When MAGAloons assert "we're not a democracy ...", they're playing with the semantics, and rebranding, but that's not all they're doing.
By saying, "We're not a democracy", they're normalizing a broad rejection of democracy, in order to condition people to accept authoritarian rule, and to rationalize it:
"It's good to have the stability of strong leadership. What did democracy get us, anyway? Woke-ism, and DEI, and Pronouns, and Welfare Queens, and BLM, and Sissy Boys and and and. Good riddance to all that."
Interesting that Pool's main concern was not refuting Loomer's call for violence, but for preserving his own commercial viability on YouTube.
Is it safe to assume there was either no further mention of it at all, or that reference to it was made only in the form of the standard non-apologetic apology?
Trump: Either you support me 100% on all things at all times, or I'll burn the whole place to the ground.
MAGA says they're working 24/7 to make sure the elections are fair, and secure, and with no shenanigans. But they go on making all this noise about how rigged it is because they continue to lose practically every time, in spite of all their herculean efforts. And remember, they say they're the best at everything so they can't possibly lose unless it's rigged, but they're busting all the rigging ... and rinse and repeat.
So either they suck at the whole security thing, or there's no fraud at any meaningful level to begin with - which of course is what everybody's been saying all along - or their whole schtick is nothing more than Ginned-Up Rage-Fueled Crowd Funding of a "movement" that has no policy, and no political agenda beyond "Make Me The King Or You'll Be Sorry".
I'm not looking to elect Democrats just so they have the power to "go after" the wingnut cranks on the right - to put the propaganda flacks at DumFux News in prison - to round up all the white people and do whatever it is "conservative" freaks say they wanna do to immigrants.
Trump and his MAGA rubes seem hellbent on doing every shitty thing they can think of to "liberals" and brown people and the Press Poodles of MSM, and they're not shy about it.
BOTH SIDES MY DYIN' ASS
But, c'mon - he's joking. It's all a joke
ignoring the constitution
the press shouldn't be allowed to do what they do
"I'll be a dictator..."
using the DOJ to punish dissent
using the military to police US cities
If it's all a joke, then why the fuck would you vote for it?
DONALD TRUMP REPRESENTS an existential threat to democracy in the United States. If he is elected president, he will try to become a dictator.
That warning must be repeated, over and over again, so Americans don’t forget it in November.
But that’s not the daily news that you will read or hear in the American press today. Instead, it’s mostly coverage of polls favorable to Trump and cute scene-setting stories about the carnival-like atmosphere at his crazed rallies, where his massive cult following is on display.
That daily coverage ignores the five-alarm fire burning up the 2024 election. The mainstream political press is effectively ignoring the coming national apocalypse. How can that be? How can they once again screw up covering Trump?
After all, Trump isn’t hiding his lust for dictatorial power. He admits it publicly. In December, when his Fox News lackey, Sean Hannity, gave him an opportunity to dispel fears that he wanted dictatorial power, Trump instead offered a rare truth. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked. “Except for day one,” Trump replied.
Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.
In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.
Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.” TRUMP IS A fascist. But the mainstream political press doesn’t want to say it. They want to act like 2024 is just another election year.
With their obsession with horse-race coverage, political reporters tend to judge what Trump says or does by whether his words and actions will help him politically. By doing so, the press is saying that Trump’s racism, corruption, criminality, and insane abuses of power matter only so far as his electability.
There are exceptions: major news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have done some important stories about Trump’s dictatorial plans for a second term. But those investigative stories are drowned out by the chorus of horse-race stories — sometimes published on the same days and by the same news organizations behind more substantial coverage.
The media is sleepwalking.
I’ve often wondered how the press, both in Germany and around the world, failed to see Hitler for the monster that he was before he gained power. After Trump, I think I understand.
Hitler took advantage of the incremental nature of daily journalism. For years, his rise in Germany was not taken seriously in the United States, and that period of American inattention and isolationism enabled Hitler to become a much greater global threat. The American press played a significant and ugly role in downplaying the threat Hitler posed to the Western world.
American journalists initially viewed Hitler as little more than a German version of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who they saw as a blustering demagogue, yet also a leader who had helped save Italy from the economic chaos of the post-World War I era.
