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We Need to Talk About the GOP’s ‘Black Friends’
Elie Mystal
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• worsening economic inequality by shifting trillions through tax breaks to “American Oligarchs,” in Andrea Bernstein’s useful phrase, who then gratefully support his assaults on environmental and consumer laws to make even more money; • inciting violence by hyperbolic attacks on opponents, embracing neo-Nazis while ignoring warnings from the FBI about the number-one domestic threat, right-wing violence (as seen in the Kenosha murders on Tuesday); • enthusiastically embracing many of the world’s leading dictators—Putin, Xi, Bolsonaro, Kim, Sisi, Duterte, Erdogan; • repeating Covid-19 falsehoods in order to pressure Republican governors to prematurely reopen the economy and schools, causing the avoidable deaths of over 100,000 Americans, so far, according to leading epidemiologists
• politicizing the civilian-run military by deploying them to cities with Black Lives Matter protests and other “Democrat cities,” conflating all peaceful protesters with a a small minority of violent militants; • attempting to stymie postal delivery to, in effect, steal millions of mail-in ballots… and the election;
• firing career professionals and “independent” inspectors general for doing their job, increasingly having a government of cronies, cranks, multimillionaires, relatives, and unconfirmable third-raters; • ignoring all congressional subpoenas (when Nixon ignored eight of them, it became the third article in his impeachment, “Contempt of Congress”); • and saying things such as “I alone can fix it” and “with Article II, I can do whatever I want,” as well as praising the Chinese Communist party for showing its “power of strength” by slaughtering thousands in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
“They all have one purpose,” said Sally Yates, past acting attorney general, “to remove any check on his abuse of power.”
The emerging picture is not transactional conservatism but rather a deviant fascism American-style. (For those still offended by the F-word, there’s more: For the first time in 58 elections, a president is refusing to agree beforehand to abide by the results.) That’s not mainstream but extreme.
READ MORE > The Nation
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Policing in the United States functions as a military occupation.
“3x as many cops chose to take their own lives last year as died from felonious gunfire… WHY? Evil is real … It has a plan to defeat you …” it said. Then, a quote: “‘The skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible…’—Sun Tzu.” This bulletin, uploaded to an Alabama law enforcement website in March 2020 and accessed by hackers this summer, advertised to officers a police training course, approved for seven credit hours by the state police standards and training commission. . .the course promised to use “the epic war tome, The Art of War, required reading for the CIA, U.S. Military Intelligence and the Marine Corps Reading Program,” to examine how ancient wartime tactics “are used to destroy law enforcement officer’s [sic] psychological well-being.”
. . . The files, known as BlueLeaks, come from over 250 law enforcement sites, and mostly span from 2007 to mid-June 2020; since their release, journalists have used documents swept up in the hack to shine a light on such malfeasance as the militarized targeting of immigrant rights activists, police–social media company collaboration, and the use of junk science interrogation techniques.
Taken together, these documents give credence to one of the central observations of the Black Lives Matter movement: that law enforcement in the United States functions as a military occupation. . .
Several “intelligence notes” from the Department of Homeland Security distributed across the hacked websites, for instance, warned police that protesters were stashing “caches” of “rocks, bottles, and accelerants” or “flammable materials, rocks, and other projectiles,” making them ready for “breakaway groups to commit violence.” Rather than the DHS’s own reconnaissance or exclusive briefings from local law enforcement, however, the intelligence notes mostly cited local and national news reports to make these assertions (and one merely cited a “social media user”). Those news reports mostly parroted unsubstantiated claims made by local police—and many of these types of claims turned out to be false, . . .
In no BlueLeaks documents did The Nation find any recognition among law enforcement agencies that police officers across the country were routinely brutalizing protesters. In fact, what is perhaps the most significant mention of police brutality during the protests came from a June 1 DHS memo, which portrayed claims of cop violence as a project of “foreign influence activity.”
