Buckle Up for the Scary Clown

August 15: 2017

makkka

Trump’s racism was anchored by his promotion of Birtherism, but, its facts were established long before he promoted the idea that Barack Obama was actually from somewhere in Africa.

Trump has long been a virulent racist, and, hardly surprising to anyone, the GOP has long provided the political home for American white supremacy. Now they are all together.

The fusion of racist President and largely racist political party is demonstrated by simple stuff such as: economic policies, voter suppression, and, recently, switching sides on an affirmative action case to favor the idea that it whites are the more profound victims of institutional prejudice.

Steve Bannon used Breitbart to advance the cause of the alt-right. Here is the alt-right manifesto, as of August 11.

PERSPECTIVE
What It Means To Be Alt-Right
A meta-political manifesto for the Alt-Right movement.
altright.com/2017/08/11/what-it-means-to-be-alt-right/

Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post: “In his eight years on Twitter…, Trump has directed accusations of racism toward black people three times as often as he has done so against whites…. Most of Trump’s allegations of racism have been directed against two people. One of them is former MSNBC host Touré…. Similarly, in August of 2013 Trump sent six tweets accusing HBO ‘Real Sports’ host Bryant Gumbel of being a racist…. Trump has also tweeted out accusations of racism against talk show host Tavis Smiley (‘a hater & racist’) and former president Barack Obama (‘a total racist?’). In 2012, noting strong African American support for Obama, Trump asked ‘Is that racism?’ Trump called the film ‘Django Unchained,’ about a freed slave, ‘the most racist movie I have ever seen.’ He characterized the title of the sitcom ‘Black-ish,’ about an upper middle-class black family, as ‘“racism at highest level??’ Conversely, Trump has sent a total of seven tweets accusing white individuals of racism. They include Hillary Clinton (‘needs to address the racist undertones of her 2008 campaign’), Elizabeth Warren (‘Very racist!’) and David Letterman (‘must apologize for his racist comment’)…. Trump’s use of words like ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ is perhaps best understood in the context of a modern conservative movement that has come to believe, against all evidence, that whites face more discrimination than blacks. By using racial language primarily as a cudgel against his nonwhite critics, Trump has given validation to that belief.” — CW via www.realitychex.com/

February 3:2017

DerSpiegelTrump

Trump-Opposite

IMG_8766

IMG_8743

IMG_8742

IMG_8738

TrumpSteveBell

Listen to the beginning, to about 15 minutes, to appreciate “deplorability.” Hey, the signs are everywhere.

Sidenote: “God” is a trickster, yes?!

200

prophetic

November 2:2016
god-emperor-trump-small

I realized sometime ago that my opinions about current events, politics, world affairs, and the unfolding of the plight of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, tended to be deployed in circumstances where they echo about, or, tended to be bones thrown into the middle of a useless competitive game.

I do lay my thoughts out to my wife, patient woman that she is.

I’ve had reason to state to other persons why I cannot even consider voting for Donald Trump. (He is: a xenophobic, sociopathic, sexual predator, pathological liar, racist, sexist, charlatan, con man and snake oil salesman, deadbeat, thieving crook, who has demonstrated that his only concern is anything with his name on it.) My hope every day is not to be moved to have to do so. In any event, such efforts are pointless. Luckily, I do not have much contact with local wingnuts.

The Insane Things You’ve Forgotten About Trump’s Campaign

In my voting life, stretching from 1972, I have never observed a political chapter as manifestly stuffed, overstuffed, with the GOP’s arch insanity as is this current chapter. It has been non-stop. Oh, GOP=Trump. As Pierce describes it, “the Prion disease has about finished its work.”

Let me catalogue a few of the GOP’s more contemptuous propositions: (1) suppress the vote, (2) grab working class by ankles, turn upside down, pick up change that falls to ground, give to guy who makes at least $10,000 every single day, (3) climate change is a hoax, (4) protect human life from conception to birth.

Mr. Trump would, were he to win, invert almost every political truism having to do with the advantages of big money, organization, ground game, big tents, and, behaving like a grow-up, (and not even that grown-up of a grown-up. Some of these prior ‘givens’ are foundational to the money-is-speech crowd, but, you let the fox in the henhouse.

