September 14, 2020
Today’s big story is the growing threat of violence on the part of Trump loyalists in the administration, including the president himself.
On September 10, Trump's friend and adviser Roger Stone appeared on Infowars, the show run by the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses before they testified concerning the ties of the 2016 Trump campaign to Russia, Stone publicly asked Trump to commute his sentence and, in exchange, promised to campaign for him.
Stone was a political operative for Richard Nixon—he famously has a picture of Nixon tattooed on his back—and was a business partner of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, now also a convicted felon. Stone calls himself a “rat-f**ker”—a term used by Nixon insiders to describe electoral fraud and dirty tricks—and was an instigator of the “Brooks Brothers Riot” that shut down the recount of ballots in Florida in 2000.
In July, Trump commuted Stone’s 40-month prison sentence, and now, apparently, Stone is holding up his end of the deal.
On Jones’s show, Stone said, without evidence, that widespread voter fraud meant that the only legitimate result of the election would be a Trump victory. (Remember: voter fraud is a myth.) He claimed that the ballots in Nevada were already “completely corrupted” and that they “should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state,” especially the ones in Clark County, which leans Democratic. He suggested that former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) should be arrested.
Stone said that Trump should form “an Election Day operation using the FBI, federal marshals, and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.” Trump should also, he said, consider declaring martial law and then using that power to arrest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, “the Clintons” and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”
On the next day, September 11, right-wing talk show host Mark Levin said that Trump “will have to… put down the enemy” after the election, using the Insurrection Act, which permits the president to use the military against citizens to stop civil disorder and rebellion. “The enemy is antifa, the enemy is Black Lives Matter, and the enemy is anybody that is going to use rioting, arson, looting, violence against our country to try to overthrow our country,” he said. “Those are traitors. That's treasonous.” He continued, “It wouldn't be hard to put down these punks…. They run around in masks because they're frauds. They cover their faces because they're frauds. They don't want you to know what they are and who they are.”
On Saturday, in an interview with Jeanine Pirro on the Fox News Channel, Trump defended the police killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl, a man who identified himself as an anti-fascist and who is suspected of killing a pro-Trump far-right activist in Portland, Oregon. Reinoehl told a reporter for VICE that he acted in self-defense before the man stabbed him and a friend. Shortly after that interview, police shot and killed Reinoehl in a parking lot. The police maintained he pulled a gun on them, but a witness says Reinoehl was walking, holding a cell phone and eating a gummy worm, and the police fired without identifying themselves.
Trump, at least, seemed to think it was a deliberate killing in which officers took the law into their own hands, and he approves. He told Pirro: "This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him. And I'll tell you something -- that's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution." Then he spoke approvingly of a backlash against alleged left-wing violence in the cities. “You will see a backlash the likes of which you haven’t seen in many, many years.”
Yesterday, Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has tried to dictate how the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on coronavirus, went on an unhinged rant in a video on Facebook, accusing the CDC of having a “resistance unit” of “seditious” scientists who were permitting Americans to die so they could harm Trump’s reelection campaign.
Caputo urged his listeners “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.” He said that Trump is on track to win in November, but that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will stoke violence rather than conceding. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. Caputo claimed that the Trump supporter killed in Portland, Oregon was “a drill” for what was to come. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing…. [T]here are hit squads being trained all over this country” to stop a second Trump term, and they were, he said, “going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going.”
Caputo noted that the pressure of his job had harmed his physical health, and his “mental health has definitely failed.” After his video had been viewed more than 850 times, Caputo shut down his account.
The escalating language of violence indicates that the Trump team thinks it is going to lose the election. Others appear to think that, too: Georgia Senator David Perdue has recently begun to distance himself from the president in his own reelection campaign.
For my part, it just makes me sad. This rhetorical pattern echoes the strategy of southern Democratic leaders in 1860, when they knew they did not have the numbers to win the upcoming election fairly. They kept opponents from the polls, jiggered the mechanics of state elections, and warned white voters that, if Abraham Lincoln were elected, he and his dangerous radicals would destroy America. As their calls for violence escalated, they promised supporters that if it came to a fight, weak and frightened northerners would run away.
Even so, when Lincoln won the 1860 election, most southern whites were content to see what he did before they picked up their guns. But southern leaders were unwilling to live in a country they did not control, and declared they were going to create their own country, based in human slavery, even before Lincoln took office. In the ensuing war, ordinary Confederate soldiers learned the hard way both that northerners would not run away, and that their leaders cared about protecting the economy, not them.
It sounds poignantly familiar.
But it is unlikely to come to armed conflict this time around. The economic interests of the country are not divided regionally, and for all the bluster at the national level, state governors are largely staying quiet. We are more likely to see sporadic violence from groups of unorganized thugs, spurred by leaders’ rhetoric and by Nazi-adjacent QAnon rumors of a Satanic cabal, exactly as the repressed threat assessment from the Department of Homeland Security said. This scenario played out in August in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly killed two people and wounded a third as he “policed” the city with a militia group.
But even this is not a given. We know that the Trump campaign plans to launch legal fights across each vital state to challenge votes for Biden, but Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times today explained that Biden has now also assembled a big new legal operation overseen by Dana Remus, Biden’s general counsel on the campaign, and the brilliant Bob Bauer, former White House counsel for President Obama. Their team plans not only to defend Biden’s voters, but also to restore trust in the country’s electoral system.
Said Remus: “We can and will hold a free and fair election this fall and be able to trust the results.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/politics/caputo-virus.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/10/reinoehl-portland-antifa-killing-police/
retribution:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-2020-election-legal-battle-coronavirus-162152
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/politics/biden-legal-challenges-trump.html
https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/
This is the only forum I participate in, so please indulge me for a lengthy note.