Fast forward to Tuesday night in Kenosha, Wis. Local cops patrolled the streets in armored vehicles, seeking to enforce the city’s 8 pm curfew set in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. When they rolled up to a group of white men with assault rifles—self-described militia members—they greeted them over one of the armored cars’ speaker systems: “We appreciate you guys, we really do.” An officer in one of the vehicles stuck his torso out of the hatch and tossed a bottle of water to a rifled teenager in a green T-shirt. Soon after the encounter, the boy in the green shirt, Kyle Rittenhouse, allegedly shot three protesters, killing two of them.
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We Need to Talk About the GOP’s ‘Black Friends’Elie Mystal
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editor's picks
The F-Word: No Other Way to Describe Trump’s Fascism 2.0
If Trump’s lengthy rap sheet of lies, threats, obstruction, and incitement doesn’t add up to fascism, then what would?
August 28, 2020
Mark GreenMark Green was the first Public Advocate for New York City and is the author or editor of 24 books. His new book, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All, co-authored with Ralph Nader, is out next month from Skyhorse Publishing.
Ralph NaderRalph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author, most recently, of
The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. His new book, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All, co-authored with Mark Green, is out next month
"Since the defeat of fascism in World War II, it’s been bad form in America to call a political opponent a fascist—or even a liar. But given Donald Trump’s career of long cons, his cult convention, his recent suggestions about changing Election Day, and his persistent efforts to sabotage the Postal Service, it’s now naive not to.
Trump is openly seeking to win reelection by getting within cheating distance of the popular vote—and then hoping that some combination of state voter ID laws, discarded mail-in ballots, dark-money super PACs, foreign interference, and the Electoral College will again make the loser the winner. He is essentially attempting an unconstitutional putsch from within government to hang on to power.
Connect all these dots.
What do you see?
• replacing the rule of law with the law of rule—courtesy of Bill Barr—as accused allies receive pardons and praise while enemies are threatened with arbitrary prosecution; • engaging in multiple obstructions of justice, such as firing FBI director James Comey and urging White House counsel Don McGahn to lie to Mueller;• basing an entire convention on himself—no platform, Trumps proliferating like Borgias—and on the daily violation of the anti-monarchical Hatch Act because “no one cares,” according to apologist Mark Meadows;• worsening economic inequality by shifting trillions through tax breaks to “American Oligarchs,” in Andrea Bernstein’s useful phrase, who then gratefully support his assaults on environmental and consumer laws to make even more money; • inciting violence by hyperbolic attacks on opponents, embracing neo-Nazis while ignoring warnings from the FBI about the number-one domestic threat, right-wing violence (as seen in the Kenosha murders on Tuesday); • enthusiastically embracing many of the world’s leading dictators—Putin, Xi, Bolsonaro, Kim, Sisi, Duterte, Erdogan; • repeating Covid-19 falsehoods in order to pressure Republican governors to prematurely reopen the economy and schools, causing the avoidable deaths of over 100,000 Americans, so far, according to leading epidemiologists
• politicizing the civilian-run military by deploying them to cities with Black Lives Matter protests and other “Democrat cities,” conflating all peaceful protesters with a a small minority of violent militants; • attempting to stymie postal delivery to, in effect, steal millions of mail-in ballots… and the election;
• digging his finger into the wounds of racism and dehumanizing people of color and immigrants as “animals,” “scum,” “vermin,” and “rapists” to excite white nationalists;
• erupting with a lava of lies—now up to an average of 22 a day, according to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler—to bury rivals and reality (Goebbels in 1941 said, “There are so many lies that truth and swindle can scarcely be distinguished”); • attempting to delegitimize the Fourth Estate as “enemies of the people,” using Stalin’s odious phrase; • bullying neutral sources of information—the CDC, DNI, FDA, regulatory agencies—to bend their expected integrity to his political needs; • rejecting science to advance his hunches and policies—on climate and Covid-19, for example—that threaten the well-being of millions of people around the world; • milking public office for private gain by treating “his” federal government like he treated the Trump Organization; • attempting to criminally extort the president of Ukraine in order to smear Joe Biden;• firing career professionals and “independent” inspectors general for doing their job, increasingly having a government of cronies, cranks, multimillionaires, relatives, and unconfirmable third-raters; • ignoring all congressional subpoenas (when Nixon ignored eight of them, it became the third article in his impeachment, “Contempt of Congress”); • and saying things such as “I alone can fix it” and “with Article II, I can do whatever I want,” as well as praising the Chinese Communist party for showing its “power of strength” by slaughtering thousands in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
“They all have one purpose,” said Sally Yates, past acting attorney general, “to remove any check on his abuse of power.”