At the same time, his appeal has unleashed collective furies against the constitutional order itself. This has little to do with the plutocratic structures, and the so-called establishment “elites,” that have come to be foremost in our political economy. Rather this has to do with what threats could be activated if a POTUS with an authoritarian personality were to come to understand that gridlock cannot be constitutionally dispensed with. Clearly, the thrust of the alt-right is to pose a vanguard for the sake of promoting the destruction of those roadblocks by an eliminativist totalitarian, such as Hair Duce. This has been assembled to be sold as anti-establishment to the suckers, but, those same suckers clearly relish more the idea of Trump-the-bomb-thrower. than the idea of Trump-the-guy-who-wants-to-lower-the-elite’s taxes-substantially-as-a-way-of-punishing-them.

Aside from all this, I have noted that many people on the populist right do not possess even a foggy notion about how our form of government is supposed to work, given the gridlock set in place by the inability of the revived Civil War (1860-1865, 1972-current) to resolve itself. Trump supporters become autistic when asked ‘just how is Trump to keep his promises?’

David Bossie, on the winning side of the Citizen’s United case that opened up our politics to self-styled oligarchs, is a major player in Trump’s campaign. Trump will not staff his White House with economic populists. Trump will not deliver cheaper and better healthcare to the 18 million he tosses off of Obamacare. He won’t rebuild the inner cities. The list of counterfactuals is a long one.

As much as Trump has been trying to channel FDR and Reagan recently, as a big government borrow-and-spend new new deal supply-sider, the only sure economic outcome he will realize are the personal winnings of the currency arbitrage his minions are posed to capture on his behalf–once he becomes President.

Drumpf

Were Trump elected, the best case is that after the damage is done, sometime down the road, the GOP will be in ruins, the demographic wave will have drowned white nationalism, and, you won’t be able to find anybody who will admit he or she voted for Trump.

November 12:2016 BLOOD RED & LONG VIEW

TrumpEmperor

That didn’t turn out well.

Somebody asked me,

So, now what? What do you think is going to happen?

Say I:

Buckle up.

All the frameworks that I can apply to any situation boil down to the hunch I’m going to operate by for as long as it remains capable (in the sense of negative capability.) There’s a great deal in play right now, starting with a planet’s climate being altered, the flux of ‘anthropo-geopolitical-econosocio’ games and end games, psyche at all of its scales, and, to borrow from Gregory Bateson, mind/nature/unity, (the social cybernetic system.)

It boils down to its extract. This in turn remains in a bubbling context of all which is in play. This is complicated and only groups working together may ind their way to some intelligent recognition. Here, today, I am intoning in a raw, but tempered, way.

The extract itself is evoked by heated reasons. The hottest reason is straightforward: our Democratic Republic has been pushed into a slow rolling revolution. The extract itself is: how do you consciously prepare for the unique kind of ‘post-modern’ fascism that has been initiated by the electoral victory of Donald Trump?

Revolution. In other words, and you can mark my words, it has already happened here.

This isn’t a revolution of the silent majority, nor is it a revolution of the Trump voters. It is a revolution come to be realized by a small group of people who realized on the evening of November 8, and did so much to their own surprise, that their leader had been elected to be the most powerful man in the world. And, my blunt and dark guess is that their sudden revolutionary zeal turns about the simple aspiration:

How can we implement change and how can we prevent it from being reversed?

It’s the second part that is the primary aim of this slow revolution. You heard it here first. The term for the defensive political structure is: oligarchy.

Trump is not capable of taking a gritty long term view. However, Steve Bannon is capable of doing so. Having studied the alt-right, it is enough to suggest that once you give its power players a little power, it makes total sense to suspect these players will concern themselves with defending their gains.

It seems patently obvious that if the executive branch and the GOP majorities in Congress are going to roll back and erase and implement and experiment, that the weighty unpopularity of this collection of changes absolutely requires a person, and then several such persons, to figure out how to insure this utopian social engineering cannot possibly be erased.

I reckon we will have a glimpse of how these changes–that will not make America great at all–are to be defended in the weeks of the transition and in the half year of Trump’s first year in office.

The scope of the defense of Trump Inc.’s changes is revolutionary. I hope I’m wrong.

November 14:2016 CLOSE LIKE A HAND GRENADE

MAGAmyass

a know-nothing reality TV star will usher in a unique American version of Fascism and authoritarianism

The election was close. Trump: 290, Clinton 232.

Michigan:

Trump 47.6% 2,279,221
Clinton 47.3% 2,267,798

Pennsylvania

Trump 47.6% 2,912,941
Clinton 47.3% 2,844,705

Wisconsin

Trump 47.9% 1,409,467
Clinton 46.9% 1,382,210

Florida
Trump 49.1% 4,605,515
Clinton 47.8% 4,485,745

How close? 120,000 votes in Florida.

