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      I've been on Parler. It's a cesspit of thinly veiled racism and hate | Malaika Jabali

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      “Civil war is coming.”I saw this message on the social media platform Parler in November, about two weeks after the election was called for Joe Biden. The ominous post followed an even more harrowing message from a different user. “[O]ur people have guns too … it’s time for us to use it!!! Just like in old days.” The poster embedded a photograph of a noose.Parler, which has since been banned by Apple’s app store and from Amazon, has billed itself as a “free speech” platform for the “world’s town square”. Last fall, without much digging, I learned that this town square is one where an increasingly violent far right digitally dances with mainstream, influential conservatives.The fact that Parler has a vague air of legitimacy – unlike other platforms known for their explicitly far-right user bases – normalizes racist violence against Black people and anyone associated with them. Like the white police officers and “respectable” public servants who joined the Ku Klux Klan after the US civil war, or the white families who partied under the lynched bodies of Black men, white America has continued its intergenerational love affair with public anti-blackness. The methods have simply mutated. Memes calling for our deaths are the lynching postcards of the 21st century. Shared among the masses, they make casual affairs of Black terror. It’s not enough for the sharers of these memes to simply believe in white violence on a personal level; the collective experience is the point.I joined Parler in November, before various tech companies announced plans to take it offline. It didn’t take long to find a bevy of hashtags and posts romanticizing civil war. By late November, there were over 10,000 posts that included the hashtag #civilwar and its variants. The person who posted “Civil war is coming” was replying to a post by Wayne Root, a conservative media personality with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. Root leveled the same unproven accusations of voter fraud as Donald Trump, using the same calls for battle that white power groups heeded in their storming of the US Capitol the first week of 2021.While some on the far right will probably retreat into the shadows cast by polling booths and hidden by exit polling data that obscures Trump’s popularity, many have not. Any perception of progress for Black people, even if this progress does not substantively exist, perpetuates violence against us and our perceived allies like leftists, Marxists and Democrats – all named by Parler posters as opposing parties in this hypothetical civil war).To say that Parler’s users, or any Americans who revel in white power tropes and violent memes, are “extremist” is a bit of a misnomer. What we call extremism is, if anything, a common American tradition. Millions of Americans, if they don’t proactively endorse the violence, silently concede to it. They vote for it. They dress it in words like “tradition” and “free speech”.I was raised witnessing it. There is a monument honoring Confederate soldiers in my home town of Stone Mountain, Georgia. The monument isn’t an ordinary statue erected in some mundane public square. It’s a nearly half-acre relief carved into the massive quartz and granite stone for which our town is named. It would take a runner five miles to circle around the rock formation’s base. We took field trips to Stone Mountain in high school, as if it were an amusement park and not the largest Confederate memorial in the world.Stone Mountain has now become a flashpoint for conflict. I hiked the mountain on a recent holiday trip with my mom, days before white men wielding guns protested against the widespread movement to remove Confederate statues. We tried to hike another day, but were blocked from entering. It was closed for the day after Black counter-protesters came back with guns of their own.When you talk to white southerners about honoring the Confederacy, you’ll hear a lot about heritage. I’ve heard it all my life. I heard it when our state flag featured the Confederate symbol throughout my childhood and in the debates to remove it. I read about it when I decided to make it one of my debate topics for a summer college class in my last year of high school. But what you’ll seldom hear is when this heritage has been selectively commemorated. Stone Mountain’s Confederate monument opened on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination.This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the worldThis, too, is the culture of Parler.“Time to get rid of the yoke calling itself democrats,” someone wrote in response to Wayne Root’s revolution post.“Every town needs to decide on a gather place where an armed citizenry takes over everything … every traitor must be executed,” wrote another.It’s not enough to dismiss the radical right as merely having a difference of opinion, or explain it away as a population of marginalized, working-class white men who can be brought back from the brink by reason and calls for a universal basic income.Universal prescriptions are necessary, but insufficient. This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the world. It is the shots I heard while reporting in Kenosha, blocks from where Kyle Rittenhouse killed two white Black Lives Matter protesters, as it happened. It was the ease of white vigilantes carrying weapons in another public square, Civic Center Park in downtown Kenosha, hours earlier. It is the audacity of those white vigilantes shouting down Philando Castile’s girlfriend, from whom I was mere feet away in the park, as they argued for their right to kill to protect property. Of course, Philando was killed while exercising their revered second amendment right to bear arms, but that right is clearly reserved for some Americans more than others.Parler may be homeless now, but there is an entire world that welcomes the hatred and violence it cultivates. As threatening as it may be, the platform will probably be replaced with something else. It’s the public terror that’s the point. More

