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    Trumpism will persist until we rekindle faith in people’s ability to reshape the world | Jeff Sparrow

    About 70% of Republicans apparently believe the 2020 presidential election to have been neither free nor fair.That’s a big chunk of voters rejecting, on entirely bogus grounds, the legitimacy of the new president.And it’s not the first time either.From 2011, Donald Trump engendered support for his own tilt at the White House by questioning the legality of the Obama presidency. He built his political career upon the embrace of “birtherism”, a racist conspiracy that emerged during the election of 2008.Back then, rightwing blogs and talk radio shows claimed Obama was not a “natural-born citizen of the US”, and thus ineligible for office under Article Two of the constitution.A Harris Poll in 2010 found an astonishing 25% of respondents questioned Obama’s right to serve, as the birthers tried to persuade electoral college voters, the supreme court and members of the college to block his certification.More than any other figure, Trump brought that rejection of Obama’s legitimacy into the mainstream.“If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility …” he told NBC’s Today Show in 2011, “then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”For the Tea Party movement and the Republican fringe, birtherism underpinned a rightwing conviction that Obama’s presidency represented a kind of coup.You don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential electionsMind you, after the 2016 election, a significant proportion of Democrats thought the same about Trump’s victory.As David Greenberg notes, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and John Lewis were among those who publicly labelled Trump “illegitimate”, elected only as the result of Russian meddling. Some Democrats blamed Vladimir Putin for the WikiLeaks release of the Podesta emails or suggested Russian social bots fixed the outcome; others falsely claimed that voting booths had been rigged or that Trump was in fact a “Manchurian candidate” employed in Putin’s service.For such people, Trump wasn’t merely an odious, rightwing demagogue. He was also an impostor, whose presence in the Oval Office signified systemic institutional failure.The refusal by Trump’s supporters to accept the 2020 result as genuine didn’t then come entirely from nowhere. Indeed, it’s been a long time since partisans of a defeated presidential candidate haven’t denounced the process that allowed their opponent to win.Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.For years, surveys have revealed a massive and ongoing decline in trust in basic institutions, including those associated with democracy.In early 2020, for instance, the communications firm Edelman polled 34,000 people in 28 countries for its Trust Barometer report. It found a tremendous decrease in the public’s respect for institutions, with almost everywhere “government and media … perceived as both incompetent and unethical”.Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed believed the media to be “contaminated with untrustworthy information” and 66% did not expect government leaders “to successfully address our country’s challenges”.Even in Australia, one of the wealthiest and most secure nations in the world, more than half of people polled saw the system as failing them, and a large majority no longer possessed confidence in the media.We might think this cynicism would favour progressives, given the left’s longstanding critique of institutional power.But it’s not as simple as that.Obama won office because George W Bush had plunged America into permanent, unpopular wars. Trump triumphed in 2016 because he faced a weak opponent; he lost in 2020 when his response to Covid-19 revealed his utter ineptitude.In other words, you don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential elections. You can understand the outcomes easily enough in terms of decisions by voters.But only if you acknowledge voters’ ability to make such decisions.Conspiracy theories proceed on an entirely different basis. They present ordinary people as gulls, the perpetual dupes of power; they suggest events unfold, always and everywhere, according to the will of hidden string pullers.Rather than asking why their candidate didn’t appeal to electors, the conspiracist looks for external manipulation – implicitly accepting that only the elite can make history.In different circumstances, a widespread cynicism about the existing institutions might propel a movement to deepen and widen participation in political affairs. Right now, however, it seems to be linked to a prevailing pessimism about democratic agency, one that can all too easily provide openings for authoritarian demagogues.Joe Biden takes office as the embodiment of American business-as-usual. Despite polling far more votes than Trump, he remains the ultimate insider, associated with many of the most consistently hated policies in recent years (from the Iraq war, which he championed, to mass incarceration, which he helped initiate).Not surprisingly, if you survey rightwing social media, you can see the new argument cohering at a frightening speed, with more and more accounts claiming that Biden was illegitimately foisted on honest Americans by a nefarious elite. Far-right agitators, many of whom had long since given up on Trump, have embraced the #stopthesteal campaign with enthusiasm, with the upcoming Million Maga march potentially bringing together motley white nationalist and fascist groups in what looks very much like an attempted reprise of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.Just as Trump’s rise inspired imitators elsewhere, we should expect the right’s narrative to spread internationally. Already, baseless allegations of electoral fraud have been echoed by Australian politicians – and it’s still early days yet.Trump might be gone but, until we can rekindle faith in ordinary people’s ability to reshape the world, Trumpism will remain very much with us. More

