Hate Rally

White supremacists were confronted by counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. A vehicle plowed into the crowd of counterprotesters and killed one person with 19 others injured. Two police officers died in a helicopter crash. Our supposed leader unhelpfully condemned "many sides" for the violence.

Words about "coming together as Americans" ring hollow in a political climate that feeds off of anger. Erin Keane interviews Jared Yates Sexton who gives his account of the election in
The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage. 

Sexton broke onto the national stage when a series of his tweets from a [von Clownstick] rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on June 14, 2016, went viral. Because he was sitting in the stands, not in the media bullpen, he could hear what [von Clownstick's] supporters were really saying in the company of their peers: racial slurs, gay slurs, vulgarities about Hillary Clinton, all delivered with gusto and acceptance.

Sexton describes how campaign events became outlets for hatred.

Inside the aircraft carrier they were hanging on every word. It was obvious they were angry at any protestors who were there. Then afterwards they actually were threatening other protestors. They were talking about getting their guns and shooting them.

Then by the time I went to the rally in June, it wasn’t a surprise anymore. I think it had the beginnings of what you would call a movement and you had these people in the same space who knew that they were now safe to say [out loud] the things that they might have said [to themselves] in the past, the things that they thought the culture sort of frowned on.

Political discourse doesn't matter at all--it's who you identify with.

If you are a Patriots fan and you’re pissing off Colts fans, you don’t care if Tom Brady cheated. You’re just happy the Colts fans are miserable. What you’re actually doing is you’re elevating yourself via your fanhood and living through these idols. It doesn’t matter [to a fan] if [von Clownstick] lies — if he pisses off people, [the fans] win.

Update (August 14):  It took two days for Fuckface von Clownstick to condemn hate groups, but less than an hour to criticize Kenneth Frazier for resigning in protest from the American Manufacturing Council.

Bob Cesca gives a blistering take-down of the original comments:

In other words, the white supremacist who rammed his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters, killing Heyer and injuring 19 others, is on the same level as the counter-protesters who didn’t kill or severely injure anyone that day. This according to your president, the ironically dubbed “leader of the free world.” The president’s “many sides” line also appeared to link the deadly Charlottesville terrorist attack with Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and other activists who, again, haven’t engaged in any acts of terror whatsoever nor are linked in any way to the Holocaust and other atrocities of World War II.

Making matters worse, the president refused to condemn the Nazis and white supremacists who assembled in the name of defending, in this case violently, the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville and — perhaps more importantly for them — expressing their perceived grievances in an age of broadening equality and civil rights. Again, it’s worth repeating: The president refused to condemn Nazis — actual, self-identified neo-Nazis with their snappy World War II German cosplayer regalia, their matching Nazi helmets, their khaki slacks and their combat boots.

[Von Clownstick] was more than happy to attack his own attorney general and his own party’s Senate leader. He condemned war hero John McCain. He repeatedly condemned the judges of the Ninth Circuit. Hell, [Fuckface] condemned both “Saturday Night Live” and Nordstrom. But he’s afraid to condemn despots like Putin or the Nazis who attacked American citizens in Charlottesville.

We know exactly why [von Clownstick] refused to say what so many other prominent Republicans and Democrats said in response. We know that [he] performs exclusively to his base. No one else matters beyond those represented best by his googly-eyed rally-attending disciples. These are people who largely do not identify as racists or Nazis, but who seem perfectly comfortable sticking it to perceived outsiders as well as the liberal benefactors of those “others.” We know that [Fuckface] has no problem with relentlessly blasting his enemies, yet neo-Nazis and white supremacists are somehow off limits.

It is worth trying to understand the obstacles to overcoming racism. Richard Moser quotes Bob Dylan ("You got more than the blacks, don't complain") and borrows the concept of a "psychic wage" from W.E.B Dubois.

This psychic wage is collected, in part, by an imaginary connection with whites of high status. White privilege creates vertical solidarity that connects working class whites to the power and glory of the rich, strong, and celebrated white elites, even though our overall political and economic interests are shared by working class people of color. White workers are exploited by the boss and sent to die in their wars daily. Our privilege gives us the delusion that we are not who we truly are.

[I]t is the privileges whites have that disrupt horizontal solidarity, but when those bribes are eroded, even partially, by debt, poverty, the long term decline of wages, poor health, drug addiction, and hopelessness, their hypnotic power weakens. Young whites in particular have come to see the transparent truth that the system is rigged against them, and perhaps above all, that the scientific forecast of life on our planet is so poisoned and precarious that no amount of privilege will save them.

