I’ll brook no more caviling from apologists for President Gag. I’m not referring, necessarily, to those who voted for the bum but, you know, those who say when we point out his ties to racists, white supremacists, nativists, and neo-nazis that we’re being overdramatic. They love to cite Godwin’s Law to minimize this argument.
Well too bad, you all. Mike Godwin himself has come out and said, “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis.” He was referring, in a Facebook post, to the punks and pimps who started all the trouble in Charlottesville over the weekend. Punks and pimps, BTW, who love Li’l Duce to pieces and are convinced he loves them back.
From this vantage point, I’ll suggest their passion is not unrequited. What more proof do you need? Other than, that is, P. Gag’s very own words both on the campaign trail and in the White House. Oh, and his appointments and executive orders, as well as his directives to his Justice Department to lay off far right loon groups and quit enforcing civil rights regulations.
Anyway, here’s a fellow named Michael German, a former FBI agent who infiltrated neo-nazi groups and is now a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice of New York University. He was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition today about the state of far-right racist groups in this holy land today. Here’s a snippet from the chat:
GERMAN: The change that we’ve seen is there has been some state sanctioning of these ideas and of these political goals.
ME host DAVID GREEN: “State sanctioning” — I want to be really careful what you mean by that.
GERMAN: Well, certainly during the Trump campaign, what had been a normal sort of dog-whistle to racists and white supremacists and other of these far right ideologies that was a normalk part of far right…, not even far right, right wing populism and a lot of conservatives would do it, what Donald Trump did was throw away the dog whistle and pick up a bullhorn and make very clear to these groups that he was going to take anti-Muslim positions, that he was going to take anti-Latino positions, that he was going to characterize security issues as protecting ‘his community’ from other American communities.
GREEN: So, you see those messaging, whatever it is, as causing some of these people to feel like they can come out of the shadows.”
GERMAN: Right. It legitimized these views, you know, that many more people could come forward and express them and feeling…, and, frankly, it did become part of our mainstream political discourse.
This, again, is a former FBI man. The Bureau is not known for elevating wild-eyed radicals through its ranks. It wouldn’t be unfair to say a left-leaning agent would be weaned out of the force in time or, at the very least, isolated socially and stymied in her/his efforts to advance. FBI people generally are authority-loving, president-obeying, stay-the-course, good boys and girls.
And even this one knows that among President Gag’s key constituencies are the aforementioned punks and pimps.
If you think this argument is overdramatic, well, you’re wrong.
▼
Tuning In & Clicking
Got a double whammy coming at you this week. Thursday, my guest on Big Talk will be Kate Hess Pace, founder and director of the new Hoosier Action community empowerment organization. She came here after a successful seven-year stint as a community organizer in Minnesota’s Twin Cities and in four short months has turned HA into a force to be reckoned with.
That same day, my profile of her will run in the Limestone Post.
I’ll pester you on Thursday AM to tune in and/or click and then on Friday I’ll provide podcast and website links.
Next week on Big Talk, long-haul trucker Rob Chatlos, who’s running for US Congress from Indiana’s 9th District as an independent. Rob has a fascinating back story and I can’t wait to hear him tell it himself.
We’ll talk.
▲