95,000 in Wisconsin plus Pennsylvania. 80,000 votes in Michigan plus Pennsylvania.

80,000 / 123,517,291 = 0.00064. HRC lost the electoral college in terms of votes cast for Clinton/Trump by, rounding, 64/hundredthousanths of the total cast for both.

Roughly 48% of registered voters didn’t cast a vote.


from the article, Trump and the Truth: Conspiracy Theories – Adam Gopnik September 13, 2016 (The New Yorker)

All fascism takes on a peculiar national tone, and where the national tone of Germany lent itself to anti-Semitic theories, that of the United States involves paranoia about secret government actions, of the kind that the radio host and Trump partisan Alex Jones engages in so much. (That Trump went on Jones’s program and praised him is in itself one more disqualifying event, among so many.) Trump, by bringing such cracked reasoning into the mainstream, becomes a truly sinister figure, rather than merely oafish. Here, the analogy with Hitler in his early phase is not overdrawn: part of what wise people, like the journalist Sebastian Haffner, whose book on the rise of Fascism in Germany ought to be required reading right now, have come to recognize is that Hitler’s confederates, like Streicher and Goebbels, were not normal nationalists but malcontents from crazy fringe groups. Yes, there are fringes on both sides of American politics today, but the Democratic nominee for President has never flirted with 9/11 “Truthism,” while conspiracy theorists of the vilest kind have played central roles in Trump’s campaign. The current Trump phenomenon began with a conspiracy theory—“birtherism” being the precise right-wing equivalent of “truthism,” albeit ladled over with the sewage of racism, rather than the paranoia of government plots.

To me, there are different types of Trump voters, and one way I qualify them is to roughly assess the level of magical fusion they have with the candidate and the candidate’s mission. Here are three, among many, qualifying types, that describe the majority of Trump voters I encountered or saw documentation of, over the last six months.

(1) persons who just want something like a politically incorrect bomb thrower to come to power and unleash punishments
***these low information voters are fueled by unconscious motivations and could not in anyway be swayed. This reflects, in a sense, a complete resistance to therapy!

(2) deeply racist or misogynist or nativist or racial supremacists–predominantly males, who have thought through to some extent what it would be like for one of their own to come to power. They also have adapted an entire new language full of terms such as SJW. alpha and beta males, cultural marxism etc., These persons are often eliminativists, and hope Trump will lead a war against: leftists, feminists, progressives, hippies, weak males, immigrants, other races, etc. There are many GOP men who fall in this group.
***these are related to #1, and these people are deplorable, but such people basically come across as being one’s antagonist (enemy,) and what we are battling against, and, again, now that these fellow citizens have been empowered and brought into the light, there is not much one can do.

(3) Republicans holding their nose and voting against HRC and Democrats.
***HRC incorrectly identified this mostly non-deplorable group as being vulnerable to changing their mind.

HRC lost by 80,000 votes.

 

Why did people vote for Trump even when he or she suspected Trump’s biography and words and actions seemed to verify he combined narcissism, sociopathy, bigotry, sexism, racism and xenophobia in a most unchristian and virulent form?

This is because once a person anchors themselves to their hunch about what serves their interests, the debasement of this emotive, magical thinking–character really cannot matter so much, right?–sinks them into an unchangeable position.

This is not a decision which hunts down logical support. However, it is, as far as it goes, a rational decision inasmuch as its justification is a guess about what matches up with self-interest.

Meanwhile, despite all the magical thinking implicit in Trump supporters wishing for some combination of bomb-throwing, change, making America great again, draining the swamp, fixing the rigged system, restoration of right wing social engineering, the actuality was, (and is,) that almost entirely white, mostly male, GOP elites and their representatives in the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly supported Trump both in word and deed.

But, they will reap the fascist whirlwind too.

January 20 Inauguration Speech, excerpt.

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

The Bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity. We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity. When America is united, America is totally unstoppable.

There should be no fear. We are protected and we will always be protected. We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement. And most importantly, we will be protected by God.

January 22 Trump speech to the CIA.

Well, I want to thank everybody – very, very special people. And it is true: this is my first stop. Officially. We’re not talking about the balls , and we’re not talking about even the speeches. Although, they did treat me nicely on that speech yesterday.

I always call them “the dishonest media”, but they treated me nicely.

But, I want to say that there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. There’s nobody. Nobody.