The New York Times credited Mussolini “with returning turbulent Italy to what it called normalcy,” according to a study of the press coverage of Hitler and Mussolini in Smithsonian Magazine in 2016.
When Hitler first burst into German political life, the American press sought to downplay his importance by treating him as a joke; the Smithsonian notes how Newsweek called him a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” and that his appearance suggested “Charlie Chaplin.”
Over time, American journalists’ views of Hitler began to shift, but mostly just to show greater respect for his skills as a charismatic public speaker and a successful demagogue. Ultimately, through more than a decade in German politics before he came to power, Hitler was normalized by American reporters. The press became numb to the outrageous things he said and wrote and did. He kept saying the same things for years; he laid out many of his plans and intentions in “Mein Kampf” in 1925, eight years before he came to power. By the time of the crucial 1932 German elections and Hitler’s subsequent rise to power in 1933, his rabid antisemitism and his lust for power were treated as old news.
The American press is making the same mistake today.
EVER SINCE TRUMP announced he was running for president in 2015, reporters have alternated between depicting him as a goof who couldn’t be taken seriously and showing respect for his skills as a demagogue.
Two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and one insurrection later, Trump is normal now, at least as far as the political press corps is concerned. The January 6 insurrection, in which Trump tried to illegally hold on to power, is old news. Just like Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was old news by the 1932 German elections.
This leads to more coverage of Trump’s poll numbers than his criminality or the threat he poses to the United States.
After Trump’s chaotic four years in office, too many journalists think that everything about Trump’s insane record has already been reported and written. This leads to more coverage of his poll numbers than his criminality or the threat he poses to the United States.
Mainstream journalists are increasingly open about their refusal to cover the campaign in crisis terms. In a recent interview, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn bristled at the notion that the Times needs to recognize the threat that Trump poses to the republic. He claimed that would just be doing the bidding of the Biden campaign and would turn the Times into a state propaganda organ like “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”
Kahn’s defensive crouch is symptomatic of the press today. After years of losing to social media companies in the fight for advertising and attention and fending off a constant barrage of attacks from right-wing critics who seek to discredit their journalism, major news organizations have become increasingly insular. A sudden surge in readership and viewership during the Trump administration has waned, while a drive to make newsrooms more diverse by hiring a wave of young progressive journalists has left older white editors embittered that the new generation has dared to challenge the status quo.
News organizations have always been hostile to outside scrutiny, but their hypocrisy about transparency and openness have reached new heights. Earlier this year the Times launched an ill-conceived leak investigation of its own staff to find out who talked to The Intercept for a story, while more recently the Washington Post has sought to downplay evidence that its new publisher, Will Lewis, was involved in a scheme to conceal evidence about phone hacking of British royals and celebrities while he was an executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in London. Semafor reported this week that an editor at the Post ordered the staff not to promote on its newsletters one of the Post’s own stories that included new allegations about Lewis from a lawsuit filed by Prince Harry in London.
Expect little accountability for these actions; the Post got rid of its ombudsman in 2013, and the Times got rid of its last public editor in 2017. Both the Times and the Washington Post have media reporters, but they rarely write about their own newsrooms and instead spend most of their time punching down on smaller news organizations.
Last year, CNN went through an internal crisis as well, after its new owners sought to force the newsroom to bend more toward Trump. That controversy ultimately led to the firing of CNN’s chief, but it is not clear whether the new ownership group still plans to push for more Trump-friendly coverage.
These efforts to build protective bubbles around their organizations at a time of unprecedented volatility in the news business seem to be at the heart of the refusal by the mainstream press to get out in front of the voters and take a stand on Trump.
In fact, many in the news business would secretly be thrilled by Trump’s return to the White House, particularly old, white pundits and commentators who claim to be liberal but quietly believe that “cancel culture” is a bigger threat than Trump. Many corporate executives in the news business would likewise be happy to see a return to Trump-era revenues.
But the basic reason the press isn’t sounding the alarm about the threat Trump poses to American democracy is much more banal. It’s about the structure of journalism.
Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection happened years ago. True, he has been indicted four times and now faces up to four criminal trials, but that’s already been reported. What’s new today?