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    End of Trump era deals heavy blow to rightwing populist leaders worldwide

    As the Donald Trump era draws to a close, many world leaders are breathing a sigh of relief. But Trump’s ideological kindred spirits – rightwing populists in office in Brazil, Hungary, Slovenia and elsewhere – are instead taking a sharp breath.The end of the Trump presidency may not mean the beginning of their demise, but it certainly strips them of a powerful motivational factor, and also alters the global political atmosphere, which in recent years had seemed to be slowly tilting in their favour, at least until the onset of coronavirus. The momentous US election result is further evidence that the much-talked-about “populist wave” of recent years may be subsiding.For Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has yet to recognise Joe Biden’s victory, Trump’s dismissal struck close to home. “He was really banking on a Trump victory … Bolsonaro knows that part of his project depends on Trump,” said Guilherme Casarões, a political scientist from Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil.As the reality of a Trump-free future sunk in last Thursday, Bolsonaro reportedly sought to lighten the mood in the presidential palace, telling ministers he now had little choice but to hurl his pro-Trump foreign policy guru, Filipe Martins, from the building’s third-floor window.The election result represented a blow to Bolsonarismo, a far-right political project modelled closely on Trumpism that may now lose some of its shine. And on the world stage the result means Brazil has lost a key ally, even if critics say the relationship brought few tangible benefits. It brings an end to what Eliane Cantanhêde, a prominent political commentator, called Bolsonaro’s “megalomaniacal pipedream” of spearheading an international rightwing crusade. More

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    The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump's election lies

    The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
    “I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
    [embedded content]
    The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
    Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
    Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
    The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
    On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views. More

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    Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading

    Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
    Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
    “Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
    “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”
    Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
    The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
    Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.
    There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
    Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
    The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
    One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
    The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
    [embedded content]
    Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
    “My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
    “First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More

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    Scholars warn of collapse of democracy as Trump v Biden election looms

    Dozens of experts on fascism warn of global danger, calling for action from ordinary people: ‘It is not too late’Republicans resemble autocratic parties – studyDozens of historians of fascism and authoritarianism have signed a letter warning that democracy “is either withering or in full-scale collapse globally”, and urging ordinary people to take action. Related: Trump has gone a long way toward hindering democracy in other countries Continue reading… More

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    I know a marriage killed by QAnon and Trump, with help from alienation | Matt Dooley

