CSotD: Our Story So Far
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A change is as good as a rest, and we’ve seen significant change in the past few days. But, as Bramhall notes, we’re still digging out and far from any resolution. However, we’re starting to see where the lines are drawn, which is a good first step, though it seems silly to suggest “first steps” when we’re so deep into crisis.
But better first steps than none at all.
“When he reigns, it pours,” but, again, Trump has been in power over a year and had four years before that, yet we’re only now seeing the start of meaningful resistance.
The No Kings rallies were meaningful and important, but the outrages in Minneapolis, both the whistles and the murders, have galvanized things from mild protest into a storm.
Someone complained on social media that the two killings of white people got more attention than the deaths of seven people of color at the hands of ICE.
But as both a veteran of the antiwar movement and as someone who has worked in marketing, I’d insist they are grasping at the wrong element: What made the deaths of Good and Pretti stand out so dramatically was that they were captured on video, often, and from multiple angles.
The result was both evidence and motivators, as those shocking videos were posted by civilians on social media and then, amid some tut-tutting and trigger warnings, on broadcast media.
It helped that the administration overplayed its hand, not only lying in our faces, but so quickly and with so many grotesquely false “facts” that anyone who had seen the footage knew immediately that the cover-up was outrageous and intentional.
This was not “spin.” It was deliberate lying, and if the press was initially reluctant to call it that, civilians were not.
Not only did it expose the falsehoods of our Fearless Leaders, but it’s helping divide the sheep from the goats.
Lester plays a cautious hand here, working with the well-established Trump claim that undocumented aliens are voting in elections.
Of course, this has been disproven in multiple investigations at a cost of millions of wasted dollars, but, even so, it carries a whiff of the Great Replacement Theory championed by white supremacists, stating that the liberals are building a brown demographic that will eventually gain citizenship and outvote the Aryans.
It’s paranoid and racist, but it has both logic and deep roots, and we cannot expect it to simply die out. We’ve seen it crop up multiple times in our nation’s history and should expect to see it continue as a factor to be contended with.
The outrage over this racist theorizing is becoming so elevated that leftwing cartoonists and commentators don’t seem so far out on the fringe anymore, and it may be that the parallels they draw will no longer shock mainstream editors into automatically rejecting their accusations.
After all, someone once said, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue,” and it was neither Abbie Hoffman nor Jane Fonda.
It was Barry Goldwater.
We can hope the “Great Replacement” form of extremism will most often appear on the level of Varvel’s easily debunked cartoon, which starts with the premise that the law officers at Waco and in Florida were masked.
The photos and videos say otherwise.
From there, we can discuss who started the fires in the Waco disaster, and the plain fact that the authorities seized Elian Gonzalez because he was the victim of a custodial abduction, his mother was dead and the purpose was to return him to his legal, surviving parent.
There’s virtually no connection between these events and what happened to Good and Pretti or any other victims of ICE, including little kids like Elian who have often been torn from their parents by force.
And, BTW, we’ve started deporting Cubans back to their ancestral home.
On the other hand, whether it’s spin or deliberate lies or simply a refusal to report facts that don’t support the approved narrative, Wuerker is right that the rightwing media will shelter the True Believers from learning things that might challenge their loyalty to the regime.
The truth is out there, but for many Americans, it’s going to remain out there, not only on Fox and Newsmax and the other American loyalist outlets, but frank reporting may also struggle to break through places like CBS News and the Washington Post, where the shield is not so formidable. While they’re not Pravda, they seem like the Oligarch Press.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Another case of the administration overplaying its hand has emerged with Bondi’s extortionist offer to withdraw the goon squad from Minnesota in exchange for its voter registration rolls. Courts have already declared the administration’s wish for voter information illegal, and that the Constitution requires voting remain a state, not federal, activity. It’s unlikely that they would reverse course and allow this violation of both the main text and the 10th Amendment.
Not that we can relax, but at least the attempt to control upcoming elections has been made public. I’m sure we’ll have a chance to discuss this in more detail later, since I doubt Dear Leader will stop trying.
But it’s encouraging to see the pushback not only from the Democratic opposition in Congress but from an emerging group of Republicans, awakening from their loyalist slumber and returning to a more conventional, responsible form of conservativism.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Just as the outrage here is not confined to Minnesota, neither is the outrage confined to the US, particularly after Trump’s disjointed, insulting, fact-free ramblings at Davos, including the draft-dodger’s lying claims about NATO troops in Afghanistan.
The American oligarchs who support him may start to question their choices if other nations begin selling off their US bonds and thinking about other currencies.
So stay tuned, folks, because ICE is heading for Maine to harass the Somali immigrants in Lewiston. Kearney suggests that Collins’ moderate stand against this intrusion puts her on — heh heh — thin ice, given that Mainers have defended their Somali neighbors in the past.
Keep the faith.
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