These changes in consciousness are signs that we might again cross into revolutionary territory. The unending recession of 2008 has forced whites to choose. Cling ever harder to the psychological wage, hate, and white supremacy, or join the movements toward social reform, revolution, resistance, and love.

In a broader sense, it is the corporate power that is creating the crisis in privilege as a form of social control. If the corporate state can no longer allow any meaningful improvements in the lives of everyday people — and impose only austerity and growing poverty — we can expect that both the Democrats and Republicans will increasingly turn to the psychological wage as the remaining form of compensation, bribe and appeal.

Update (August 15):  A third statement from the "leader of the free world":

I think there’s blame on both sides … You also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. 

What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, the alt-right?. . . Do they have any problem? I think they do.

Update (August 16):  Heather Digby Parton sums up where we're at as a nation.

His obtuse reaction to Charlottesville is really just the latest in a long string of behaviors that should have made him unelectable — but that actually helped him win.

Update (August 17):  There seems to be a contrast in reaction to the attack in Charlottesville versus attacks in Spain.

In a rambling press conference Tuesday, [von Clownstick] defended his initial statement, arguing he needed to get “the facts” before making more definitive remarks against racist groups.

But [von Clownstick] has been quick to cite “radical Islamic terrorism” for attacks in the past.

His rhetoric toward “radical Islam” is often violent and sweeping, unlike his comments on the white supremacist and racist groups who gathered for the rally in Charlottesville, which [von Clownstick] claimed had some “fine people.”

Update (August 18):  Did the "alt-right" overplay their hand with that rally? And will the Republican civil war escalate? Allies turn into enemies. Who knows what could happen?

Update (August 19):  Over 150 years since the Civil War ended, another flare-up over Confederate memorials brings Andrew O'Hehir to recall the words of President Grant.

Grant’s moral vision was clear enough. He saw the slaveholding aristocracy that drove the South into secession as an indefensible criminal regime, rooted in treason and an immoral economy where human beings were “bought and sold like cattle.”

[He] perceived the slave-owning South as “an enemy with whom we could not make a peace. We had to destroy him. No convention, no treaty was possible. Only destruction.”

Somehow, this time, history has been rewritten by the losers.

White America’s strange romance with the supposedly tragic and supposedly noble “lost cause” of the Confederacy is so tangled and so contradictory that it can likely never be unsnarled. Sometimes the Rebel battle flag and the bronze generals on horseback stand for badass rebellion and hell-raisin’. Sometimes they stand for a genteel and deliberately vague conception of “heritage and history,” all too perfectly captured in the noxious and seductive “Gone With the Wind,” a film that overwrote actual history for several generations of white Americans. Sometimes they stand for overt and vicious racism.

And rewritten in a way only possible in the United States.

I ... encountered a beach towel for sale in a Delaware resort town: The Rebel flag, emblazoned with a giant marijuana leaf at its center. I’m not even sure that’s a mixed signal so much as an eloquent statement of American bewilderment: We’re white, we’re stoned and we ain’t apologizing for shit. We’re pissed off about something, but we’re not quite sure what it is and have no idea who to blame.

O'Hehir writes that American society has been "poisoned by its addiction to a perverse and suicidal myth".

By refusing to face the true legacy of slavery and its aftermath, and embracing an entire universe of “alternative facts” about the Civil War, the Confederacy and race relations, a large portion of white America has in effect enslaved itself to a false sense of history and a false racial consciousness. We can see the resulting confusion and dysfunction all around us: In the “diseases of despair” and self-defeating politics of the now-infamous white working class. In the appalling street theater of Charlottesville, a new low in our nation’s 21st-century decline. In the White House, whose current occupant, a person not much given to aesthetic contemplation, felt it necessary to wax rhapsodic on the subject of mediocre martial statuary.

Grant had respect for Lee, but clearly understood what mattered most.

"I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

Update (August 20):  He just can't shut the fuck up.

Protesters against the alt-right are now “anti-police agitators” to the president, apparently.

[I]n a common pattern, [von Clownstick] was faster to denounce the peaceful, anti-hate protest than the actual white supremacists and neo-Nazis who gathered in Boston Common for a “free speech rally.”

Update (August 22):  Conor Lynch warns against splintering on the left.

If it wasn’t already obvious, the past week should clear up any doubts about what the [von Clownstick] presidency represents. In contemporary America, the political party in power is not only led by an apologist for white supremacists but a president who has extensive ties to the racist “alt-right” movement .... The Charlottesville demonstrations and the subsequent fallout made it abundantly clear what is really at stake in American politics today. To quote early 20th-century revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg’s famous rallying cry: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.”

