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Tennessee GOP Show That Revenge Is Fascism's First Instinct
The Republican Party has devolved into an organized mob bent on revenge, because the people of America are rejecting their version of leadership and their abandonment of the principles of democracy.
Apr 07, 2023
Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives are furious and out for revenge. Two Black Democratic members and a Democratic woman had confronted them — and embarrassed them — over their unwillingness to do anything about the slaughter of Tennessee’s children in that state’s schools.
To punish them and teach women and other young men Black men — who might think of being too troublesome in the legislature — a lesson, the GOP ran a pathetic Kangaroo Court for the world to see. And got their revenge.
Jim Jordan and his buddies in the GOP are furious and out for revenge. Donald Trump is being held to account by a Black district attorney in New York City for falsifying business records to affect the outcome of an election and to avoid paying taxes and Jordan is attempting to intimidate the prosecutor’s office.
Ron DeSantis is furious and out for revenge. After the CEO of Disney publicly disagreed with the governor’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, DeSantis thought he could hurt the company, but they outfoxed him. Now he’s demanding an investigation to harass and bully the company.
Brett “Beerbong” Kavanaugh is furious and out for revenge. Several women pointed out his drunken sexual assaults when he was a teenager and he told the Senate:
“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups. This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades … and as we all know, in the political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.”
Donald Trump is furious and out for revenge. For the first time in his 76 years on this Earth, he’s being held to account for a small slice of his lifetime of criminal behavior, and being held to account by a Black man. He’s apparently trying as hard as he can to trigger another of his stochastic terrorist followers to threaten or assassinate the DA, the judge, and their families.
The Republican Party has devolved into an organized mob bent on revenge, because the people of America are rejecting their version of leadership and their abandonment of the principles of democracy. Facing increasing rejection by voters, they have turned to gerrymandering, threats, blocking the right to vote, and inciting violence.
Having failed at holding power through the democratic process, Republicans have turned instead to revenge tactics.
Revenge is violence.
Revenge as a political philosophy is rooted in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth and political power being used to destroy one’s enemies, or unjustified violence inflicted by the state under color of law.
But at its core, revenge is rooted in physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It’s war brought into politics and governance.
Vengeance like this has its own power and its own attraction. The media is drawn to it, making it attractive to Republicans as a way of bringing together their followers.
Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in revenge-fueled violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence.
And make no mistake: the GOP has become the party of revenge and political violence.
Democrats watch revenge threats of violence against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid; against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who Republican legislators declare — and try to put into law — are less than human or “aberrations” that must not be tolerated in a “free society.”
“It’s the exception,” the media notes, and moves on to the next story.
In fact, these displays of revenge-based violence and the willingness to use violence are Republican declarations. They are statements of purpose. They’re spoken and executed with pride.
They are assertions by Republicans and their followers that they are perfectly willing to exercise violence and its power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human lives, as they did against three police officers (and tried to kill others) on January 6th.
Republicans and their media lionize Kyle Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing two protestors. They celebrate police revenge against Black people with “thin blue line” flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the willingness to kill one’s political opponents.
They show up at protests heavily armed and wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, “Free helicopter rides for liberals.” Their leader said there are “very good people on both sides” after his followers — demanding revenge against Jews they say are trying to “replace” them with Black people — murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer.
Republicans running for office feature guns and imply threats to kill people for political revenge in their television and online advertising. Eric Greitens is just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie’s Christmas Card, but he’s just one of many members of Congress to pose their white children with deadly assault weapons.
These are all expressions of a political philosophy that is based in revenge.
When men like Rusty Bowers, Adam Kinsinger, and Brad Raffensperger — Republicans who dared stop Trump’s criminal attempts to steal the 2020 election — describe how they were and continue to be threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.
Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay dying: this kind of revenge-driven violence is devoid of compassion. It is evil.
Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about the embrace of revenge by the base of the Republican Party she leads, there was not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow conservatives like Liz Cheney now face, nor a word from Republican media other than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications about why they must seek revenge.
Because revenge is now their brand. They revel in it.
They boast of it in ways they sometimes claim are just hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of “Second Amendment solutions” to Democratic successes at the polls, or when Donald Trump sent his mob to hang Mike Pence in revenge for failing to flip the election to him.
Their followers know what they mean: these are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse revenge-based violence, and carry explicit threats.
Revenge is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of revenge against an “other” they claim have stolen from them or persecuted them.
Rightwing media revel in the language of revenge. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like “invaders” and “vermin” and “illegals” and demand revenge for the lost jobs, integrated schools and neighborhoods, and other insults they imagine.
To justify the violence at the heart of their movement, they also squeal a phony claim to victimhood: wealthy Republicans claim Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear gays are trying to groom their children. They pretend teachers are indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Revenge, they say, is their only option.
