a trajectory toward social justice, the purge – and it must be a purge – cannot stop with his ouster. We need to ask ourselves how our leaders – political, “religious,” and journalistic – could continue to countenance Trump, how white evangelicals could support a man whose moral compass consistently points south to Hades, and how conservative pundits and putative journalists could have repeated his lies and maintained their silence about them while being fully aware that they were not only untrue but obviously intended to deceive, even as hundreds of thousands of Americans died. They must all be held accountable.

One might speculate as to why they tolerate Trump. Aside from their moral bankruptcy, my first guess would be that Trump has something on them. Recall that Trump’s late mentor and fixer was Roy Cohn, a mouthpiece for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a man who knew a thing or two about leveraging dirt gathered on one’s political enemies. In his book Disloyal, another Trump fixer, Michael Cohen, has written that in 2016 Trump had him suppress “racy” photos of Jerry Falwell Jr to secure the support of the now disgraced evangelical leader. No doubt, Trump has dirt on others that he has mined to extort support for himself and protection against his enemies and a potential post-election prison term. Trump’s personal familiarity with the art of the smear may also explain why our Golden (Shower) Boy kowtows to Putin. It may be less out of a fondness for autocrats than hands on experience of the efficacy of extortion and the human weaknesses that make it a tenable strategy for securing and maintaining power.

Then again, the answer may be less complex. Trump’s enablers may simply be unapologetic miscreants whose idolatry is not motivated by the threat of exposure. Sometimes a scumbag is just a scumbag.

Regardless of what motivates these scoundrels, their lies take a toll, which leads to another, far more disturbing question: Does it really matter? Do we, to borrow Melania Trump’s inquiry, really care? Did we ever? After all, while Trump’s college records, I.Q., and tax returns are a well-kept secret, his mendacity is not. Our current awareness of his proclivity for naked nihilism doesn’t arise from some epiphanous revelation that the emperor has no clothes. When it comes to corruption and maleficence, Trump has always been as transparent as those old anatomical Visible Man model kits, though that which is exposed is not a network of internal organs but a web of calculated deceits and feints. The tawdry spectacle of his indiscretions was out there for all to see well before he became president, and much more has come to light since. Indeed, judging by the current spate in tell-all books about him, with more on the way, Trump could probably use them to build his wall, should he be granted another term.

An agitated Trump insists to a black female journalist that she is misquoting him when she says that he promised a vaccine in by the end of the year, only to add that it may come “before November,” hinting that it might be ready “even before a very special date.” Video of Trump’s initial statement reveals that the journalist did, in fact, accurately quote him.

He recommends ingesting bleach as a cure for COVID-19, only to deny it later, claiming the remark was sarcasm.

He denies that he ever called John McCain “a loser” and boasts about how much he loves his soldiers, or at least those who have not been captured, maimed, missing in action or killed.

The fact that videos of Trump uttering these words exist and will now be endlessly re-aired to highlight his mendacity does not faze him. We already know Trump lies; we know he lies both badly and “bigly,” but never with any consequences.

In short, Trump is a liar – and a bad one at that. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Indeed, does the concept of a “bad liar” – both in its technical and moral senses – mean anything anymore? “A lie told often enough,” the propagandists insist, “becomes the truth,” but it does something far more insidious: it inures us to dishonesty and undermines the very notion that facts and reality matter.

This is not gaslighting; it is pure, poker-faced “A-Guide-to-the-Married-Man” stonewalling. For at day’s end, like the flummoxed wife of that film’s philandering husband, in the face of a cascade of interrogatory evasions designed to obfuscate the reality of what we have seen and heard, we simply give up and, discombobulated, meekly ask Trump what he wants for dinner, or in the case at hand, if he wants another term.

How ironic it is, then, that even during the early days of the Trump administration, the media debated whether it was journalistically responsible to label Trump’s falsehoods “lies,” although eventually, overwhelmed by their frequency, some outlets such as The Washington Post began to count them (as of July 9, 20,055 and rising) and their columnists and fact-checkers finally label them as such. Their initial dictum was just to report what he said without speculating as to his intent and present the reader/viewer with the facts. That in the eyes of Trump and his supporters, the media was the “enemy of the people” and facts in the age of information overload reduced to items on an a la carte menu from which to be chosen depending on convenience and gut feelings had not yet sunk in. Perhaps, like Trump himself, the media felt that calling out his lies would cause the American people to panic, to lose faith in our system of governance. One might have hoped they had learned from their mistakes: After all, when Trump came into office, we were still reeling from the after effects of seven years of war in Iraq started on the basis of another series of lies largely unchallenged by the mainstream media. (Tellingly, those who told the truth – Edwin Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange – have become “enemies of the state.” More recent whistleblowers, like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, have been vilified by the usual suspects.)