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      Anyone shocked by the US Capitol attack has ignored an awful lot of warning signs | Francine Prose

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      Perhaps the most powerful shocks, the most painful surprises, are the ones that we saw coming yet refused to believe would happen. Our ability to fear something and, at the same time, assume it will never occur is one aspect of human nature that seems particularly ill-suited to our continued wellbeing and survival.Throughout the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, as journalists and politicians expressed their stunned astonishment, one couldn’t help wondering: hadn’t they heard about the hundreds of people, some of them armed, who stormed the Michigan state capitol building in April, objecting to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order? Had they forgotten that a young woman was killed during the August 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia – a neo-Nazi event that Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn? Had their interns not been keeping up with – and informing their bosses about – the popular Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of far-right hate groups and extremist conspiracy theorists? Had no one explained that the Proud Boys’ T-shirt insignia – 6MWE – means “Six Million [Jews] Weren’t Enough”?During the assault on the Capitol, as I listened to the panic and horror in the voices of the journalists who, until now, had reported on Donald Trump with something closer to detached disapproval, I wondered: is this what it takes to finally make them understand who this man is – and what he wants for our country? What did they think he meant when he tweeted about the gathering planned for 6 January: “Be there. It will be wild.”Even as the “wild” rioters were scaling the walls of the Capitol, some news media persisted in calling them “protesters” and “demonstrators”. These insurgents were far more than that. Images of politicians sheltering in “safe locations” in the Capitol complex reminded me of how, on 13 November 2015, my son – whose band was playing at the Trianon theater in Paris that evening – sheltered backstage while jihadis murdered 89 people at the Bataclan auditorium, a few blocks away.The difference between protesters and terrorists is critical. Demonstrators are expressing their response to a policy, an event or a series of events – systemic racism, for example. But terrorists plot violent mayhem, rehearse, fail, come up with a new plan, try again and again until they succeed. We all recall that the destruction of the World Trade Center was preceded by a 1993 attempt to bomb the WTC parking garage. The attack on the Michigan state capitol and the Charlottesville march were rehearsals for what transpired in DC last week.Donald Trump is clearly responsible for the 6 January attack. His speech to the crowd that day was an incitement to violence. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the fury and lawlessness of his supporters will disappear when he retires to Mar-a-Lago, goes to jail or begins campaigning for the 2024 presidential election. It’s important to recall that Trump has been the accelerant but not the fuel, not the kindling that has allowed the flames of hatred and bigotry, of anti-democratic rightwing fanaticism to blaze as brightly as they do now.Many of us have a film clip or photo, taken on 6 January, that most haunts us. A friend posted an image of some thugs trying to burn a heap of costly equipment – cameras, recorders, microphones – abandoned, during the rout, by Associated Press reporters. But the image I find most troubling is a short video clip of a dozen or so rioters idly wandering the Senate floor, picking up papers from the senators’ desk, then strolling on. If these Trump loyalists believe – as they kept chanting – that the duly-elected, soon-to-be Biden-Harris administration is not their government, it’s not only because their president told them so. And the framed portraits, the statuary, the gleaming chandeliers they saw in the Capitol building were unlikely to change their minds. The interlopers on the Senate floor looked less triumphant than bewildered, and their bewilderment is not unrelated to the sources of their rage: the massive income inequality, the epidemic unemployment, the opioid and Covid pandemics, the sense of being excluded and forgotten that helps inspire xenophobia, racism, sexism and violence. The rapid decline of our public educational system and the rise of far-right media are not unrelated; among the things that education gives us is the ability to think, to distinguish the truth from the lie, to process and evaluate the information we’re given.These are the problems and the perils that the Biden-Harris administration will have to deal with, and which all the palliative talk about unity, reconciliation, and “working across the aisle” is not going to come remotely close to fixing.Let’s be clear: the Biden-Harris administration has exactly four years to repair some large part of the damage that’s been done – a short time to begin a massive and necessary project. Otherwise, these violent groups are going to rehearse, retry, recoup, try again and again – until they succeed. With or without Donald Trump, the violence, if it ever goes away, will come roaring back. Lawmakers like Josh Hawley, loudly voicing their objections to the 2020 election results, are already campaigning for the job of anti-democratic dictator in 2024. Unless some substantive changes are made – something more sweeping than the middle-of-the-road policy tweaks that seem to be in the offing – the next coup attempt may very well succeed.And we’ll be left to marvel at something else that we always suspected was possible, but that we never believed would actually happen here, and certainly not to us. More