Over the past four decades, as this revenge-fueled movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists who invariably claim they’re rightfully seeking revenge.
Republicans justify their violence as necessary to get revenge against those they say have assaulted their faith, their families, and the “identity” of their homeland. They will tell you it’s the unfortunate last-ditch “necessity” provoked by the Democrats and dark-skinned or queer “others” who “threaten our way of life.”
In reality, revenge is not the fascist’s final, last-gasp option: it’s their first.
— It’s their most powerful recruiting tool, showing, as it does, their dominance and control of society and society’s institutions.
— It’s how they cow dissent.
— It’s the weapon that provokes action, and fascists are all about action.
— It creates chaos, and revenge needs chaos to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to replace.
The final cause to which fascist revenge is directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia: war of all against all. Every vengeful act is designed intentionally to bring society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly and vengefully kill their enemies — particularly people of color and “liberals” — in the streets of the nation.
It’s why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680: he told the world it was revenge for Waco and other “big government” violations of his rightwing world. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and left over 550 wounded, and the Boston Bomber. Revenge against Black people was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a supermarket, and revenge against Hispanics motivated the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people. Revenge against Jews enraged the Tree of Life synagogue shooter.
It’s the story line of the two best-selling books within this part of the modern Republican movement, Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with revenge-fueled mass slaughter leaving a nation of “pure” white Christian survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of brown and Jewish bodies.
Most Americans are not driven by revenge. It’s not how they think politics should work.
They’d just like a country that works for all of us, instead of just white people, the billionaire class, and giant, monopolistic corporations. Most Americans are sick of Republicans saturating our airwaves with their revenge fantasies, their revenge investigations, their revenge against voters, their revenge programming on hate-driven TV and radio.
Revenge is a poison, and it’s deeply embedded now in the political bloodstream of our nation because Republicans who haven’t gotten their way have proclaimed the political and social equivalent of revenge-fueled holy wars.
They showed up with revenge in their hearts to make right Trump’s loss on January 6th; they sought revenge for having to wear masks during the pandemic; they seek revenge on women, racial, and gender minorities who merely want equal rights and freedoms as citizens of the United States.
A 2003 study by University of Oklahoma psychology researcher Ryan P. Brown found a strong association between revenge and narcissism, a personality disorder that has become a defining characteristic of many Republican politicians, from Donald Trump to, apparently, Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Jim Jordan.
“As expected,” Brown noted, “people low in dispositional forgiveness were more vengeful than were people high in dispositional forgiveness, but particularly so among those high in narcissism; among those low in narcissism, forgiveness was less strongly related to vengeance. Thus, the most vengeful people were those who were both low in forgiveness and high in narcissism, independent of gender differences and healthy self-esteem.”
Republicans in Tennessee, preening for the cameras and high on their own white privilege self-righteousness, got their revenge yesterday. They bullied and humiliated their Democratic colleagues who were acting on behalf of that state’s schoolchildren, and expelled two “uppity” Black members.
Now, hopefully, America sees how disgusting and pathetic revenge is when compared to governing on behalf of the people, instead of just the gun industry and the morbidly rich.
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Not One Single Republican Votes for Probe of Neo-Nazis in US Military and Police
Zero House Republicans supported a measure requiring the Pentagon and federal law enforcement agencies to publish a report on countering white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in their ranks.
Jul 14, 2022
Zero House Republicans on Wednesday supported a measure requiring the Pentagon and federal law enforcement agencies to publish a report on countering white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in their ranks.
Rep. Brad Schneider's (D-Ill.) amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2023 directing the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Defense "to publish a report that analyzes and sets out strategies to combat white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies" passed in a party-line 218-208 vote.
Among present lawmakers, Democrats were unified in support and Republicans in opposition. Reps. Theodore Deutch (D-Fla.), Kevin Brady (R-Texas), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) did not vote.
The House is expected to pass the full NDAA this week, after which it will conference with the Senate, where amendments to the annual military spending bill could be struck down.
Schneider's proposal requests "figures on the number of people who were discharged from uniformed services or law enforcement because of situations involving white supremacy and neo-Nazi activity," The Hillreported. It also calls for "information on how the agency leaders responded to 'planned or effectuated incidents' connected to white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology."
The report--to be published no more than 180 days after enactment of the NDAA and every six months thereafter--would be submitted to congressional committees, and unclassified sections would be made public.
In a House floor speech on Wednesday, Schneider said that the U.S. is experiencing a rise in domestic terrorism, pointing to the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a right-wing, anti-Semitic gunman, and the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was killed when a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of progressive counter-protesters.
In a 2020 report titled Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement, the Brennan Center for Justice wrote that "the government's response to known connections of law enforcement officers to violent racist and militant groups has been strikingly insufficient."
