Trump again refuses to commit to peaceful transfer of power

Yesterday Trump was asked, not for the first time, whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. Again, he has refused.

“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said when first asked if he would “commit here today for a peaceful transferral of power after the November election.” He continued, “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.” But it’s when the reporter, Brian Karem of Playboy magazine, pressed again, that Trump really laid it out. “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

There you have it, the Republican plan for the 2020 election with all the lies and obfuscation burned away: they plan to win by getting rid of the ballots.

QAnon conspiracy theory is just rebranded Nazi conspiracy theory

Gregory Stanton, a genocide expert, makes the case that QAnon, the conspiracy theory beloved of many Republicans, is a Nazi cult.

A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.

Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.

Stanton points out that what QAnon has repackaged, is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time, one promoted by Hitler and his collaborators.

You might think it’s unfair to say the whole Republican Party is in bed with QAnon, but you’d be wrong.  Not only are Republicans running QAnon supporters on the ballot for Congress, but Iowa Republican Joni Ernst is repeating the QAnon conspiracy theory.  We have to vote out all the Republicans; they no longer have a place in a democratic government.

It’s no exaggeration: Nazis love Trump

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog to hear that Donald Trump is very popular among German neo-Nazis.

The Trump appeal to Germany’s neo-Nazi groups, a source of domestic terror in that nation as their far-right allies are in this one, is simple to understand. Trump is an avowed nationalist and nativist. He’s brazenly racist. He’s both a sponge for far-right conspiracy theories and an avid distributor of them. And he’s a practicing fascist—leading an administration that has increasingly simply ignored federal laws, Congress, and the courts in service to a white nationalist agenda headed by a forever-incompetent Dear Leader figure. Trump is currently closer to the neo-Nazi ideal government than perhaps any other top nation, both nationalist and world-powerful.

Nobody in Germany is confused over what Donald Trump represents or what his intentions are. They understand him, and those he has staffed his administration with, perfectly fine. It is only the American press that cannot quite muster what to make of Trump’s fascist rhetoric and “norm”-breaking dismantling of ethics and law alike.

It’s what I’ve been saying for years now:  Republicans are supporting a fascist.  And as if to underline it for us, Trump is now openly supporting extrajudicial killings.

Crimes against humanity

We now have, from multiple sources, reports that the Trump White House dragged its feet in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic because they saw it as a blue state problem.

Post-Trump reconstruction of the United States is going to require prosecution of Trump and all his collaborators, definitely including Jared Kushner, for using the coronavirus response as a political weapon against the American people.

Trump promotes “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

The next time someone says you should be for bipartisan cooperation, remind them of this:

President Donald Trump promoted a video on Twitter late Wednesday night that opens with Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin declaring that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

Here’s the screenshot of Trump’s tweet.  It is not ambiguous.Screenshot of Trump tweet

Former senior CIA official calls openly for murder of Trump opponents

If you have read this blog before, you’ve heard me suggest more than once that fascism is ascendant in America.  If you still think that’s an overstatement, perhaps this latest bit of evidence will change your mind.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official and author, wrote a blog post in which he explicitly calls for Trump opponents to be killed.  This is justified, in his mind, and no doubt the minds of others, because Trump opponents are involved in a coup against the Trump government.  Note the detail he provides:

Fortunately, they have in hand a long and very precise list of the names and photographs of those who hate and threaten them, their families, their way-of-life, their liberty, their livelihoods and their republic. No self-respecting and determined-to-remain-independent citizenry can let themselves forever be held hostage by thug-civil-servants like Strzok, Comey, McCabe, Page, and Rosenstein; worshipers of tyranny, like the Democratic members of Congress, the Clintons, the FBI, and the Obamas; apparent traitors like Brennan, Hayden, and Clapper; all of the mainstream media; and the tens of thousands of government-admitted-and-protected, violent, criminal, and illegal immigrants.

Just in case you missed it, “all of the mainstream media” and “Democratic members of Congress” are on Scheuer’s death list.

Notice that he’s not calling for the government to round up people.  He’s calling for civilians to pick up their guns and go out and kill their neighbors on behalf of the government.  This is precisely how fascist violence begins, as it did, for example, in Italy in 1922.

Are we a fascist country yet?

