reflectivepundit

Not Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Diversity but White Supremacy and Crazy Conspiracy Theories Loom as Serious Threats to U.S. Democracy

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In his 2011 book “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” the one-time presidential speechwriter, presidential GOP candidate, and to this day right-extreme pundit Patrick J. Buchanan characterized the essence of a nation as “a people of common ancestry, culture, and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, ’by bonds of affection…mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriotic grave, to every living heart and heath-stone.”

Given those characteristics, Buchanan lamented, “the European and Christian core of our country is shrinking” and “the death of its [America’s] cradle faith brings social disintegration, an end to moral community, and culture war.”

 He left no doubt that the election of President Barack Obama represented the greatest threat to the survival of “his” idea of America. And in his prescriptions to save the European-Christian America included a moratorium on immigration and rolling back any progressive gains won in what Buchanan labeled the [liberal] culture war.

Not only pundits like Buchanan but also some well-known scholars have long warned of the evils of multiculturalism. In 2004, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington chose as the lead in his article “The Hispanic Challenge” the following paragraph,

“The persistent flow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting Anglo-Protestant values that build the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.”

It is ironic that President Joe Biden warned the other day in his Memorial Day that “democracy itself is in peril,” using the same term as Huntington. But the peril Biden spoke of has a very different meaning than the peril Huntington meant.  

Whereas Huntington and Buchanan saw multicultural challenges to what Isabel Wilkerson described in her recent book “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” as a system of White caste dominance, Joe Biden invoked the beliefs and values of true Christianity and inclusive democracy, when he said, “Wherever Americans are, there — there is democracy: churches and synagogues and mosques, neighborhoods and coffee shops and diners, bleachers at kids’ baseball or soccer games, libraries and parks.  Democracy begins and grows in the open heart and the impetus to come together for a common cause…Americans of all backgrounds, races, creeds, gender identities, sexual orientations, have long spilled their blood to defend our democracy.  The diversity of our country and our arm- — and of our armed services is and always has been an incredible strength.”

The GOP is now the Orwellian Party

By Brigitte L. Nacos

 

“There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    George Orwell

 

The current state of the Republican Party, better understood as Big Brother cult, has hit us 37 years later than the Orwellian nightmare of 1984. But when reality unfolds in front of us, it is more shocking, more frightening than the fictitious warning shot.

Big Brother and his servants in GOP are signaling the upcoming purge of Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post in the House in purely Orwellian terms: While ideologically fully in tune with the GOP’s far right policies, she refuses to embrace and repeat the Party’s Big Lie that Leader Trump won the 2020 election, that Biden is not the legitimate president, that January 6 was a patriotic Stop the Steal act.  

The other day, Cheney stood again her ground, when she said,

“We can't embrace the notion the election is stolen. It's a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. We can't whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump's big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed."

But telling the truth means in today’s GOP to be disloyal to the Party and its Dear Leader. As the Orwellian Party propagandist explains, “Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

That describes today’s loyalty test in the Republican Party. You cannot claim that 2 times 2 equals 4, when Big Brother and his cultists insist that 2 times 2 equals 5. If you do not follow the party’s lies, you become the enemy.

Do all of the pure Trumpian GOP officials believe the Big Lie and many other lies? Probably not. But they all understand that the vast majority of the party’s core followers hold the Party’s truth to be the truth. And only loyalists in that sense can look forward to be renominated and reelected next year. Again, the Orwellian fascist model provides a plausible explanation for the scarcity of truth tellers in the rank of GOP officeholders, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power…Power is not a means; it is the end.”

The news that the ban of Trump from Facebook will continue for the time being renewed the discussion over a private company’s right to decide who can use its social media platform. But since the hate speech is not criminalized in the United States, I believe that right now it is best to deny the former president and his servants to once again disperse their Big Lie and a bunch of supportive conspiracy theories via global social media.

Four months without Trump’s posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram did not diminish Trump’s influence in his movement.

Elected GOP office holders are very much aware of this. They all want to please Dear Leader Trump and his base. Holding on to power is much more important than upholding truth and reality.

 

Women’s Liberation reached the White Supremacy/Neo-Nazi Movement: Females had Leading Roles in the Capitol Breach

By Brigitte L. Nacos

“I can’t predict. I don’t understand the resolve of the Deep State. Biden may still yet be our president. If he is, our way of life as we know it is over. Our Republic would be over. Then it is our duty to fight, kill and die for our rights.” This was the answer given by Jessica Watkins, the self-described commander of an Ohio militia affiliate of the Oath Keepers, when asked by one of her recruits after the 2020 presidential election what she predicted for the new year 2021.

Following the violent assault on the Capitol earlier this year, Watkins received a great deal of news coverage because of her prominent role in the preparation for and execution of the violent invasion. Along with eight others in the Watkin’s led group she was indicted by a Grand Jury of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia with conspiracy to stop, delay, and hinder the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote and four other crimes.

Lost in the “breaking news” barrage in the post-January 6^th days and weeks was the starring role of a surprisingly large number of females among the first wave of violent intruders. Four of the nine members of the Watkins group were women—besides Army veteran Jessica Watkins who is 38 years old, the others were significantly older females: Laura Steele (52), Connie Meggs (59), and Sandra Parker (60).  As surveillance video from the Capitol shows, these four women were in the thick of the crowd pushing into the Rotunda.