Or perhaps, like Bob Woodward, they decided to hold out until they saw the bottom line and the prospect of higher circulation, steeper paywalls, and larger ratings, which itself should be a source of rage.

Technology has not been of much help here. The panopticonic state with its cellphones, television cameras, security cameras, and body cams and other forms of mass surveillance has not provided, as Jeremy Bentham once envisioned, a voyeuristic “mill for grinding rogues honest.” Instead, it has produced new, more elaborate ways to evade, delay and potentially conceal the truth.

Nor it is the problem merely that Trump’s lies; he also has others lie for him. As The New Yorker’s Masha Geesen observed in 2018, “Lying for Trump has become … a familiar practice in American politics.” The endless parade of Trumpist prevaricators includes not only those who worked in his administration – Ronny Jackson, Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly – and his stalwart Republican defenders – Mitch McConnell, Mark Meadows, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan – but also some members of the Fourth Estate – Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, or at least those hanging out in its infotainment gazebo. Politico reports that Health and Human Services chairman Michael Caputo, and other top officials, altered CDC reports on COVID-19 so that their findings better squared with Trump’s lies, even going so far as to suggest victims of the disease were to blame for contracting it, a telling emendation given that the disease disproportionately afflicts people of color. Like a syphilitic Midas, Typhoid Trump corrupts everything he touches, or, less generously, freely indulges those actively seeking to wallow in their baser own instincts. Nothing, including DHS, ICE, the CDC, the FDA and HHS, escapes his poisonous embrace. To paraphrase Trump, “When you’re president they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Eager to vilify BLM and Antifa, Trump’s enablers hold their tongues when it comes to militia and vigilantes. To say that they maintain their silence, however, is to mischaracterize the depths of their immoral stealth. Asked repeatedly by CNN’s Dana Bash if he condemned the murderous actions of Trump-supporter Kyle Rittenhouse, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, evaded the question, repeatedly mouthing the words, “It’s a tragedy.” (The tragedy is that he did not have the cojones to answer Bash’s question.) This is the same Johnson who a year earlier in an interview with Bash refused to condemn Trump’s statement demanding four progressive Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back to their country” and accusing them of being incapable of “loving our America.” Instead, he quoted Martin Luther King on judging people by the “content of their character not the color of their skin.” How, one wonders, does Johnson judge Trump’s? Given the evidence of Johnson’s own palpable lack of character and judgement, it is best he steer clear of ever quoting King again.

Meanwhile, Deputy Director of DHS Ken Cuccinelli and Acting Secretary Chad Wolf (once again American democracy is threatened by a misplaced chad; hopefully the results will not be as disastrous the time around) downplay the threat of white supremacy to national security while overstating the menace of “Antifa,” “socialists,” “anarchists,” “radicals,” “transgender black Marxists,” and other boogeymen without apparently being too worked up about panicking the public. Others manufacture conspiracies, including one that painted 75-year old white peace activist Martin Guigino as an “Antifa provocateur” armed with “Mission Impossible”-grade hi-tech doohickeys and Tom Savini-level makeup effect skills.

Trump screams about anonymous sources, yet he’s not too great about naming his own. As The Washington Post noted in 2016, Trump attributes much of what spews from his mouth to anonymous “people” (“lots” of them, in fact) who have, allegedly, informed him that, among other things, Obama “didn’t want to know about Muslim terrorism,” “[the Iran deal] is worse than stupid,” Ted Cruz was “born in Canada,” Vince Foster was “absolutely murdered,” “they had spies in [his] campaign, and the 2020 election will be “rigged.” These “sources” remain unnamed.

We have seen the clashes of armed, self-styled militias with BLM protesters. And yet there are those who stubbornly insist that fascism cannot happen here and who ignore the vicious irony that these armed militiamen are allowed to roam the streets while unarmed blacks are suffocated and shot dead. In Wisconsin, Rittenhouse walks free after killing two protesters and maiming a third. Meanwhile, in Colorado, a black child is suspended from school and has the police sent to his home for playing with a toy during an online class, though I suppose we should be relieved they did not shoot and kill him seconds after their arrival.

The mendacity of those in power should not surprise us. Those who have pledged to “protect and serve,” whether politicians or police, continue to betray the public trust. For to the champions of “law and order”, the proud boys (and girls) who worship Trump as their ochre Übermensch, their own paunchy Aryan Homelander blessed with, according to Trump’s former physician Ronny Jackson, the “good genes” that prove his triumph of will über alles, lies don’t matter. And so long as they can lie and be lied to with impunity and without complaint, why should they? For in their eyes, Trump’s lies are not lies at all, but the benevolent paternalistic largesse of an infallible patriarch protective of his faithful brood.

YOU ARE CAPABLE!

YOU ARE QUALIFIED!

YOU ARE POWERFUL!

AND YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE YOUR LIFE AND DETERMINE YOUR DESTINY!

–Kimberly Guilfoyle plagiarizing the mantra Donald Trump shouts at his bathroom mirror reflection every morning

Our country is experiencing something none of us envisioned.

–Tim Scott stating the obvious while avoiding the orange elephant in the room

The world laughs at us, folks. The world laughs at us.

—Donald Trump telling the truth, for once

After four nights, the reality show” Shouting with the Tsars,” a.k.a. the Republican National Convention, is finally over. Convened to con America and nominate Donald John Trump as its incumbent president, the RNC engaged in nightly rounds of racial poker – I’ll see your black former president, first lady and former secretary of state and raise you my black senator, football player, self-avowed Democratic Party “mental plantation”-escapee, and former prison felon – all the while bluffing that the party is a colorblind meritocracy with nary a white supremacist in sight, a utopian model of and for an America that never was and under them never will be.

To demonstrate Republican racial diversity and the ideological heterogeneity of the black community, black and brown people were invited to serve as water-carriers for a party that has shown their people nothing if not contempt. Now the RNC trots them out like contestants on the “Devil’s Apprentice” to foster the illusion that: 1) racism, if it ever really existed, is a thing of the distant past and a stranger to the party of Lincoln, 2) their presence at the podium will lure a more diverse element to the party that will make it more politically competitive, all the while adapting to its showcase of melaninated luminaries the racio-linguistic rules of n-word usage, also known as the FOX News gambit, whereby these black and brown tokens can criticize the black community in a way whites cannot without being labelled racist, and 3) in the Republican Party black lives matter, or at least these do, if only because they are necessary to secure the God-Emperor of Dumb another term.

The dramatis personae in this farcical parade of personality cultists included:

Tim Scott

Scott’s story of personal, intellectual redemption was inspirational only to those who desperately wanted to be inspired. It was meant to show that with the “right values” even a black D-student can turn his life around and become a valued party houseboy. However, his uplifting narrative only served to obscure the fact that the current occupant of the Oval Office allegedly did not earn his academic achievements, preferring to pull strings and have others do the heavy lifting for him, yet insists that Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez release their college transcripts and threatens to sue the educational institutions he attended if they release his own. All of which throws a wrench into the GOP’s myth of a colorblind meritocratic America and undercuts the impact of Scott’s narrative of personal perseverance and triumph.

We may never know what courses Trump failed, though it’s a good bet, judging from his performance as president, they were the same as Scott’s (English, Spanish, World Geography and Civics), and perhaps, in light of his multiple bankruptcies, business practices, and first term as president, Business Administration and Ethics, though the latter is up for debate since it was probably an elective and an unlikely choice for Trump.

For all intents and purposes, Scott was trotted out (or, more precisely, allowed himself to be trotted out) like the party’s other speakers of color as Trump’s (other) African Americans, a shortlist that includes Kanye West, Diamond and Silk, and Mike Tyson, and once included Gregory Cheadle, Trump’s original African American, who later wisely announced he was leaving the Republican party because, according to the PBS News Hour, he believes it has  a “pro-white” agenda and is using black people as “political pawns,” something Scott and his fellow collaborators might keep in mind as they prostitute themselves for Orange Don and his nepotic brood. A “whorendous” decision, to borrow a term coined by wordsmith Eric Trump – or was it simply bastardly?

Nikki Haley

Playing the race card like a Las Vegas cogger, Haley proclaimed herself a “proud daughter of Indian immigrants in a black and white world,” disingenuously reassuring her audience, despite actual and hypertextual evidence to the contrary, that “America is not a racist country”:

America respects and values every black life. The black cops who’ve been shot in the line of duty. They matter. The black small business owners who’ve seen their life’s work go up in flames. They matter. The black kids who’ve been gunned down on the playground. Their lives matter too. And their lives are being ruined and stolen by the violence on our streets. It doesn’t have to be like this. I wasn’t like this five years ago.

Sure, Nikki, tell it to the family of fellow South Carolinian Walter Scott.

Tell it to now paralyzed Jacob Blake and his traumatized sons.

Tell it to the Kenosha Police Department who were so concerned about street violence that they let a white 17-year-old, Donald Trump supporter, police wannabe/vigilante, and George Zimmerman Syndrome sufferer armed with an AR-15 who shot two people dead and wounded a third, leave the scene of the crime before finally and perhaps, given their effusive appreciation of militia support, reluctantly arresting him at his mother’s house. (Was he, like Dylan Roof, also treated to a Whopper?) In as much as both his victims were white, white lives, at least those protesting for racial justice, don’t matter either. Buffalo, New York peace activist Martin Gugino could have told the former UN ambassador as much, had she deigned to listen. But then, “white-on-white” crime has never been a priority for the GOP.