[Fuckface's] political ascent was only possible after 40 years of neoliberalism and unfettered corporate capitalism. The resurgence of white supremacy must be stomped out completely, but only a true left-wing movement that emphasizes class politics and structural reform can truly foil the advance of barbarism. Perhaps it is time for liberals to join anti-fascists on the streets and show solidarity.

Update (August 26):  Timothy Snyder says that "both sides" language makes it sound like two groups of extremists are battling each other.

[W]e’re in a situation where the president will exploit something like this, where he suggests that there is no difference between Nazis and those who oppose them. A few years down the line, we’ll look back at this as a moment where we failed but then later we rallied. This is not the Reichstag Fire — the Reichstag Fire incident would be some act of terrorism where [von Clownstick] does not make evil something relative, but where he uses it as an occasion to suspend basic civil rights. That has not happened yet. Because when there is another incident, we know that the president could say, “Look, that was the ‘alt-left.’ Therefore we have to crackdown on the ‘opposition'” — which is most of the politically active population in the United States. That’s a very drastic position at the end.

Update (August 28):  Endorsing racism is one priority, pissing off liberals is also a motivation. Bob Cesca:

The close proximity between [von Clownstick's] horrendous comments about the Nazi terrorist attack in Charlottesville and the pardoning of Arpaio isn’t mere coincidence. I’d wager that [Fuckface] made the decision to pardon the controversial Phoenix sheriff as payback against his political opponents for criticizing [his] remarks in which he appeared to sympathize with the white supremacists, KKK members and neo-Nazis who gathered in Charlottesville.

It's all part of a pattern where hate ("trolling") seems to be the only point.

Making decisions based on whether they will trigger “liberal tears” is nothing more than political road rage, ignoring everything else on the freeway including the oncoming tractor-trailer with the name “Mueller” printed on the side. Rewinding back to the attempt to repeal Obamacare, for example, [von Clownstick's] approach on this front has only managed to isolate him from his former Republican allies on the Hill, including the Senate majority leader, while utterly burying the repeal-and-replace process, likely forever. Pursuing a policy based on scolding Obama supporters turned out horribly for [Fuckface]. Frankly, I’m not sure why Schlichter and the others are so stoked about this tactic, given how [von Clownstick] has botched, bungled and failed virtually everything he has touched.

Then again, if trolling the anti-[Fuckface] coalition is the entire point of supporting the president — and it seems more and more like it is — then fine. If the full extent of the [von Clownstick] presidential legacy is nothing more than being the nation’s first troll president, I can live with that, especially if it continues to sabotage the GOP’s legislative priorities as well as significantly roadblocking [Fuckface's] longevity as chief executive.

Update (September 15):  Even black Republicans can't get through.

[Senator Tim] Scott made it clear that his motive for requesting the meeting was to explain to [von Clownstick] that there was no equivalence to the two sides in Charlottesville, saying, “There’s no way to find equilibrium when you have three centuries of history versus the situation that’s happening today.”

“Antifa is bad and should be condemned, yes, but the KKK has been killing and tormenting black Americans for centuries. There is no realistic comparison. Period.”

When asked after the meeting whether the president expressed regret over his post-Charlottesville comments, Scott displayed a “pained expression,” the New York Times reported, and said that [Fuckface] “certainly tried to explain what he was trying to convey.”

Update (October 8):  A small group of white supremacists returned to Charlottesville.

Update (October 19):  It's good to know the Nazis remain unpopular.

Thousands of people turned out on Thursday at the University of Florida to protest an afternoon speech by a prominent white supremacist, making their message clear: Richard Spencer, and those like him, are not welcome.

Update (October 29):  A rally in Tennessee was met with protesters and a second rally was cancelled.

Update (October 31):  Senator Tim Scott has to teach another white man about slavery.

We need to stop relitigating and referencing the Civil War as if there was some moral conundrum. There was no compromise to make – only a choice between continuing slavery and ending it. We need to move forward together, instead of letting the divisions of the past continue to force us apart.

Update (March 6, 2018):  Michael Edison Hayden has some good news.

The white supremacist, alt-right movement that rose during the presidential campaign of [Fuckface von Clownstick] appears to be splintering.

[K]ey figures in the movement [have] lashed out at one another in a public way, accusing each other in heated terms of sabotaging their efforts to organize.

The chaos, defection and infighting shows a political movement mired in turmoil seven and a half months after appearing united at the deadly Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia.