His approval rating is down to 35%, while 43% want impeachment proceedings to begin. He responds by turning more and more to his base, that 35%. I suspect he believes that the reason the 43% is bigger than his 35% is because it’s composed in large part of Californians and illegal aliens, seriously, he probably thinks that, and that there are more voters and real Americans in his base than not. These polls are MSM lies, fake news, he says, or FAKE NEWS!!!! It’s obvious following his tweets that he gets nearly all of his news from Drudge and Breitbart and their ilk, and that is his reality, and these poll numbers mean nothing. His tweets and policies and appointments will get more and more strident and offensive, and he’ll do more of his Trump Country rallies before crowds of fanatical supporters who perceive things exactly as he does. One third of the country and our president live in an internet reality where facts are only what they care to believe, no one is there to counter them in their beliefs, and Trump is winning victory after resounding victory, the most successful president ever. Sad.
Category Archives: Alt Right
Only tweets will tell
Unless you actually wander through the bizarre social media world of Trump supporters, you will really have no idea just how out there and paranoid their perception of reality is. I was amazed to see that they are becoming increasingly convinced that the London mayor Sadiq Khan has ties to ISIS, the implication being that he was somehow behind the terror attacks. There’s no proof of this whatsoever, of course, but it was a story in Breitbart, which means it must be true. Furthermore, as Trump, like his core followers, gets most of his news from Breitbart, does he think that the mayor of London is affiliated with ISIS? Only tweets will tell.
Roger Stone, 420
Admittedly, mix tapes is way cooler than compilation tapes. Then again, pot wasn’t as strong then and we could say compilation without falling down. Four syllables, that is definitely a two hitter word. Though after the second drag off the Nixon bong (Nixon and tapes, it’s a natural) you’ll forget what the next two syllables were. Stuck at compil. French. Qu’est-ce que c’est? How do you tell a Parisian supermodel you got lost half way through the word compilation? So mix works. Mix tapes. Harsh, sure, without the mellow stoned sibilant halfway through the ashun in compilation, that whispered shhhhh, though you could go faux french and call mix tapes mees tapes. As in Ed Meese. Shhhhh I say again, and a supermodel thinks I mean her. She puts a long delicate finger to her lips and says shhhhh. Of course, back in the day cassette was too long to type if you were stoned so we used to type K7. Two key strokes. Just a one hitter, that. And French again. Ka sept, with a silent p. Ka set. Cassette. First time I saw that I thought it was kay seven. Luckily I didn’t say it out loud, and the Parisian supermodels I was hanging with never knew. They were too busy vogueing anyway. Just about then Lee Atwater showed up with a bag of blues 8 tracks, some Freedom Fries and a shitload of cocaine. What’s with all the Pink Floyd, he bitched. I hit on the Nixon bong again. You don’t like Floyd? It was my Pink Floyd meese tape. I exhaled a blue cloud and a single note repeated, over and over. That same single note. Ninety minutes of Echoes. I must have been high.
Roger Stone’s Happy 420 tweet
A mere piece of paper
My right to speak, worship and defend myself do not come from a piece of paper, as glorious as the Bill of Rights is.
They come from God.— Kurt Schlichter on Twitter (@KurtSchlichter) March 6, 2017
We’ve got ourselves a genuine constitutional crisis when Trump supporters begin thinking of the Bill of Rights as a mere piece of paper. “Natural rights”, as they call them, trumps the constitution every time, or at least the amendments to. Kirk Schlichter is a senior columnist at Townhall.com and a Trump true believer, every word as gospel. He doesn’t seem the least bit religious in his daily deluge of tweets. Instead it seems an excuse to dispense with constitutional niceties when they conflict with Donald Trump. He’d disagree, I’m sure, quite colorfully, but that must be the impression that all but the true believers get from him. And as the Trump administration descends into chaos, Schlichter’s tweets have taken on a ferocious, humorless intensity, very militant, often offensive, jibing with Breitbart and hinting at the increasingly crazed talk of civil war you see on InfoWars. He’s an impressive writer for what he’s doing, taut and angry, with nearly a hundred thousand followers, old friends of mine among them. He’s a masterful propagandist on Twitter, and Twitter is the social media battlefield now. Trump made it so, and battle lines surge back and forth angrier and angrier by the day, by the hour, in huge numbers. Schlichter is in the thick of it, hurling himself into the breach like John Bell Hood at Antietam, matching every thrust with a counter thrust, every insult with a sharper insult, every attack on Trump with an attack on Obama or Hillary or the press or Sweden or anybody. Just keep attacking. It’s impressive.
But look at the war of words over the long term. This political struggle is turning into a generational battle, Baby Boomers vs Millennials, with GenXers in between. The Boomers have another ten years of dominance in Red States and red counties before age and disease start thinning their ranks. You can do extraordinary damage in a decade. Schlichter and a zillion other Schlichters could be complete Bannon acolytes by then. All those old fashioned Tea Party principles gone the way of Barry Goldwater, replaced with this scary new economic nationalism. Imagine the battle lines then, long since hardened into trenches and barbed wire. A lot can happen in ten years. The country descended from peace into fanaticism and war in the ten year span from 1850 to 1860. You couldn’t have seen 1860 coming in 1850, and could scarcely have remembered 1850 in 1860. And all they had then was telegraphs. But telegraphy had shortened the news cycle from weeks to a couple days in that ten year span. The sheer velocity of news upped the intensity to crackling levels and the killing began. John Brown launched his raid because he knew that telegraphy gave him the possibility of starting a revolution overnight. He didn’t. But he certainly rushed the southern states headlong into secession.
So do I see a civil war happening again? No, I adamantly do not. It’s a comparison you hear more and more, however, and will hear even more so as the politics gets fiercer. But the differences in 1860 were much more stark, two civilizations existing under one constitution, each hating the other. We are nowhere near that now. We never will be. That was decided for us way back in 1865. Nor will we have revolution, that possibility ended with the election of FDR back in 1932. Besides, as Trump’s boomers fade from the scene everything will mellow out nicely. This is a scarily intense interregnum, the most conservative generation since the 1920’s–the baby boomers–wielding their maximum ballot box power just as their economic security plunges to an all time low. Thus the stark differences that have sundered the county now, these two huge camps of Americans who can’t agree on almost anything, even besmirching the Super Bowl with crazy political talk, and people talking idiotically of guns and revolution and civil war. All the time technology changes the news in minutes. Our never ending, never even slowing down news cycle, frantic as the electrons its made from, gushing with updates and breaking stories arriving by the second. The potential for vast and sudden change seems in there. It’s a perfect medium for extremism. I read David Duke’s vicious screes supporting Trump and hating Jews and realize that thirty three thousand people see those every time he pushes the enter button. For a second I get nearly metaphysical, wondering what all this means.
Well, it mean this is going to be a helluva fight, for one thing, and that 2018 is all important. So vote. If you love your Bill of Rights and constitution, you must vote. Resisting is all well and good, but voting wins.
Kurt Schlichter with what looks like a damn fine cigar.
Donald Trump does not by any means represent the will of the majority
The New York Times has projected that once the California, Washington, Oregon and Colorado mail-in and provisional votes are all tallied, which could be a month off in California (where I believe about 5 million votes remain uncounted, breaking for Hillary about 2 to 1), that Hillary Clinton’s margin in the popular vote will be over 1% of the total. The total will probably be over 130 million (maybe 132 million), which means Hillary’s minimum total should be 1.3 million more votes than Trump, perhaps even 1.5 million. Maybe even more. That would be three times more than Gore’s margin over Bush in 2000. It would be about as many votes as Carter had over Ford in 1976, as well as being upwards of three times as many votes as Nixon had over Humphrey in 1968, and a dozen times more votes than JFK had over Nixon in 1968. It would also be equal to Trump’s combined margin over Hillary in the battleground states.