 While important as supporting cast, women did not participate directly in violence in right-extremist movements of the past, including White Supremacy/neo-Nazi movements. That was in stark contrast to violent left-extremist movements and groups starting with the anarchists of the 19^th century and more pronounced in the Marxist terrorist organizations of the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the latter, such as the Red Army Faction in then West Germany, had at times more women in the leading strata than men. And females were instrumental in planning and carrying out brutal terrorist attacks. Thus, a saying in some police circles was, “Shoot the women first…”

Now, it seems that female White nationalists are no longer excluded from violent activities of their movement. On the first Friday in March, there were a total of 259 persons charged with crimes in the January 6^th breach of the Capitol according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia.

More remarkable, of those 259 defendants, 31 were women. When adding Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran, who was shot by Capitol police as she forcefully tried to enter the Speaker’s lobby near the House chamber, 12,4% of those forcefully storming into the Capitol were females as aggressive as their male counterparts—in deeds and words as the following examples show:

Shame on Mainstream Media for Publicizing another Trump for Political Office

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It is well-document that the most influential organizations of the U.S. mainstream media—from CNN to the New York Times and Washington Post—singled out Donald Trump for the bulk of their election-related coverage. This was the case in 2015 before and in 2016 during the Republican primaries. The celebrity candidate, however rude and insulting, received significantly more and more positive coverage than his competitors on the GOP side but also with respect to Hillary Clinton. Only after he had won the presidential nomination, did the same news organizations finally scrutinize the least qualified and the most dangerous of all candidates. It was too late.

While these same newsrooms deserve credit for their watchdog role during the nightmarish years of the Trump administration, they seemed not to have learned from their past mistakes in 2015/16. Again, they help—unwittingly, I assume—to pave the way for another Trump’s political career.

I was shocked this morning, when I first saw on Yahoo’s home page a story on Lara Trump, Donald’s daughter-in-law, under the headline “Lara Trump for North Carolina Senate Seat?” The article originated in the New York Times and was, as the story revealed, teased by Donald Trump’s enabler-in-chief Lindsay Graham, Senator of North Carolina, who told FOX News that the pro-conviction vote by Richard Burr of North Carolina in the Senate’s impeachment trial “made Lara Trump almost the certain nominee for the Senate seat” in that state.

So, the ambitious Trump through marriage, whose political ambitions had already been covered quite generously before, won another plum piece of free media without saying a single word or doing a single thing—just like father-in-law Donald whose ample free news in 2015/16 freed him from pleading for donations or spending his own money.

The news media must not become the former president’s substitute for his no longer available Twitter account but treat him like any former ex-president, better less so, although the FOX News newsrooms and their competitors will be delighted to serve as his bullhorns.

Just as important, the influential mainstream media must refrain from providing free publicity to other members of the Trump Clan: his sons, his daughters, daughters-in-law, and son-in-law.

When it comes to Mr. Trump and his family, journalists, editors, producers—all in the mainstream media must act according to George Santayana’s aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I do not expect that they will.

A Likely Blue Print for the Horrific Invasion of the Capitol

By Brigitte L. Nacos

“Despite all the noise and smoke and wreckage caused by our attack on the Capitol, only 61 persons were killed… But the real value of all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact,    not in the immediate casualties…More important, though, is what we taught politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon that not one of them is beyond our reach…All the    armed guards and bulletproof limousines in America cannot guarantee their safety…”

The above sentences in “The Turner Diaries” describe the beginning of a catastrophic global race war that American White Supremacists  and their counterparts in Europe fought and won within eleven months by the destruction of democratic systems, non-Whites, and "hostile" Whites in order to establish a pure White empire.  

Written in the late 1970s by William Pierce, founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, the “novel” became a bestseller among militia circles in the 1990s. For Timothy McVeigh the book was a blue print for planning and carrying out the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995 that killed 168 persons and injured many more.

It has been suggested that ISIS may have influenced the playbook of the organized elements that stormed and invaded the Capitol last week. While that might be the case with respect to certain aspects, for example, ISIS’s savvy exploitation of social media platforms, Pierce’s gruesome prescriptions contain more clues for the present state of mind of organized White Supremacy/neo-Nazi groups and their plans for their short- and long-term objectives.

One of the main differences between ISIS and the various White Supremacy and neo-Nazi groups in the United States has been their unwillingness or inability to unite. The “Unite the Right” demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017 were an effort of “alt-right” ideologists to pull the groups together. It failed.

But President Trump whose starring role in the racist anti-Obama birther conspiracy theory years ago and the anti-immigrant policies as president managed to become the idol behind whom White Supremacy groups finally united. The thousands of men and women whose violence shocked the nation as they forced their ways into the halls of the Congress the other day were united in responding to Mr. Trump’s calls to come to Washington and march to the Capitol in order to prevent the “enemy” from taking the non-existing election victory and the presidency away from Trump and them.

Although indicating that he would march with them, the President retreated to the White House. In that he followed the script of other violent movements’ leaders. Hitler and Mussolini never fought along their parties’ brown and black shirts in the streets; bin Laden and al-Baghdadi did not carry out acts of violence they propagated.

Even after four years of the Trumpian war against the intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security communities some institutional memory still exists in the FBI and other security agencies. Some FBI agents, for sure, remember that “The Turner Diaries” motivated McVeigh and guided his logistical planning. For them and their colleagues it might be worthwhile to read or reread the “novel” as blue print for further violence.