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      in US Politics

      'Stand back and stand by': how Trumpism led to the Capitol siege

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      [embedded content]
      The storming of the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Wednesday was the culmination of a year of white nationalist and anti-democratic violence that steadily intensified and featured the direct incitement of the US president.
      Last February, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, issued a direct warning to Congress that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists” had become the primary source of domestic terrorist threats and killings. His fears were supercharged as 2020 progressed by the confluence of the pandemic and the brazen actions of Donald Trump who exploited public anxieties over mask ordinances and Covid-19 lockdowns to whip up his base into a frenzy.
      “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” he cried in April after the Democratic governor of the state, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed stay-at-home orders to combat soaring coronavirus infection rates. More

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      Sisters in Hate review: tough but vital read on the rise of racist America

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      It’s not Proust, Nietzsche or even Toni Morrison when it comes to difficult reading, but some are sure to find Seyward Darby’s book even more arduous to wade through.It’s not that it is inscrutable. Indeed, as engaging as it is adroit, Sisters in Hate offers an excellent explanation for the ascent of Donald Trump amid a triumphal resurgence of white supremacy, sexism and xenophobia. A journalist, Darby focuses on Trump’s success through the experience of three individual and distinct women. Apart from gender and reactionary politics, there’s only the year of their birth, 1979, to link them. Each took a divergent path to arrive at what she saw as a battle to save white identity, deemed by all three to be America’s “true identity”.Oregon native Corinna Olsen, a former porn star and bodybuilder, has mostly survived as an undertaker, specializing in embalming. She is Darby’s sole repentant sister. Admirably, all along her erratic odyssey she sought to shield her young daughters from a hatred of difference she was first reluctant to admit but gradually came to accept. Her search to fit in, leading to an embrace of white nationalism, was sparked by the death of her skinhead-adherent brother. Today, swastika tattoos obscured, she’s a Muslim convert, teaching martial arts to black girls as wistful as she once was.The savviest white nationalists are aware of the blind spot that observers often have when it comes to womenAyla Stewart hails from Las Vegas. Between looking after six children as a Mormon “tradwife”, she has become a minor celebrity in her malevolent milieu with blogged and broadcast racist rants. How did she evolve thus, from being a vegan feminist who worshiped a pagan goddess and supported liberal Democrats like Dennis Kucinich? Only by slow degrees. Eventually, suspecting a plot to discredit her, Stewart stopped confiding in Darby. But she was plenty happy to tell her story at first, and it is riveting.The third sister in hate, Lana Lokteff, was born to Russian immigrants in the Pacific north-west but is now a resident of quaint and gracious Charleston, South Carolina. Like her Swedish husband Henrik Palmgren, the pale and slender blonde is perfectly Aryan-looking. Together the neo-Nazi pair operate Red Ice TV. Produced abroad since being banned on YouTube, it is widely considered the CNN of the alt-right. Espousing apocalyptic antisemitic conspiracy theories, the pair have generated notoriety as well as wealth.The particular appeal of women as spokespersons for a movement so blatantly misogynistic, Darby tells us, is what makes female recruits such valued members. It’s akin to the prominent placement of black people behind the podium at Trump rallies or front-and-center among the ranks of the Proud Boys. Both offer plausible deniability of bigotry.“Today,” Darby writes, “the savviest white nationalists are aware of the blind spot that observers often have when it comes to women, discounting their contributions to abhorrent causes because they prefer to think of them as humanity’s better angels.“One of this book’s subjects,” she continues, “put it this way: ‘A soft woman saying hard things can create repercussions throughout society.’” In same the vein, Lokteff noted at a conference: “Since we aren’t physically intimidating, we can get away with saying big things. And let me tell you, the women in this movement can be lionesses and shield maidens and Valkyries.”Startling as this is, it is not much different from Sarah Palin’s memorable characterization of gun-toting Alaskan soccer moms as “pit bulls in lipstick”. How perverse is the desire of some women to show fidelity and worth by matching the contempt for others held by men? What does this growing ruthlessness mean?In 2016, some 6 to 9 million citizens who had supported Barack Obama, voted for Trump. Nearly 50% of white women did. This November, in even greater numbers, one-time Obama voters sought to re-elect Trump. As hard as it is to imagine, he gained still more adherents among women.All three “sisters” who spoke to Darby do not like being thought of as racist haters. Yet their disdain, their race- and class-based derision, born of envy, ignorance and fear, is real enough. Lyndon Johnson posited that if someone can make the worst white feel they are superior to the best black, their subject’s pocket can be easily picked. Of late, more than 600 billionaires have gained double the wealth held by 331 million Americans. One might imagine that the time was ripe for the masses to join ranks.The total indifference displayed towards the humanity and contributions of people of color and more is what makes Sisters in Hate so painful to read. Considering the genocide and theft to which Native Americans were subjected, African enslavement or the Holocaust, one might regard each tragic episode as holding the promise of a happy ending. These struggles were a testament of our common resolve. We can all say, “We shall overcome!”But can America’s resurgent white nationalism and antisemitism be surmounted? The prospect is pessimistic, Darby concedes, writing of the how the dismantling of hegemony and patriarchy feel like discrimination to many entitled whites.“Black people are the magical faces at the bottom of society’s well,” wrote Derrick Bell. “Even the poorest whites, those who must live their lives only a few levels above, gain their self-esteem by gazing down on us.”Perhaps America’s happy ending will come from heeding the lessons of history. In the turbulent 1960s, willing to be brutalized, black and white demonstrators protested successfully for change. This year, in the wake of enduring police violence, diverse masked protesters marched anew worldwide.In the same spirit, risking all, more voted than ever before. But, overwhelmingly, those who made the difference on election day were women of color. Our sisters in hope? More