This may seem arcane now, but in a couple months as the Trump Administration gets set to launch their revolution (their term) on the country, Hillary’s margin could be a powerful argument, weapon and call to resistance on the part of those of us who did not vote for him. We will be the majority, and not a small majority. The two previous elections that resulted in revolutionary change were FDR in 1932, where his margin was 14%, and Ronald Reagan in 1980, where he had just under ten percent. Trump will have a -1.5%, that is a negative 1.5% margin. (Obama, in contrast, came in with a more than 7% margin in the popular vote.) Trump will be attempting, in true revolutionary style, to launch a nationwide revolution that changes everything from a minority position. In a democracy, where majority rule is the fundamental concept, there can’t be anything more wrong. This does not mean that there is anything we can do constitutionally to block him, aside from our rights of free speech and assembly. When the GOP retained the Senate we lost our checks and balances. But it does give a moral argument with which we can raise holy hell. Which is all we have going for us right now.
So never forget that Trump does not by any means represent the will of the majority. America has not spoken. The electoral college has spoken. He was just put in power by that archaic constitutional device designed to protect the country from the tyranny of the majority. They feared the French Revolution back then. Yet that very electoral college has delivered the country over to revolutionaries now…one of those ironies the Founding Fathers never considered, apparently. We may be screwed, but we have something to build our resistance upon–that there are more of us than there are of them, and they got into power because of a rigged system.
That’s not exactly good news, but it’s something.
This was not 1980
This was not 1980. There was not a landslide. Indeed, when the votes are finally tallied in a couple weeks, Clinton will have a margin in the popular vote that could reach two million votes. Most people did not vote for Trump. But enough did in the right states that enabled Trump to win the electoral college. But American did not change like it did in 1980. There is no national mandate for Trump’s vicious, racist ideology. This was the electoral college equivalent of a coup d’etat. So what do you do? You resist. You resist in every way possible, you fight him at every step, until the next election. Remember, this scumbag declared war on the rest of us. He and his followers treated it like war. They screamed bloody threats, waved guns, and promised to put us in jail. His movement–and he loves calling it that, his movement–is probably the most fascist thing we have seen in this country since the nazi-infiltrated German-American Bund in the 1930’s. Trump and his movement have some really freaky tie ins to the far right movements in Europe, to the creepy insane Alt Right in this country, and most bizarrely of all is affiliated with the kleptocratic regime of Vladimir Putin. The most dangerous right wing ideologues in this country will be working in his Administration. There has never been such a threat to American democracy as the presidency of Donald Trump. We can’t afford to lighten up on them for a minute. We are like the French when they suddenly found themselves conquered by the Nazis in 1940. Some collaborated. Some hid and pretended it wasn’t happening. And some joined with others and resisted. It’s your choice.
I think the paradigm shifted when nobody was looking.
This was the year that the far left and the alt right began merging. Julian Assange and Alex Jones are now on the same side. The outer fringe of the Bernie Sanders movement mixed with the Alt Right too. And Trump is still reaching out to Bernie voters, convinced he believes what they believe. The mainstream media has missed nearly all of this, being that they do almost all of their social networking on Twitter, while this strange new paranoid blend is strictly Facebook. Strange it is, too, ideologically completely mystifying and free of the entire left vs right spectrum that has been in place for over a century. This is all new, and it will only get weirder and weirder. Thus, Julian Assange is convinced that Hillary intends to kill him with a drone strike….news he probably saw first somewhere in the Breitbart universe, and believed completely.
This is the first time you have ever had the Far Left and Far Right come together. It is the beginning of new ideologies. The internet has released us from conventional political philosophies and reality, and allowed us to believe anything we want. Paranoia reigns supreme in this new digital universe, as paranoia always does in new places. Millions of years of evolution as prey make us fearful in unexplored territory. There are predators everywhere, enemies, unseen threats, and they are watching us, waiting to pounce. We interact online with bared teeth the way we never do in person. It is all so high tech yet all so primordially fearful and hostile. It will take a long time for calm to prevail on the internet, long, long, long past our lifetimes. We will have to evolve into creatures able to think and act calmly online. We are hardwired to be hostile and paranoid there. It is our default position. As politics is subsumed by the internet, it can only get mean and scary. There’s nothing to keep it from getting meaner and scarier. 2016 might be only a taste. 2020 could get really weird.
Brick's Politics 