As a former debating teacher and so-called expert, I want to put out my general rules of debate in the hope that one of you will be able to pass this on to JB's advisers within the next two weeks.
The first debate is crucial, for it sets the tone; remember Kennedy vs Nixon. Here is my advice:
1. To be on the Defensive means you are losing the debate. To be on the Offensive means you are winning. It's like football; you can only score points when you are on the offense. Don't waste time defending; respond and counter attack. Always try to dictate the topic and direction of discussion. Mohammed Ali won many of his fights by learning his opponent's vulnerabilities and going for them; make a checklist of the most important ones which will score points.
2. Get the audience on your side; remember Ronald Reagan and "There you go again". Your opponent will try to score points by attacking you, twisting facts, making spurious accusations, denying failures, claiming untrue successes, etc. Don't simply deny; that is a mug's game. Laugh and say "There you go again, there's lie number 2,760" or similar. Puncture his balloon.
3. The best precedent you can call upon is Joseph Welch, during the McCarthy hearings. His quote, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" made nationwide headlines and brought McCarthyism to an abrupt end. When confronted by an outrageous lie or false accusation, simply reply "You know that is totally untrue and it is an insult. Have you no sense of decency, sir?" (I can guarantee it will be the headline of every newspaper the next morning.)
4. If he does not treat you with respect, respond accordingly. Do not call him "Mr President" if possible. If he calls you "Sleepy Joe", use a similar appellation in response; the terms "Conman", "Devious" and "Dopey" come to mind. Remember that he has a very thin skin and is easily riled. He cannot stand confrontation.
5. The final rule of debating is "He who loses his temper loses the argument."
Once again, apologies for this lengthy treatise, but I felt I must somehow make my thoughts public.
Today seems like the perfect day for this. Here is what Cult45 RRALLY thinks about us and about Trump. (Full of fucks, so if you’re easily offended by language you might want to sit this one out. Even though you really shouldn’t)
From a FB friend who escaped the Trump cult:
“You all don’t get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence. They don’t give a shit what Trump does. He’s just something to rally around and hate liberals, that’s it, period. He absolutely realizes that, and plays it up. They love it, he knows they love it, and the fact that people act like it’s anything other than that just proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.
“If you keep getting caught up in why do they not realize blah blah blah and how can they still back him after blah blah blah, you are not understanding what is the underlying motivating factor of his support. It’s fuck liberals, that’s pretty much it.
“Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable and they’ll explain some way that rationalizes it that makes zero logical sense? Because they’re not even keeping track of any logical narrative, it’s irrelevant, fuck liberals is the only relevant thing, trust me, I know first hand what I’m talking about. That’s why they just laugh at it all, because you all don’t even realize they really, truly, don’t give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about, it’s just a side mission story that doesn’t really matter anyways. That’s all just trivial details- the economy, health care, whatever. Fuck liberals.
“Look at the thing with not wearing the masks. I can tell you what that’s about. It’s about exposing fear. They’re playing chicken with nature and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal.
“You gotta understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for weakness, because that’s what they believe strength is, hatred for weakness. And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred. And I’m not exaggerating. Believe me. Sadistic, passionate hatred, and that’s what proves they’re strong, their passionate hatred for weakness. Sometimes they lump in vulnerability, a compromised circumstance, or an overwhelming circumstance in there with weakness, too, because people tend to start humbling themselves when they’re in those circumstances and that’s an obvious sign of weakness.
“Kindness=weakness. Honesty=weakness. Compromise=weakness. They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anyone who doesn’t hate weakness as much as they do. They consider liberals to be weak people who are inferior, almost a difference species, and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers. Disgust is a true expression of their natural superiority.
“Go ahead and try to have a logical, rational conversation with them though. Just keep in mind what I said here, and think about it.”
The below is by another author regarding the above:
“This summed up something I’ve been trying to say for years. Because, yes, the cruelty is the point for trump supporters but this is why. “
“This is why there is no bottom of the barrel and why so many of them will tell you he’s been such a successful president. They don’t care that he’s the reason they’re getting fucked in taxes or that his border wall is a failure, they don’t care that he hasn’t managed to really pass any landmark legislation or make good on the promises he made during his campaign. They don’t care because the ONLY measure they’re using to determine how successful he’s been and how much they support him is how much he pisses off or hurts liberals and the more he does it the better he looks to them, the more support they give him and the more bullshit he doubles down on. It’s a never-ending feedback loop and it’s ALL about "the performance" rather than his political promises & results. It’s why we’ve devolved into whatever mess of a country in 2020 with seemingly no rock bottom."
“These are people who don’t understand politics as an entity that actually affects them, they can’t be reasoned with because they know being like that pisses off liberals. It’s honestly the most juvenile, immature tactic that elementary school-aged bullies use, but just as long as they get a rise out of liberals, repeatedly, they'll do it. It’s why so many of them comment on social media “trump 2020″ on posts that aren’t even about politics: because they know just posting that on a tasty video or something will piss off a bunch of liberals. We need to just stop responding to them when they say this type of shit, we need to ignore them, we need to stop giving them the outrage they want. “
“But, of course, we CAN'T do that because ignoring fascism is the same as and just as dangerous as ENABLING it.”
“Most of them don’t even pay attention to what he’s actually does and says; ask them about it–half the time, they don’t even know what you’re taking about. But so long as he’s pissing off liberals (and I’m using the colloquial US definition of “opposite of conservative” here), he’s doing everything they want.
Conservativism in this country has devolved into a movement with no ideals, no principles, nothing at all beyond - hurt the enemy at all cost.”