This is the same Nikki Haley who once asserted that the Confederate flag wasn’t a symbol of hate until it was “highjacked” and held up by Roof, suggesting that slavery was a benign institution and those who fought to maintain it heroes, which speaks volumes about Haley’s perverted sense of history. This is also the Nikki Haley who once defended Trump, after he made an fool of himself during an address before the UN General Assembly boasting of his accomplishment as president, by suggesting the guffaws he elicited from its members were because they “love his honesty…and they find it funny.” If they found that funny, the fact that Trump, according to the Washington Post, has made over 20,000 false or misleading statements must have them all rolling in the aisles.

Herschel Walker

Walker’s presence at the RNC was designed to personally assure the virtual(ly) all white audience that Trump is not racist and actually “shows how much he cares about social justice in the black community through his action.”

This presumably includes actions like:

・ refusing to apologize for taking out an ad in 1989 calling for execution of the Central Park Five even after they were found innocent and calling their exoneration a “disgrace,”

・insulting every woman of color who calls out his racism, misogyny, and dishonesty,

・referring to Haiti and African nations as “shithole” countries and explicitly suggesting that the “crime-” and “rat-infested” cities run by black Democrats are the same,

・underplaying the deadly impact of the coronavirus and its devastating socio-economic impact on communities of color.

Mark and Patricia McCloskey

The RNC would be remiss if it did not pimp out wealthy white victimhood. This election year the poster couple for white grievance is the McCloskeys, who took up arms to protect their home from nonviolent protesters and who as a consequence have become the privileged face of Law and Order. Yet these gun-brandishing champions of affluent homeownership and Second Amendment rights conveniently obscured the true victims of real home invasions: Breonna Taylor, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, and Kenneth Chamberlain Sr, to name but a few. Unlike the McCloskeys, these victims did not bear witness at the RNC; they are dead.

In the end, the RNC chose to spin the “greatness” of America, while its leadership strives systematically to dismantle the very principles it claims to hold dear. Steeped in hagiology, it refused to acknowledge the cruelty of its Dear Leader, all the while insisting that we not concern ourselves with the fact that Trump wants to protect the “homeland” by not just building a wall but demanding that it be designed to deliberately maim those who attempt to breech it.

But the price of this panglossian outlook is myopic denial: of the reality of American racism, of science, of fact and reason, and the raging incompetence of their golden idol.

All of the shouting, bluster, and flag-humping jingoism on display at the RNC was a distraction as the circus master conspires to undermine the foundations of democracy with the same brazen hypocrisy with which Jerry Falwell Jr. celebrates family values, though we are now the cuckolds who watch as 45 screws our country.

Meanwhile, as a petulant Trump stamps his tiny feet in objection to defunding the police and threatens to defund the UPS to impede mail-in voting, his Republican enablers mobilize the arsenal of more conventional means they have traditionally deployed to suppress the vote of black and brown people, the same people Trump claims to have done more for (to?) than anyone.

Sadly, those who should have held Trump’s feet to the fire have instead held their tongues. A recently leaked tape to The Independent revealed that in 2017, speaking on Martin Luther King Jr Day before a group of black leaders that included Martin Luther King III, Trump boasted that the low black turnout in 2016 helped him secure the presidency and claimed that black voters stayed home because they “liked” him over Hillary Clinton. Ever the hyperbolic center of the known universe, he also reportedly boasted that “I listen better to the African American people than anybody else. Anybody else in this room,” apparently forgetting the composition of his audience. Yet this audience, the paper reports, while stunned by the statement, did not censure or publicly criticize him for it. This raises an unsettling question: If these “prominent civil rights activists” won’t stand up for themselves, how can they be expected to stand up for those they ostensibly lead. Were the shiny baubles Trump dangled before them worth their silence?

Hopefully, while some black “leaders” nurse their silence, those whom they represent will make their voice known at the polls in massive numbers. Given what is at stake, black Americans will need to vote in record numbers. In the unlikely event their vote is not suppressed, Trump will be defeated, though the game changers remain the electoral college and poll-skewing crypto-Trumpists. Still, if the parade of, to borrow the title of an old C.M. Kornbluth story, “marching morons” at the RNC is any indication, one should never underestimate the fact that the spectacle of stupidity on defiant display (remember the TV show “Jackass”?) can draw ratings – and reactionary white votes. Moreover, the danger remains that even if he loses the election, Trump will refuse to concede, leave, and surround his regime with loyal, armed federal agents as the courts try to resolve yet another in a never-ending series of constitutional crises.