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      How the 'great reset' of capitalism became an anti-lockdown conspiracy | Quinn Slobodian

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      At a recent anti-lockdown protest in London, thousands of people gathered to oppose what they saw as a clandestine power grab taking place under the cover of a pandemic. Some protesters carried cardboard signs bearing the name of the alleged takeover: “The great reset”. “They thought they could easily get their great reset,” one man shouted. “Little did they know! The pandemic’s a hoax!”The great reset, both the title of an airport book by the creative economy guru Richard Florida and a slogan favoured by corporate do-gooders, is also the term for a web of ideas that has become increasingly popular among the anti-lockdown right. In its most implausible version, this conspiracy imagines that a global elite is using Covid-19 as an opportunity to roll out radical policies such as forced vaccinations, digital ID cards and the renunciation of private property.Though a poor diagnosis of the causes of global events, the great reset offers a grim insight into the public mood. An unlikely source provided its initial spark. On 3 June, as the UK’s Covid death toll reached 50,000, the royal family’s YouTube account posted a video about a new sustainability drive headed by the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Titled #TheGreatReset, the initiative called for “fairer outcomes” and the redirection of investment towards a more “sustainable future”. It had all the slick branding one has come to expect from the WEF, with a cinematic video of ice floes and beached whales, and a sonorous monologue by Prince Charles.The initiative joined a line of similar proclamations riffing on Karl Polanyi’s 1944 urtext, The Great Transformation. In the past decade, authors and politicians have talked of the “great financialization”, the “great regression”, the “great reversal”, the “great acceleration”, the “great unraveling” and the “great uncoupling”, to name just a few. The WEF’s great reset went largely unnoticed at first, arriving at the same time as George Floyd’s death spurred Black Lives Matter protests across the world. But the idea later caught on – in a way that organisers most likely didn’t expect.Weeks after the WEF’s announcement, Justin Haskins, the editorial director of the libertarian thinktank, the Heartland Institute, sounded klaxons about the great reset on Fox Business, Fox News and Glenn Beck’s network, TheBlaze. “The rough outline of the plan is clear,” he said. “Completely destroy the global capitalist economy and reform the western world.” Yet, apart from a few isolated yelps in the rightwing echo chamber, the great reset failed to catch on as a fully fledged conspiracy theory until Joe Biden’s victory in early November, when Google Trends shows that searches for the term surged online.The most obvious spark for this growing interest was a segment on Laura Ingraham’s television show on Fox News, which averaged 3.5 million viewers in 2020. “You know the idea, ‘never let a crisis go to waste’,” said Ingraham on 13 November. “Well, with the coronavirus, that idea went global. And since last spring, powerful people began to use this pandemic as a way to force radical social and economic change across the continents.”Years after the journalist Naomi Klein first identified the “shock doctrine” of radical policies that conservatives rolled out during disasters, the right was now appropriating this narrative for its own ends.A few days later, Ingraham returned to the theme. In a clip viewed some 2.4m times, she said Biden’s “handlers” believe in “the great reset of capitalism. It’s a plan to force a more equitable distribution of global resources.” The same day, another conservative commentator, Candace Owens, tweeted: “They are using Covid to crash western economies and implement communist policies. That’s what’s going on.” And in Australia, the Spectator columnist James Delingpole was interviewed on Sky News Australia (which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch). “Anyone who doesn’t realise that the great reset is the biggest threat to our form of life right now hasn’t been paying attention,” he said.The great reset theory is nonsense, and will probably become a prime target for the many new research centres and initiatives studying “disinformation” that have mushroomed on university campuses since 2016. But although we may scorn the ideas of anti-lockdown protesters, we ignore the unequal reality of the pandemic at our peril. Many of the world’s tech companies and CEOs have done well from this crisis. Indeed, in the same week that many Americans lost their jobs, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, added $13bn to his fortune in just a day. With surreal realities like these, where prominent members of the 1% really do appear to have gained from the pandemic, how much of a leap is it to persuade someone that the crisis has been orchestrated deliberately so that elites can amass power?The genius of Murdoch’s hosts was giving people a place to direct their anger. With his thick German accent and outpost in the Swiss Alps, the WEF’s founder, Klaus Schwab, labelled a “charismatic German” and “dangerous Marxist leader” by Sky News Australia, was the perfect villain for this conspiracy. For rightwing pundits, the great reset was also a welcome distraction from their own complicity with power and wealth, having spent four years cheerleading a president whose major legislative achievement was a mammoth tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich.That the WEF has inspired a conspiracy about elites is unsurprising; the organisation is best known for its annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, when top corporate executives arrive in fleets of private jets to pay lip service to climate change. While Schwab has pronounced that “neoliberalism has had its day”, it is left to his critics to remind the WEF of its record, such as its publication of an annual “global competitiveness index” that has, since the 1970s, flogged national governments into a race to the bottom to adopt lower taxes and slash regulations.If the great reset tells us anything about political reality, it’s that corporate elites can’t win legitimacy through vacuous initiatives. People recoil, it turns out, at being treated like buggy hard drives that can be reset from above. Changing the conditions of people’s lives and the causes of political alienation will take far more than the WEF’s tone-deaf video about the opportunities of a pandemic, fronted by the royal family. It’s social movements such as Black Lives Matter and the climate strikers, not boardroom initiatives, that offer a better lesson in how to gather popular support for the transformations we need.• Quinn Slobodian is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, Massachusetts• This article was amended on 4 December 2020 to reflect the fact that Candace Owens is not a Fox News host More