    Everyone remembers where they were when Trump won the election. Alex and Mary* remember it especially well. It was the night their relationship fell apart.
    Alex and I first met in 2012. I went to dinner one night with him and his fiancee, Mary. I remember her as a bright, intelligent woman with a passionate interest in animal rights. Fast forward to the evening of 8 November 2016, and a gaudy reality TV star was on the verge of being elected president of the most powerful country on Earth. As Alex and Mary watched state after state fall for Donald Trump, it became clear that the beginning of this new chapter in American history would mark the end of their marriage.
    During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mary had become a dedicated conspiracy theorist, paving the way for her embrace of a bizarre conspiracy theory known as QAnon. “I had a nervous breakdown,” says Alex. “I couldn’t wrap my mind around the whole Trump thing and all the weird stuff Mary was getting into. I just fell apart.” Mary is unambiguous about the reason their marriage ended. “It is 100% my fault. I came in as one person and left as another.”
    Alex and Mary moved from Australia to California in early 2014. Alex had a job offer and they decided to take the plunge. From day one, Alex was pulling long days at the office and Mary passed a lot of her time online, frequenting a huge message board community called 4chan. A naturally inquisitive person, Mary enjoyed reading about fringe opinions with a specific focus on alternative medicine. After a series of bungled health diagnoses, Mary had lost faith in the authorities. She viewed the entire medical system as a web of malevolent conspiracies. 4chan had vibrant communities for discussing these issues and more. At the darker end of the 4chan spectrum there lurked several large groups dedicated to white supremacist hate speech, antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
    Mary’s network of 4chan friends became an increasingly important antidote to the sense of alienation she experienced in her new town. While Alex jeered Trump’s orange skin and ridiculous hair, an avid following was growing across America and the world.
    In Trump, Mary saw someone who was finally going to shake up the establishment and put an end to the hegemony of the political elite. “I was praying and meditating for Trump to win,” she says. “That is where all of my consciousness was”. Alex admits he didn’t take it seriously. “If she brought up Trump, I just tried to shut it down,” he sighs. “ I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to seriously believe in that guy’s bullshit.”
    One day in the autumn of 2016, Alex drove Mary out past the used car yards and fast-food joints to a convention centre near the airport. “I knew she had been doing some chanting or something with the Hare Krishnas and dabbling in Scientology,” says Alex. “It was her thing and I respected that. I just didn’t want to know about it”.
    Mary wasn’t on her way to a Hare Krishna meeting. She was going to a presentation by David Icke, an English conspiracy theorist whose ravings include: the existence of a nefarious reptilian race invading Earth from a parallel universe; various antisemitic nonsense; the obligatory UFO fare; and a cabal of deep state villains.
    Icke has attempted to foretell the end of the world several times (incorrectly, thus far). His predictions imagine absurd cataclysmic showdowns between good and evil. In 2019, the Australian government rejected Icke’s visa application on grounds of character. While an army of multi-dimensional lizard people may seem far-fetched, Public Policy Polling released a study in April 2013, which showed that 4% of Americans believed lizard creatures control the world. That is more than 12 million people.
    Mary describes how she felt after seeing Icke speak: “I came away smiling. I felt like everything was clear, like it all made sense”. In October 2017, an anonymous blog post turned up on the message boards. It was posted by a mysterious member, named “Q”, who claimed to be a high-level US government whistleblower with secrets to share. Again, Mary felt like puzzle pieces were falling into place. “I had been waiting for this. I knew Q was coming,” she says.
    David Singh Grewal, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law, has published research on the dynamics of conspiracy theory. He explains how the over-simplification of a perceived enemy allows the conspiracy theorist to role-play “the one good cop that takes down the bad guys and makes America great again”. “The conspiracy theory gives the believer a feeling of empowerment,” he says. “They feel as though they have all the answers.”
    Rather than being one specific conspiracy theory, QAnon is better thought of as a constellation of conspiracy theories. At the core of this ever expanding galaxy of conspiratorial solar systems is the idea that a shady cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles are working in the shadows to bring down Trump’s presidency.
    The genius of Q is that it remains non-specific. Just about anyone can find a version of truth that suits their palate. For Mary, it was distrust in the medical system and disgust at child abuse. Others have been motivated by changing racial demographics, feminism, gun rights, Covid, 5G towers – you name it. BYO fears and grievances.
    Three years and five thousand odd messages after the original post, Q content is a rambling mishmash of obtuse clues and inane conjecture. Every post is a regurgitation of publicly available information organised into a dramatic narrative, concocted to keep millions of followers coming back for more. And Mary is all in.
    Alex and Mary’s relationship ended in divorce over their fundamental disagreements. Alex says he doesn’t think he could have changed Mary’s mind, but he is philosophical about the way society mocks conspiracy theorists. “I just couldn’t get past taking the piss out of it,” he says. “But I think that is the problem with QAnon and this whole Trump thing. Everyone on the left spends too much time making jokes.”
    Asked if she thinks the wild web of QAnon conspiracies might be bullshit, Mary pauses for a moment. “Well, I guess it could be. But it’s a great story if it is”.
    * Alex and Mary’s names have been changed for the purpose of this article.
    • Matt Dooley is an Australian writer and journalist More