Despite these very real fears, convention speakers presented Trump as tough on crime – others’, not his own – which is telling considering that Trump and his cronies continue to violate the law with impunity. This time around, Trump, his Cabinet officials and family members, apparently emboldened by indifference over the Goya incident, committed mulitiple violations of the Hatch Act during the convention itself by politicizing the federal government and using the White House as a campaign prop, all on the taxpayer’s dime. His defenders also presented Trump as tough on China, as if :1) orchestrating a hostile takeover of a Chinese company to enable an American company to secure its popular app and ultimately share its data with or have it surreptitiously monitored by the NSA^[1] and 2) turning a virus into a xenophobic slur are somehow a measure of his manhood, which our home-grown, would-be Lukashenko has previously assured us is without problem, though some would beg to differ.

Yes, the world laughs at us, and rightly so.

If the RNC taught us anything, it is that Donald Trump and the GOP have always shamed America first, but never so often and as much as now.

Note.

1) When it comes to spying on Americans, why leave to corporate communists what corporate capitalists do best. Just ask James Clapper. Strike that; he’d only (im)plausibly deny it – with impunity. ↑

[I]t’s easy to imagine for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some entity for their entertainment.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

Has the world gone mad, or have I? Each night I have to pinch myself to make sure that the day’s events weren’t some feverish nightmare.

Seventy days until the election – assuming there is one – and already Trump and his accomplices are plotting to steal it right from under us, post-haste. In some ways, we live in a chillingly horrific world presided over by the wicked warlock of the West Wing. We tut-tut his evil and idly hope for the best. Hollywood has conditioned us to believe that in the end Good prevails. Trump will be defeated, the nation will right itself. Like Oz after the Wicked Witch melts. Like a rejoiceful Earth after the mothership is destroyed at the end of “Independence Day” and the massive invading fleet falls from the skies. Without its head, the fantasy we continually tell ourselves goes, the dragon flails, then falls. Unless, of course, it’s a hydra.

Nightmare or fantasy, there is something otherworldly about the world in which we live. Some philosophers of science with more time on their hands than is perhaps healthy have suggested that our world may be a cosmic “Matrix”-like simulated reality, as if that offers any comfort. It is the kind of idle thought experiment (can you say “mental masturbation”?) that could be imagined only by those who don’t have to navigate the harsh global realities created by this theoretical “simulation.”

As a black American, am I to take comfort in the thought that the enduring legacy slavery, Jim Crow, a lynching, and police brutality is simply a computer code, a programmed sequence of 0s and 1s in a system in which blacks and other people of color are the 0s? Am I to find solace in the belief that the bias is binary, the discrimination digital, the anti-blackness algorithmic? Or as the Baud once put it, “All the world’s a video game, and all men and women merely avatars.” Should I convince myself that all that is needed to address the problem is to hit the reset button? Should I be relieved that there may be other simulations, alternate universes, that offer better, more just outcomes, the digital equivalent of heaven, virtuality as the Oxycodone of the people. And to think, the right gets its panties in a bunch over stereotypical Islamists martyring themselves to bask eternally under the ministrations of virgins in paradise. But then what does one expect from those who, maskless, would martyr others to bask in the radiant narcissism of their mendacious trickster president.

Expanding on the speculation, Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has stated, “It’s hard to argue against the possibility that all of us are not just the creation of some kid in a parent’s basement programming up a world for their own entertainment. And then every time something weird happens in the world, some disruptive leader takes charge…I wonder if that programmer just got bored and had to stir the pot. So, he throws somebody in there just to…just for their own entertainment. For me that’s some of the best evidence we live in a simulation” (emphasis mine).

Well, if brother Tyson is right, then for the last four years that hypothetical programmer must have been bored shitless.

But, hold on. Who the hell is this “programmer?” The same hi-tech Google wizard who developed facial recognition software that can’t distinguish photos of black people from those of gorillas? The brainiac whose Keywords Planner ad portal consistently connects searches with the words “black girls” “Latina” and “Asian” to pornographic suggestions and whose Google Maps led those searching the term “nigger” to the White House and other black institutions during the Obama presidency? The inventors of Facebook and Instagram’s moderation system that disproportionately disables black accounts? The same techno-bigots whose implicit biases are responsible for the copious “glitches” chronicled in Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Nobel’s sobering analysis of digital bias? If you’re a person of color, this hypothetical programmer’s heaven echoes the all too familiar hellish reality of life in Trump’s America.

And who programmed the programmer? God? Or is God just another program? I prefer the comforts of agnosticism and, when it comes to cyber deism, unmitigated atheism. I don’t look for God in the machine; humanity’s continuous search for one has not been particularly conducive to its happiness.