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      Trump’s legacy is the plague of extreme lies. Truth-based media is the vaccine | Richard Wolffe

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      Normal presidents start to think about their legacy long before the final weeks of their time inside the West Wing. But if there’s anything we have learned from the lab rat experiment of the last four years, it’s that Donald Trump is entirely abnormal.Whether he knows it or not – and all the evidence suggests he knows nothing worth knowing – Trump’s legacy is the toxic politics of lies: a permanent campaign of fabrications and falsehoods.No matter that he clearly lost the 2020 election by landslide margins in the electoral college and the popular vote. What matters is the never-ending sense of grievance that someone or something, somewhere – liberals, minorities, judges, reporters – have conspired to wrong Trump and oppress his long-suffering fans.This is the narrative of the fascist story forever: you are not to blame for your suffering because it was contrived by others – immigrants and outsiders, wielding wealth and power in the shadows.Trump did not invent this story and likely has no idea where it came from, other than his own obvious genius. He did not invent the notion that brazen lies can buy you a delusional base. He wasn’t the first to put the bull in the bully pulpit of the presidency.But he was the first to run a White House like a Joe McCarthy witch hunt, unleashing social media to cower an entire party into a posture of pure cowardice.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills of the IRS, the calling-in of his massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud cases of New York state’s prosecutors.These Trumpist Republicans are his legacy, as much as a supreme court stacked against the popular vote, science and all good sense.They are people like Elise Stefanik in upstate New York. Stefanik is a Harvard graduate whose career began alongside Republican moderates such as Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, and Josh Bolten, Bush’s second term chief of staff. But now she’s a full Trumpista, mimicking his campaign style of insults and defending him through his impeachment for corruptly twisting national security to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.They are people like Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator and 2024 presidential hopeful. Cotton is already campaigning against immigrants and says he’ll oppose Biden’s nominee for homeland security because he was part of a giant conspiracy of Democratic donors to sell green cards to the Chinese. In fact the conspiracy involved just three cases, and is the same cash-for-citizenship program that triggered investigations into Trump’s son-in-law and confidant Jared Kushner. But why spoil the soundbite?They are people like Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, who spent most of the 2020 campaign sounding like a Trump clone but has now disappeared from public view, even as he continues to stop local officials from enforcing mask-wearing to slow the spread of the pandemic.Trump’s Republicans will be with us long after the soon-to-be-ex-president succumbs to the overdue tax bills, the massive property debts, and the long-brewing fraud casesThis political plague of extreme lies did not start four years ago.George W Bush and Karl Rove won the 2004 election by suggesting that Democrats would open the nation’s doors to Islamist terrorists. That was before the second term was demolished by their own nativists who sunk their plans for immigration reform. Those anti-immigrant forces found a natural home in the so-called Tea party that denied Barack Obama’s citizenship, and later populated Trump’s White House and justice department.The good news is that we already have a vaccine. It’s the best way to protect yourself from demagogues, deception and delusions. It separates fact from fiction. It recalls recent history to place the present in some kind of meaningful context.It’s called the news media, and you can help. You can be an informed