For political reporters covering the campaign, that means usually treating Trump’s authoritarian promises as “B-matter.” That’s an old newspaper phrase that refers to the background information that reporters gather about a story’s subject. B-matter is usually exiled to the bottom of an article — if not cut entirely to save space or time.
But the horrifying truth is that when Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are left on the cutting room floor as B-matter, America is in trouble.
The Republican party has become a full-fledged anti-sex movement
The US supreme court justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas cited the Comstock Act, named after the 19th-century anti-vice campaigner Anthony Comstock, in last week’s case about access to the abortion pill mifepristone. If you don’t know who Anthony Comstock was or what his law did, that might not have alarmed you. But it should have.
The Comstock Law has come up a lot lately, and it’s part of the Republican war on sex, and to put it that way might sound overly dramatic. But there is such a war, and parts of it – against sex education, against access to birth control, against the healthcare provider Planned Parenthood and of course against abortion – have long been out in the open along with a war against the rights of women and on the rights and very existence of queer and trans people.
Comstock was reputed to be driven by religious shame over masturbation to become his era’s most extreme anti-sex crusader. He rose to prominence in the early 1870s, when he convinced Congress to make it a crime to advertise, sell or mail contraceptives or give out contraceptive information, even orally, or to mail anything “immoral” – a term whose vagueness allowed widespread prosecution, including of a feminist newspaper reporting on sexual abuse whose prominent publishers, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, he got sent to prison. Like modern-day rightwingers he was a book-burner, and he boasted that he had driven 15 people to suicide.
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” is a handy quote and it does seem to describe well Donald Trump, who has hugged a lot of US flags onstage and last week was hawking Christian nationalist Bibles. But if fascism really comes to America, it won’t come just as a single figure. It will come sneaking in, as local, state and federal laws and the gradual erosion of rights pushed by many players at many levels. In fact it has been coming at us all along. It is right now, among other things, a full-fledged anti-sex movement.
Too many people thought that Roe v Wade wouldn’t really be overturned just like they thought Trump wouldn’t really be elected. The assumption that norms will persist is these days a dangerous obtuseness, whether it’s about climate, domestic policy, society or the international order. While the backlash to Roe’s June 2022 overturning has been spectacular, with Democratic election victories and blue-state legislation strengthening reproductive rights, that doesn’t spare women in red states from the horrific consequences of the decision.
At this point we all know they include prosecution for miscarriages suspected of being abortions, let alone for actual abortions, and lack of timely care from medical providers, who, fearful of prosecution themselves, sometimes wait for miscarrying patients to go critical from infection or loss of blood before offering care. As the law journalist Mark Joseph Stern tweeted on 27 March, “The anti-abortion movement’s end goal is to let doctors refuse treatment – including life-saving emergency care – for patients whom they deem to be sinful and morally impure.” The patients, largely women, are supposed to die for their sins.
As if that weren’t enough, in May 2023, the Heritage Foundation declared on social media, “Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.” It’s a fanatical statement: the vast majority of sex had by the vast majority of human beings does not have reproduction as its goal, though the term recreational disparages what can be a joy, a profound connection, or a transcendence of self, among other things.
The far right the Heritage Foundation belongs to is, nevertheless, driving toward this goal by striving to take away birth control and abortion to make sex punitively risky for anyone who might get pregnant. Taking away women’s reproductive freedom takes away other freedoms, social, economic and educational, and rebuilds a society of gender inequality, which is clearly the goal. The right has also made noise about ending no-fault divorce and marriage equality, and introduced hundreds of anti-trans bills this year and last.
The Project 2025 agenda for a rightwing coup, should Trump win this November, declares that the USAid office of gender equality and women’s empowerment “should remove all ... language on USAid websites, in agency publications and policies, and in all agency contracts and grants that include” terms including “gender and gender equality” and should also remove references to “abortion”, “reproductive health” and “sexual and reproductive rights”. The threats are in plain sight; I hope people notice them.
It’s not a coincidence that the authoritarian right is obsessed with both the border and women’s bodies; they’d like to increase the patrolling of both, and essentially shut them both down. It’s an obsession with purity and control to be achieved by punitive and sometimes homicidally violent means. And it’s a roadmap straight back to the terrible inequality women were already campaigning against in Anthony Comstock’s time.