Still, whether it is the invisible hand of God or some cosmic Deep Blue, we’re screwed. If not by the mythic Cosmic Kahuna “himself” then by those who allege to carry out “His” work. Trump sees himself as the “chosen one,” as does his reality-averse base – and under the pandemic, people of color have increasingly paid the price for this delusion with their lives and livelihoods. Despite – or perhaps because of – this, the God-Emperor of Mar-a-Lago continues to be deified by FOX News loyalists and worshipers at the altar of QAnon.

But one man’s savior is another’s Antichrist. Back in 2013, The Guardian reported that one in four Americans thought Obama was the Antichrist. In fact, it was only four years ago that Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann (who?!) seriously predicted that Obama would reveal himself as such, and just a little over a year since she proclaimed Trump a “godly, biblical president.”

There was even a book, The Final Antichrist: Barack Obama, a clarion call to racial Armageddonists, written by the demonically prolific Michael D. Fortner. Other evangelicals suggested that while Obama himself may not have been the Antichrist, he might pave the way for the real deal, a view apparently endorsed by Trump himself who recently stated, “Frankly, I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for Barack Obama.” Adds Dallas megachurch pastor Rev. Robert Jeffress: “I’m not saying the president [Obama] is an evil man who’s trying to destroy our society, but Americans are willingly giving up their freedom for what they’re told is a greater good…. A future world dictator will assume power under the guise of the greater good of the world.” Or under the guise of making America great again.

But then Trump still has the support of evangelicals, including multi-millionaire Christian yachter Jerry Falwell, Jr.who, having traded his Kool-Aid for “black water” and exposed more than his hypocrisy, couldn’t manage to keep his pants zippered. However, unlike Falwell, Trump proved with his raid on Lafayette Street that he knows how to stage a controversial photo op without getting the boot for it.

Still, for believers, there is no shortage of signs foretelling the arrival of the Antichrist.

The world we live in, whether real or computer-generated, is rife with Old Testament omens. Plagues? We got plagues to spare. Floods? Look no further than Venice, East Africa, and the American heartland. Fire?: Wildfires in California and Australia. East Africa is ravaged by locusts. It wasn’t long into the Trump presidency that the “sun turned dark,” but apparently not dark enough to discourage Trump from staring directly at it. As if these omens were not enough, the video game that is our world is, if we are to believe at least one of the “experts” touted by Trump, infested by witches, succubi, demon sperm-spewing incubi, alien DNA, and reptilian humanoids. Despite these signs that the end is nigh, no one has seriously bestowed the Antichrist label on Trump. Well, at least no one on the right. Then again, according to the Daily Ko’s Dan K, they have. Each day seems to bring us to a new “level” of madness, with no “Game Over” in sight. And for those who would argue that the election will bring a reset, take it to the post office, if it’s still there.

Or maybe it is not the world that’s a simulation but the autocrat who seeks to rule it. In The Penultimate Truth, a prescient work of science fiction by the ever-prescient Philip K. Dick, the avuncular, bromide-spouting U.S. president, Talbot Yancy, is actually an artificial simulacrum secretly programed by “Yance Men,” technocrats charged with deceiving the public. In Trump we have our own Yancy, though without the folksy pep talks. That is, it may be that Trump is just a public facade, an orange-faced facsimile whose populist blather is actually the work of Trump Men (and Women) like Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Hannity, and Dan Scavino, Trump whisperers all.

The last four years have been as surreal as any imagined deus ex machina denouement,

though without the requisite last-minute, miraculous happy ending. Instead, we have a malevolent Pennywise in the White House who has brought with him a bottomless clown car from which emerges an endless stream of democracy-threatening bozos.

Commenting on how Americans might respond to Trump’s relentless assault on democracy, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg writes, “We won’t know whether Americans will turn out in necessary numbers for [peaceful] demonstrations. The recent racial justice protests are some of the largest America has ever seen; protests over Trump’s systematic subversion of democratic norms have been smaller.”

Like Neo in “The Matrix,” we are given a choice: We can choose the red pill of epiphanic liberation or the blue pill of complicitous complacence. The problem is, even if we choose the red pill and confront those who have swallowed – hook, line and sinker – the blue, the circus, which predates its current star performers, shows no signs of ending and every sign of continuing until we finally shutter the tent and shut down “the program” for good, and for the good of us all.

The name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now. It has a vaguely Teutonic ring – Ve must help ze Fuehrer protect ze Homeland! – and Republicans must always be on guard against sounding Teutonic.

–Peggy Noonan

The federal government has absolute power. As to whether I’ll use that power, we’ll see.