citizen by reading established news media first, not your social feed or email. You can share stories from the truth-tellers who have no problem calling out the liars.You can even pay for the truth that journalists deliver every day, no matter how much sewage pours through social media feeds and email inboxes. It doesn’t cost much when you think about how much we’ve paid during these last four years of chaos and corruption.We can’t stop the Trumpistas from Trumping. We can’t stop the rest of them from pretending like they were never big Trump fans in the first place.But we can stop them running away from the facts or their record. We can remind them how they failed to stop Trump’s corruption and this murderous pandemic.We can stop them skewing the political spectrum so far that the Biden team tacks to center ground that is already six steps to the right.We can hold the new White House to its promises at the same time as holding the old Republican party to what used to be its principles.But this work comes at a price. Back in the late 19th century, the French writer Gustave Le Bon wrote that “the crowd” has never rewarded the truth.“They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them,” he wrote. “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”You can reward the truth if you want to. It’s one of the best ways to demolish the legacy of the last four years. More

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      Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump

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      This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More

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      Driving Mr Donald – White House excursion reveals a presidency pushing up daisies

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      It was a jarring few minutes of seeing the world through Donald Trump’s eyes and indulging his fantasies.
      As the White House pool reporter on Saturday, taking a turn to shadow the US president for print media outlets, the Guardian found itself at the back of Trump’s motorcade, rolling out of the executive mansion grounds and on to Pennsylvania Avenue.
      At 10am the dozen black shiny vehicles with flashing blue and red lights were greeted by a sight seldom seen in Washington, a Democratic bastion: hundreds of Trump supporters, cheering and clapping, whistling and whooping, punching the air and hailing their idol as if he had in fact won a glorious victory over Joe Biden.
      What a difference from the previous Saturday when Trump returned from a round of golf to be jeered and booed by denizens of the capital who had just learned that he had been fired by the electorate. Some foreign observers compared that scene to Paris after the liberation or a Middle East autocracy that had overthrown its dictator.
      But a week later, with Trump adding election defeat to the coronavirus disaster and climate crisis as truths that must be denied, supporters – among them far-right groups including the extremist Proud Boys – poured into town to endorse his baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.
      Attendees at the “Million Maga March”, a number as inflated as Trump’s estimation of his inauguration crowd, swarmed the motorcade as it made its stately progress down Pennsylvania Avenue, which in its time has witnessed inaugural parades and funeral marches, suffragists and the Ku Klux Klan.
      Some punched the air; others took pictures with phones. Many sported clothes patterned in red, white and blue, like the stars and stripes. Outside the Willard Hotel, a man proudly wore a t-shirt that declared “I’m deplorable” – a reference to Hillary Clinton’s disparaging remark about Trump supporters that he and they never let go. Biden’s glancing reference to “chumps” never stuck in the same way.
      Among the signs being waved were “Best prez ever” and “Stop the steal”. Among the numerous flags were “Trump 2020: Keep America great”; “Trump 2020: No more bullshit”; “All aboard the Trump train!”; “Women for Trump”; and “Trump 2020: Pro-life, Pro-God, Pro-gun”. More