And the wall behind me is very, very special. We’ve been touring for quite a while. And I’ll tell you what: twenty – nine? I can’t believe it.. Oh, 28. We’d better reduce it. But that’s amazing. And we really appreciate what you ‘ve done in terms of showing us something very special – and your whole group. These are really special, amazing people. Very, very few people could do the job you people do.

And I want to just let you know: I am so behind you. And I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted. And you’re going to get so much backing. Maybe you’re going to say: “Please don’t give us so much backing”. “Mr President, please, we don’t need that much backing.”

But you’re going to have that. And I think everybody in this room knows it.

You know, the military and the law-enforcement generally speaking, but, all of it, but the military, gave us tremendous percentages of votes. We were unbelievably successful in the election with getting the vote of the military and probably almost everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did.

But I would guarantee a big portion – Because we’re all on the same wavelength, folks. We’re all on the same wavelength. Right? He knows. Took Brian about 30 seconds to figure that one out, right? Because we know. We’re on the same wavelength.

But, we’re going to do great things. We’re going to do great things. We’ve been fighting these wars for longer than any wars we’ve ever fought. We have not used the real abilities that we have. We’ve been restrained.

We have to get rid of ISIS. We have to get rid of ISIS. We have no choice.

Radical Islamic terrorism – and I said it yesterday – has to be eradicated. Just off the face of the Earth. This is evil. This is evil.

And you know, I can understand the other side. We can all understand the other side. There can be wars between countries. There can be wars. You can understand what happened. This is something nobody could even understand. This is a level of evil that we haven’t seen.

And you’re going to go to it, and you’re going to do a phenomenal job. But we’re going to end it. It’s time. It’s time right now to end it.

You have somebody coming on [Mike Pompeo] who is extraordinary. You know for the different positions, of secretary of this and secretary of that and all of these great positions , I’d see five, six, seven, eight people.

And we had a great transition. We had an amazing team of talent.

And by the way, General Flynn is right over here. Put up your hand, Mike. What a good guy.

And Reince, and my whole group. Reince. You know Reince? They don’t care about Reince. He’s like, this political guy that turned out to be a superstar, right? We don’t have to talk about Reince.

But, we did. We had just such a tremendous, tremendous success.

So when I’m interviewing all of these candidates that Reince and his whole group is putting in front, it went very, very quickly, and in this case went so quickly. Because I would see six or seven or eight for secretary of agriculture, who we just named the other day. Sunny Perdue. Governor – former Governor – of Georgia, Fantastic guy. But I’d see six, seven, eight people for a certain position. Everybody wanted it.

But I met Mike Pompeo and he was the only guy I met. I didn’t want to meet anybody else. I said: “Cancel everybody else. Cancel.”

Now he was approved, essentially. But they’re doing little political games with me. You know, he was one of the three.

Now, last night, as you know, General Mattis – fantastic guy – and General Kelly got approved.

And Mike Pompeo was supposed to be in that group – it was going to be the three of them. Can you imagine? All of these guys. People respect, you know, they respect that military sense.

All my political people? They’re not doing so well. The political people aren’t doing so well, but you – we’re going to get them all through. But some will take a little bit longer than others.

But Mike was literally – I had a group of, what, we had nine different people? Now. I must say, I didn’t mind cancelling eight appointments. That wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

But I met him, and I said: “He is so good”. Number one in his class at West Point. Now, I know a lot about West Point. And to be one… I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say, I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many different ways academically. He was an academic genius.

And then they say: “ Is Donald Trump an intellectual ?” Trust me. I’m like a smart person. And I recognised immediately.

So he was number one at West Point. And he was also essentially number one at Harvard Law School. And then he decided to go into the military. And he ran for Congress. And everything he’s done has been a home run.

People like him. But much more importantly to me, everybody respects him.

When I told Paul Ryan that I want to do this – I would say, he may be the only person that was not totally thrilled, right, Mike? Because he said: “I don’t want to lose this guy.”

But you will be getting a total star. You’re going to be getting a total gem. He is a gem. And I just… You’ll see. You’ll see. And many of you know him anyway. But you’re going to see.

And again: we have some great people going in, but this one is something, going to be very special, because this is one of – if I had to name the most important, this would certainly be, perhaps, you know, in certain ways, you could say my most important.

You do the job like everybody in this room is capable of doing.

There can be… And the generals are wonderful and the fighting is wonderful. But if you give them the right direction? Boy does the fighting become easier. And boy do we lose so fewer lives, and win so quickly.

And that’s what we have to do. We have to start winning again.