Last year, a House Committee on Veterans' Affairs hearing on "Violent Domestic Extremist Groups and the Recruitment of Veterans" highlighted the dangers of far-right extremism among veterans and active-duty military personnel.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the percentage of all domestic terrorist incidents linked to active-duty military personnel and reservists increased in 2020 to 6.4%, up from 1.5% in 2019 and 0% in 2018.
Schneider cited a May presentation from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, titled "The Insider Threat and Extremist Activity Within the DOD," which detailed cases of domestic terrorism connected to members of the U.S. military.
"Such behavior, such extremism is a threat to us in all segments of society," Schneider said during debate. "There is no reason to believe that our military is any different."
"These are exceptions, they are rare," he added, "but we must do everything we can to identify them and to thwart them before risks become a reality."
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Rise of Fascism Feeding Off a Meaner, More Violent United States
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence.
Jun 24, 2022
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
-Benito Mussolini
"Have you noticed that people are getting meaner?" the villain asks in a Paramount+ promo for their new show Evil.
"What does it mean?" asks the "nice" character.
"It means," says the evil character with a note of triumph in her voice, "that your side is losing."
And here we are. The lede of an above-the-fold story in yesterday's Washington Post lays it out:
"In the past 24 hours, there has been an uptick in the number of violent threats against lawmakers on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and all lawmakers on the committee are likely to receive a security detail..."
We need to discuss the violence and threats of violence now endemic to the GOP, because they signal a hopefully reversible--but possibly terminal--slide into fascism.
Fascism is violence.
Its philosophy is rooted in violence: the domination of the many by a few, whether the main instrument of that domination is personal physical violence, the violence of great wealth or political power being used to destroy one's enemies, or unjustified violence inflicted by the state under color of law.
But at its core, fascism is rooted in physical violence, intimidation, and murder. It's war brought into politics and governance.
Violence like this has its own power and its own attraction.
The media is drawn to it, making it the most powerful recruiting tool a fascist movement has.
Insecure, frightened men (and the occasional woman) participating in fascist violence find a sense of agency, of individual power and meaning, a sort of orgasmic release from a life of ordinariness and political impotence.
And make no mistake: the GOP has become the party of political violence.
Democrats treat the violence associated with today's Republican Party as if it were coming from outliers, as if it's "a few bad apples," as if it's simply a troublesome weirdness on the extreme periphery of the conservative movement.
We see this in their response to the violence of January 6th, to the threats of violence directed at members of the January 6th Committee who are now getting security details, and to the frequent but scattershot violence that erupts across the country almost daily.
Democrats watch threats of violence against school board members; against nurses and hospitals treating Covid; against abortion providers; against racial minorities and queer people who Republican legislators declare--and try to put into law--are less than human or "aberrations" that must not be tolerated in a "free society."
The media continues to largely ignore those frequent moments when fascist-infiltrated police--the only group within our society who are legally authorized to use violence without consequence--overlook or overtly encourage the violence that breaks out when Americans dare stand up to fascist militias.
\u201cProud Boys stormed the Pine Valley Public Library in Wilmington, North Carolina. I did some research from people who witnessed things on the ground and took pictures, and it would seem that not only was the Sheriff's office ineffective - they ESCORTED the proud boys to the room!\u201d— Erin Reed (@Erin Reed) 1655915559
"It's the exception," the media notes, and moves on to the next story.
In fact, these displays of violence and the willingness to use violence are declarations. They are statements of purpose. They're spoken and executed with pride.
They are assertions by fascists that they intend to exercise violence and its power up to and including the ultimate: the power to take human life.
Republicans and their media lionize Kyle Rittenhouse for showing up at a Black Lives Matter protest and killing two protestors. They celebrate police violence with "thin blue line" flags, and wave the all-black US flag that signifies the willingness to kill one's political opponents.
They show up at protests heavily armed and wearing tee-shirts evoking General Pinochet with the slogan, "Free helicopter rides for liberals." Their leader said there are "very good people on both sides" after his fascists murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer.
Republicans running for office feature guns or imply threats to kill people in their television and online advertising. Eric Greitens is just the latest in a long list of GOP shooters glorifying assault weapons and implying political violence. This is Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie's Christmas Card:
\u201cMerry Christmas! \ud83c\udf84 \nps. Santa, please bring ammo. \ud83c\udf81\u201d— Thomas Massie (@Thomas Massie) 1638642123
These are all expressions of fascism.
When men like Rusty Bowers and Brad Raffensperger--who dared stop Trump's criminal attempts to steal the 2020 election--describe how they were and continue to be threatened with violence, elected Republicans fall silent.
Arizona House Speaker Bowers endured violent threats outside his home through night after night as his daughter lay dying: this kind of violence is devoid of compassion. It is evil.
Not a word from Ronna Romney McDaniel about the embrace of violence by the base of the Republican Party she leads, not a word from congressional Republicans about the violence their own fellow conservatives now face, not a word from Republican media other than to cynically mouth phony excuses and justifications.