–Donald Trump

There is a real discrepancy in how you react as attorney general when white men with Swastikas storm a government building with guns. There is no need for the president to, quote, ‘activate you’ because they’re getting the president’s personal agenda done. But when black people and people of color protest police brutality, systemic racism and the president’s very own lack of response to those critical issues, then you forcibly remove them with armed federal officers, pepper bombs because they are considered terrorists by the president.

-Rep. Pramila Jayapal  addressing Attorney General William Barr

Wake up, America, the signs of the police state loom large. Of course, for some, America has always been one; now, increasingly, they have the videos to prove it. But now it’s no longer only a matter of local law enforcement.

In his never-ending efforts to transform America into a banana republic, Donald Trump, our lawless and chaotic law and order president, has deployed federal agents to Portland, Chicago, Kansas City, and Albuquerque to sweep up protestors as he attempts to distract us from the deadly toll of the coronavirus.

What next? Will protesters be disappeared? Will renditions follow? Will the feds, following the lead of the Baltimore Police Department, use their unmarked vans as mobile Abu Ghraibs? Indeed, are the feds fundamentally any different from local police? Does Congress care? Do we?

We should. Trump’s incessant attempts to make America into the kind of “shithole country” he once notoriously decried are tolerated with the same benighted resignation, the same complacent inevitability with which we greet global warming. Ivanka Trump hawks Goya products; her sugar daddy follows suit, turning the Oval Office into bodega. Hatch Act? Shmatch Act. Don’t kid yourself: Trump will neither fine nor fire his daughter and the president himself is comfortably ensconced beyond the rule of law, protected and abetted by his attorney general. In resolutely giving Goya his two thumps up, Trump once again thumbs his nose at us, or more characteristically, flips a pair of birds at us, daring us to do anything about it.

And why shouldn’t he? He knows he can get away with it. The impeachment debacle told him as much, so now there is nothing to rein in his abuses. As president, he is above the law – where he will remain unless enough people rise to challenge him and prove otherwise. Impeach him again? Only in an alternate universe where our political leaders possess spines and heed the will of the majority of the American people. Instead, the “opposition’s” strategy seems to be to bide time until the November election with the expectation that Trump will be defeated, an overly wishful scenario that, were it not for our collective national amnesia, we would recognize we have witnessed before.

Some presidents are scandalous, others have scandals thrust upon them. When there was a black president in the White House, the right and corporate mainstream media were scandalized that he wore a tan suit, bowed to a Saudi king, and occasionally used the Resolute desk as an ottoman (as did his predecessors) not a sales counter. Today, news that Russian military intelligence allegedly paid bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan elicits the usual chatter from mainstream media magpies and little else from our putative political leaders. The fact that the white man in the artificial tan skin knew about it – or didn’t, according to press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who, we should recall, on her first day on the job also promised never to lie to the press corps, her first of many – generates only a modicum of outrage from the right and no effective response from the left. According to CNN, a “bipartisan group of congressional leaders demands” answers. Politico, on the other hand, reports that these same “leaders…appear poised to do little – if anything – about it.” Which is it? Will they hold more congressional hearings? Probably not, because they know this would only end in more absurdist political theater and, ultimately, paralysis.

How things have changed! Hilary Clinton faced ten investigations ostensibly over the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. And while we do not know the number of soldiers killed as a result of Russia’s alleged intervention, there’s another death toll for which the president is himself responsible, though here, too, he has not been held accountable: According to Worldometers, as of 11:52 p.m. GMT, July 30th, 155,019 Americans have died from COVID-19, That’s over 500 times the number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks since 9/11 and 155,018 more than the hypothetical Fifth Avenue victim the President claimed he could shoot with impunity. The blame for many of these deaths can be laid at the feet of ze “Homeland’s” feckless fuehrer. As the body count mounts, it appears that Trump has sorely underestimated the amount of lethal leeway the people’s elected representatives would grant him, which says more about the nation than it does the feebleminded man-child who “leads” it. (Well, in light of his self-proclaimed “amazing” ability to remember in sequence five words, he may not be so feebleminded after all. We can only hope that one day he will make a song of this particular skill set and serenade us from his prison cell if and when he is removed from office.)

Meanwhile, the nation frantically hobbles from one constitutional crisis to another. “I wish we had an occupying force there,” Trump told Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during a conference call. Trump’s not so secret secret police now patrol a number of Democrat-controlled cities and he has threatened to deploy them in others to turn them into his own private Crimea, his personal Palestine.

This is the same man who argues that the coronavirus response – but not law enforcement – should be left to the states, while falsely claiming that he has “absolute authority,” which explains why he refused to consult these states before deploying federal agents. However, Trump telegraphed his move as early as June 1st when he pressed governors, law enforcement and national security officials to “dominate the protestors” and later threatened to do it for them if they didn’t.