You know, when I was young, And when I was … of course, I feel young. I feel like I’m 30. 35. 39. Somebody said: “Are you young?” I said: “I think I’m young.”

You know, I was stopping when we were in the final month of that campaign. Four stops, five stops. Seven stops. Speeches, speeches, in front of 25- 30,000 people. 15,000, 19,000, from stop to stop.

I feel young.

But when I was young – and I think we’re all sort of young – when I was young, we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade. We’d win with wars.

At a certain age I remember hearing from one of my instructors: “The United States has never lost a war.”

And then, after that, it’s like, we haven’t won anything. We don’t win anymore.

The old expression: “To the victor belong the spoils.” You remember? You always used to say: “Keep the oil.” I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But, I will tell you: when we were in, we got out wrong.

And I always said: “In addition to that, keep the oil.”

Now I said it for economic reasons, but if you think about it, Mike, if we kept the oil we would probably wouldn’t have ISIS, because that’s where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil.

But, okay. Maybe we’ll have another chance.

But, the fact is: we should’ve kept the oil.

I believe that this group is going to be one of the most important groups in this country towards making us safe, towards making us winners again, toward ending all of the problems.

We have so many problems that are interrelated – that we don’t even think of – but interrelated to the kind of havoc and fear that this sick group of people has caused .

So I can only say that I am with you 1,000%. And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.

Right? And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want to let you know, the reason you’re the number one stop is exactly the opposite. Exactly. And they understand that too.

And I was explaining about the numbers. We did a thing yesterday, the speech , and everybody really liked the speech. You had to have liked it?

But, we had a massive field of people . You saw that. Packed.

I get up this morning. I turn on one of the networks and they show an empty field. I say: “Wait a minute. I made a speech . I looked out. The field was…. It looked like a million, a million and a half people.”

They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.

And they said: “Donald Trump did not draw well.”

And I said: “Well, it was almost raining.” The rain should have scared them away. But God looked down and he said: “We’re not going to let it rain on your speech.”

In fact, when I first started I said: “Oh no.” First line, I got hit by a couple of drops.

And I said: “Oh, this is, this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it.”

But the truth is that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sudden, and then I walked off and it poured right after I left – it poured.

But you know, we have something that’s amazing because, we had, it looked honestly, it looked like a million and a half people.

Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument.

And I turn on the thing and by mistake I get this network – and it showed an empty field. And it said we drew 250,000 people.

Now that’s not bad. But it’s a lie.

We had 250,000 people literally around, you know, the little bowl that we constructed. That was 250,000 people.

The rest of the 20 block area all the way back to the Washington Monument was packed.

So we caught them. And we caught them in a beauty. And I think they’re going to pay a big price.

In the Oval Office there’s a beautiful statue of Dr Martin Luther King. And I also happen to like Churchill – Winston Churchill. I think most of us like Churchill. He doesn’t come from our country but he had lot to do with it, he helped us – a real ally.

And as you know, the Churchill statue was taken out. The bust. And as you also probably have read, the Prime Minister is coming over to our country very shortly , and they wanted to know whether or not I’d like it back. I’d say: “Absolutely, but in the meantime we have a bust of Churchill.”

So, a reporter for Time magazine -and I have been on their cover like 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all time record in the history of Time magazine. Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover of Time magazine, it’s one time, because he won the Superbowl or something, right? I’ve been on it for 15 times this year.

I don’t think that’s a record, Mike, that can ever be broken, do you agree with that? What do you think?

But, I will say that, they said – and it was very interesting – that Donald Trump took down the bust, the statue, of Dr Martin Luther King. It was right there. But there was a cameraman that was in front of it.

So Zeke – Zeke – from Time magazine writes a story about I took down.

But I would never do that, because I have great respect for Dr Martin Luther King. But this is how dishonest the media is. Now, big story. The retraction was like, where? Was it a line? Or do they even bother putting it in?

So I only like to say that because I love honesty. I like honest reporting. I will tell you, final time, although I will say it, when you let in your thousands of other people that have been trying to come in, because I am coming back.

We may have to get you a larger room. We may have to get you a larger room. You know?

And maybe, maybe, it’ll be built by somebody that knows how to build and we won’t have columns. You understand that? We’d get rid of the columns.

But no, I just wanted to really say that I love you. I respect you. There’s nobody I respect more. You’re going to do a fantastic job. And we’re going to start winning again – and you’re going to be leading the charge.

So, thank you all very much. Thank you, beautiful. Thank you all very much.

Have a good day.

I’ll be back. I’ll be back . Thank you.