The emerging picture is not transactional conservatism but rather a deviant fascism American-style. (For those still offended by the F-word, there’s more: For the first time in 58 elections, a president is refusing to agree beforehand to abide by the results.) That’s not mainstream but extreme.
READ MORE > The Nation
________________________________________________________________________________
Policing in the United States functions as a military occupation.
US Law Enforcement’s Warrior Complex Is on Full Display in the Streets—and in Leaked Documents
Hacked documents from the early weeks of the ongoing protest movement illustrate one of Black Lives Matter’s central observations:
CASE IN POINT: “Sun Tzu and the Officer Resiliency Mindset,” “3x as many cops chose to take their own lives last year as died from felonious gunfire… WHY? Evil is real … It has a plan to defeat you …” it said. Then, a quote: “‘The skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible…’—Sun Tzu.” This bulletin, uploaded to an Alabama law enforcement website in March 2020 and accessed by hackers this summer, advertised to officers a police training course, approved for seven credit hours by the state police standards and training commission. . .the course promised to use “the epic war tome, The Art of War, required reading for the CIA, U.S. Military Intelligence and the Marine Corps Reading Program,” to examine how ancient wartime tactics “are used to destroy law enforcement officer’s [sic] psychological well-being.”
. . . The files, known as BlueLeaks, come from over 250 law enforcement sites, and mostly span from 2007 to mid-June 2020; since their release, journalists have used documents swept up in the hack to shine a light on such malfeasance as the militarized targeting of immigrant rights activists, police–social media company collaboration, and the use of junk science interrogation techniques.
Taken together, these documents give credence to one of the central observations of the Black Lives Matter movement: that law enforcement in the United States functions as a military occupation. . .
Several “intelligence notes” from the Department of Homeland Security distributed across the hacked websites, for instance, warned police that protesters were stashing “caches” of “rocks, bottles, and accelerants” or “flammable materials, rocks, and other projectiles,” making them ready for “breakaway groups to commit violence.” Rather than the DHS’s own reconnaissance or exclusive briefings from local law enforcement, however, the intelligence notes mostly cited local and national news reports to make these assertions (and one merely cited a “social media user”). Those news reports mostly parroted unsubstantiated claims made by local police—and many of these types of claims turned out to be false, . . .
In no BlueLeaks documents did The Nation find any recognition among law enforcement agencies that police officers across the country were routinely brutalizing protesters. In fact, what is perhaps the most significant mention of police brutality during the protests came from a June 1 DHS memo, which portrayed claims of cop violence as a project of “foreign influence activity.”
Fast forward to Tuesday night in Kenosha, Wis. Local cops patrolled the streets in armored vehicles, seeking to enforce the city’s 8 pm curfew set in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. When they rolled up to a group of white men with assault rifles—self-described militia members—they greeted them over one of the armored cars’ speaker systems: “We appreciate you guys, we really do.” An officer in one of the vehicles stuck his torso out of the hatch and tossed a bottle of water to a rifled teenager in a green T-shirt. Soon after the encounter, the boy in the green shirt, Kyle Rittenhouse, allegedly shot three protesters, killing two of them.
Contrast that with how the demonstrators have been treated.
Police see armed militia members as brethren;
law enforcement is hungry to feed its warrior complex.
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This is what it looks like since Trump doesn't believe in science, the World Health Organization, or his own health advisors.