Wake up, America: it’s time to take Marmalade Mussolini at his word.

In pursuing this course of action, Trump is acting on the authoritarian impulse that began in 2002 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and that gave the department its ominously prophetic name. As he did ICE before it, he is corrupting an already suspect institution for his own political ends.

You don’t have to have aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test to see that Trump has already laid the ground work for contesting the election in the event he is defeated. These deployments test the waters. Every step of his career, Trump has been testing limits—the limits of indecency, credulity, cruelty, corruption, and power – limits with which he has seldom had to contend. He has already launched a preemptive strike against the 2020 election by insisting it will be rigged in the event he fails to cancel it outright.

Is there any doubt that a defeated Trump will contest the election and refuse to leave the White House? Given the laws that he has broken both before and after he assumed the presidency, he has little choice if he hopes to stay out of jail, assuming, of course, that any legal action against him will actually be pursued and that if prosecuted he will actually serve even a token amount of time before he is released from a criminal justice system that privileges the rich, powerful and connected. Just ask Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, or any member of the nation’s murderously impervious thin blue line.

Trump’s current experiment with federal agents is a practice run: Ultimately, he will deploy them to run inference to impede his eviction from the White House. Those who doubt that federal agents would carry out his instructions need look only at how these gutless golems responded in Washington, D.C. to Trump’s orders to forcibly clear Lafayette Square of peaceful demonstrators so he could have his Bible-brandishing photo op. Remember, it took eleven days for General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, to apologize for his gaffe de guerre. And while Milley’s apology suggests he has learned from his mistake, DHS Acting Secretary Chad Wolf and FBI director Christopher Wray have learned nothing, except to prepare their own perfunctory mea culpas to preserve their careers in the post-Trump period, assuming, of course, there is one. Indeed, if we are to believe Defense Secretary Mark Esper, during the same photo-op excursion, he “didn’t know where [he] was going.” Apparently, he was just obeying orders, the oath he swore to protect the Constitution that he now invokes to assuage his critics and his conscience forgotten in the fog of “battlespace” and flashbulbs. A couple of days later, however, Esper still didn’t seem to know where he was headed when he ordered federal agents removed from Washington, D.C. only to reverse his decision the next day. While Trump invokes the Insurrection Act in all but name, Esper and other agency heads eagerly comply. According to The New York Times, as early as June 2, a day after federal troops cleared Lafayette Square, David Bowdich, the deputy director of the bureau, “demanded an immediate mobilization” in response to the national protests. So much for constitutional rights, which, as Pramila Jayapal reminds us, need protection only when protesters invoke the Second Amendment not the First.

Uniforms are not the only camouflage the feds don to cloak their presence. Another is their assertion that, like local law enforcement, they are there “to serve and protect.” Yet according to Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, DHS and other federal agencies are “not trained to deal with protests.” Soak yourselves in the irony of that for a second, since one of the issues that precipitated the current wave of national protests for police reform is that state and local law enforcement aren’t adequately trained (or trained all too well if the goal is to demoralize and intimidate the communities they “serve”). So, by pouring federals troops into these cities, Trump is essentially pouring fuel on a bonfire in a cynic bid to paint himself as the law and order president and solidify support among his base. But it’s not as if there were no warning signs: according to Watts, Trump “always turns to the DHS whenever he wants to get something done. He sorta forces them into this.”

The fact that they have not pushed back but instead relish the opportunity to dominate should give us pause. In the face of such rampant corruption, we try, like Jayapal, to contain our anger as we interrogate the brazen daily spectacle of mindless power displays orchestrated by an erratic, incompetent infant terrible who grabs pussies, lies, endorses medical quackery, and skulks away when called out on it, but who, despite his abjectly abnormal behavior, remains commander-in-chief with access to federal troops.

Our would-be Fuehrer and the Homeland don’t need protection; the people and its Constitution do.

Wake up, America, for as you slumber, monsters rule.

I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president. And let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, because he did good, but although it’s always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result.

—Donald Trump (June 14, 1946- Present)

I didn’t do nothing serious man
please
please
please I can’t breathe
please man
please somebody
please man
I can’t breathe
I can’t breathe
please
man can’t breathe, my face
just get up
I can’t breathe
please
I can’t breathe
shit
I will
I can’t move
mama
mama
I can’t
my knee
my nuts
I’m through
I’m through
I’m claustrophobic
my stomach hurt
my neck hurts
everything hurts
some water or something
please
please
I can’t breathe officer
don’t kill me
they gon’ kill me man
come on man
I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe
they gon’ kill me
they gon’ kill me
I can’t breathe
I can’t breathe
please sir
please
please
please I can’t breathe

—The last words of George Floyd (October 14, 1973- May 25, 2020)

One is celebrating birthday.