The transition of a society from liberal democracy to fascism isn’t a sudden thing.  The gradual transformation must have seemed normal and sensible to a lot of Italian, Spanish, and German citizens in the 1930s.  It’s worth asking today how future historians will view the America of 2018.  Will they wonder why we we went along, why we didn’t seem to notice what was happening?

Several signposts are already in the rear-view mirror.  The President has called news reporters “enemies of the state” and openly incites violence against them.  We had an open gathering of KKK members and actual Nazis in Charlottesville, described by President as “very fine people.”  Trump has repeatedly praised President Duterte of the Philippines, who literally describes himself as a fascist, and particularly likes Duterte’s program of mass murder.  He has asserted more than once that he is above the law.  We have Rep. Steve King, R-IA, openly and repeatedly expressing his support for fascists.  We have various Republicans saying, as Ted Nugent did, that Democrats should be shot, and that people who take down Confederate monuments should be lynched, and that it’s a good thing when reporters are beaten.  We have death threats against a federal judge who blocked Trump’s Muslim ban.  We have numerous incidents of anti-Semitism, including one at a Republican event.  And we have actual Hitler-loving Nazis praising our current administration.

So what has been happening lately?

That is an incomplete list of things that have happened in just the last two weeks.  We should probably all be thinking about how history will judge us for resisting, or failing to resist, in 2018.

 

A stain that will never come out

Let’s get some clarity on the worst Trump administration policy so far.

  • The Trump administration has made a policy of separating children from their parents at the border, for the express purpose of deterrence, that is, terrorizing people to keep them from attempting to cross the border.  John Kelley said as much on the record, as did Jeff Sessions when he announced the policy.
  • The Trump administration is now gaslighting us, denying what we all heard them say about their deliberate policy of tearing families apart. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Sunday on Twitter, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”  Trump himself has repeated the lie, over and over again, that families are being separated because of a nonexistent law passed by the Democrats.
  • The children are being held in cages.  The officials who deny there are children in cages, are denying what we have already seen.  We have an unedited, confirmed audio recording of children wailing and crying for their parents.  The recording lasts 7 minutes 47 seconds.  Listen to the whole thing if you can.  I can’t.
  • Mitch McConnell has said that a “narrow fix” to the problem is needed.  “I support, and all of the members of the Republican conference support, a plan that keeps families together while their immigration status is determined,” he claims.  And yet:  every Democrat in the U.S. Senate has cosponsored the “Keep Families Together Act,” a bill that would only allow undocumented children to be separated from their parents if there is evidence of parents abusing the children or children being trafficked.  Sounds like a pretty narrow fix.  But for all the hand-wringing and concerned noises being made by Republicans, not one Republican has endorsed the bill.
  • Rank and file Republicans don’t bother pretending to oppose the policy.  A new poll shows that 55% of Republicans approve of the family separations.

So to review, we have a Republican policy, that the framers of that policy are lying about.  We have Republican officials opposing the policy, but not supporting a bill that would put an end to it.  We have a solid majority of rank and file Republicans approving of a policy that can only be characterized as evil.

Let’s remember this when a Republican stands up, now and in the future, to tell us the difference between right and wrong.  They have no standing to talk about morality.  They are solidly and unapologetically behind evil.

Ex-GOP chair to Trump-supporting evangelicals: “Shut the hell up”

I have several bones to pick with Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee.  But now that he’s out of power, he seems to have some clarity about the Party of Trump that he helped create.

Evangelicals love a president who cheats on all of his wives, brags about assaulting women by grabbing their pussies, and pays hush money to a porn star to keep her from talking to the press about his sex affair with her. Tony Perkins of the right-wing Family Research Council, said Trump gets “a do-over” because evangelicals “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists.” But Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chair, has one thing to say to evangelicals about their unwavering support for the unfaithful Trump: “I have very simple admonition: just shut the hell up and don’t preach to me about anything ever again,” he said on MSNBC.

“After telling me who to love, what to believe, what to do and what not to do and now you sit back and the prostitutes don’t matter, the grabbing the you-know-what doesn’t matter, the outright behavior and lies don’t matter, just shut up!” Steele blasted.

“They have no voice of authority anymore for me,” Steele concluded.