Because violence is now their brand. They revel in it.
They boast of it in ways that are often misinterpreted as either hyperbole or jokes, like when Sharron Angle (and others) warned of "Second Amendment solutions" to Democratic efforts, or when Donald Trump said he could murder someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected.
Their fascist followers know better: these are proud statements of their willingness to use or endorse violence, and carry explicit threats.
Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"[T]he propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.
"The Nazis 'were convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,' ... and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.
"The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet 'deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean, but it is very clever.'"
When a nation goes fascist, it happens quickly. It takes people by surprise.
In 1919, Benito Mussolini started out with 300 armed volunteers, his Blackshirts. They began by terrorizing gay men, striking union members, and socialists; newspaper reports of their violence, beatings, and the occasional murder swept across Italy.
Over the next three years Mussolini's Blackshirt militia burgeoned to over 20,000 men, so when, on the last day of October 1922, he directly confronted King Victor Emmanuel III with the threat of violence, the king gave in, dissolved the government, and appointed Mussolini Prime Minister of Italy.
No campaign, no election, just three years of unrelenting violence and the threat of more violence.
Hitler rose to power on the wings of violence as well, first in the Beer Hall Putsch and later, when he became Chancellor, through his volunteer militia the Brownshirts terrorizing gays, Jews, and union members. Paul von Hindenburg thought Hitler would set aside the violence, as promised, if he was given the power he demanded. Hindenburg didn't understand fascism.
Violence is the cardinal characteristic, the logo, the brand identity of fascism. Every fascist movement in history has lifted itself to power on the scaffold of violence. And then continues to rule with violence.
Fascist media revel in the language of violence. They dehumanize the victims of their violence with words like "invaders" and "vermin" and "illegals."
To justify the violence at the heart of their movement, they squeal a phony claim to victimhood: They think Democrats are trying to take their tax dollars. They fear gays are trying to groom their children. They believe teachers are indoctrinating their youth in socialism. Violence, they say, is their only option.
Over the past two decades, as this fascist movement has arisen in America and taken over the GOP, more than three-quarters of all politically motivated murders have been committed by rightwing often-Republican-aligned terrorists.
Terrorism is fascism. Isis and Al-Qaeda are fascist organizations, just like the various militias that attacked our Capitol on January 6th and today stalk our streets from the backs of pickup trucks while brandishing assault weapons.
For the Republicans in Congress, this is not a problem until violence is threatened against one of their own; when a lone mentally ill man calls police to confess he's hallucinating voices telling him to kill Brett Kavanaugh, legislation is passed within days to protect the Court's justices.
Two years earlier, when "men's rights" advocate Roy Den Hollander murdered the 20-year-old son of Judge Esther Salas and was carrying detailed plans to kill Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor next, Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked legislation in the Senate to provide federal judges with that protection.
Not even one Republican objected to Paul's obstruction, and Mitch McConnell let it stand. Violence is their brand.
When violence is threatened against the few remaining non-fascist Republicans, theoretically members of their own tribe, that's just fine with the "base voter" fascists who now control the levers of power in the party. Just ask any of the Republicans who have testified before the January 6th Committee or who voted to impeach Trump.
Fascists justify their violence as necessary to protect their faith, their families, and the "identity" of their homeland. They will tell you it's the unfortunate last-ditch "necessity" provoked by the "others" who "threaten our way of life."
In reality, violence is not the fascist's final, last-gasp option: it's their first.
- It's their most powerful recruiting tool, showing, as it does, their dominance of society and society's institutions.
- It's how they cow dissent.
- It's the weapon that provokes action, and fascists are all about action.
- It creates chaos, and fascism needs chaos to tear down the existing structures of governance and law that they intend to replace.
The final cause to which fascist violence is directed is what Jefferson (and Hobbes) called bellum omnium in omnia: war of all against all. Every murderous act is designed intentionally to bring society closer to breakdown, so the fascists can openly kill their enemies--particularly people of color and "liberals"--in the streets of the nation.
It's why Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring another 680. It appears to be what motivated both the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and the Boston Bomber. It was claimed by the Buffalo killer of 20 people in a supermarket, and the 2019 El Paso shooter who murdered 23 people.
It's the story line of the two best-selling books within the militia movement, Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries. Each ends with mass slaughter leaving a nation of "pure" white Christian survivors, most holding well-used assault rifles as they stand atop piles of bodies.
Hannah Arendt noted in her 1969 essay "Reflections on Violence":
"[T]he danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end.
"If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely.
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently demanded that Republicans "take back their party." So far, they're not listening.
Every day that Republicans refuse to seize and root out the fascist violence now associated with their party is another day closer to a dystopia like the one through which Hannah Arendt lived.
It can happen here.
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