Trump’s hysteria-creating message begins, “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem,” and it ends with this appeal: “We’re calling on YOU to make a public statements and add your name to stand with President Trump against ANTIFA.”
No problem for it seems that with the exception of brief coverage in Mother Jones of street gang bullying and payback (August 29, 2017), “ANTIFA” may be more of a computer-distributed idea taken up chaotically by actors inclined to “play” into their roles for a moment of political action without creating an organization. The “enemy” Trump points to — and wants you to join him in fighting — may have at best a (so far) chimeric existence. On the anti-organization organization concept that isn’t an organization 🙂 but has the Administration’s attention as at least a figment of its imagination substantial enough to promote into a quick two-minutes hate — or a sign-up with the Trump team –>
— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) June 18, 2020
When Trump’s Presidency stepped off with broadsides against the “Fake News!” and proceeded to tear down key missions and personalities in every quietly accepted or admired national institution, he laid the groundwork for his Administration’s own discredit as well as the inspiration for a new spectrum of resistance to authoritarian behaviors and claims. The earlier spectacle of impeachment and the sight of Trump associates being marched off to jail as felons could not have helped in that regard. This latest brouhaha may well cement the impression of an Administration trying mightily to create its own reality to sell to a perhaps confused faithful who believe they have been fighting “globalists”, “libtards”, and “socialists” that actually exist in the manner described to them.
“We are going to destroy each other and this country based on raw emotion, public opinion, media distortion, fake news, false narratives and unverified video and allegations.”
Disciplined observation with integrity accompanied by empathy, logic, and reason may be more difficult than casually imagined, but those are the best tools we have for defining issues and answering with appropriate and progressive policy.
The Stanford philosophizing referenced above may not lead to the most cogent or helpful of references for approaching legal or policy issues, but for those two regions, any may start with the idea that mere perception is not reality, and it is generally good to investigate how things really work when on the way to making decisions or plans pertaining to them.
Peel the onion; turn over the rock; have another look; put it to a test — language has many cliches and tropes related to investigation and the methods of arriving at conclusions — “truths” one might call them — in which one might have confidence on the basis of other than ambitions, agendas, pleasant delusions, and personal interests.
The Far Out Left Mob has drummed into existence the idea of the Far White Right in response to the now incendiary Presidency of Donald Trump, he who referred to white supremacists on the march in Charlottesville as “very fine people”.
As one thing leads to another, the once amateur politician who by much advice and fast seasoning has become Presidential, finds his forces and streets — ours as well — in the hands of hotheaded police and politicos.
As so many feckless and ignorant Americans have chosen to ban or bring down the symbols of the nation’s extraordinary heritage in blood and suffering on behalf of its prevailing values (” . . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . .”), even if on the “wrong side” of history, I’ve given in to launching a short response — a reminder, actually — of what America, to this point, has meant to be — and we may be certain we were not meant to be a post-Soviet Russian “State Capitalist” white nationalist enterprise nor a storage bin for post-Soviet Communist and Socialist agitation, propaganda, and unrest.
President Lincoln had directed General Grant to leave the Southern leadership its freedom and pride at surrender. The war was not one of conquest but of reintegration with the Union — and the United States of America — and the end would lead to reconstruction of the south and later reconciliation between once mortal enemies.
With surrender, the Confederate Flag that had stood for “State’s Rights” and, yes, the institution that was agrarian slavery, had become transformed through time into a symbol of Southern courage, memorial, and rebelliousness. For the greater nation it became a decorative regional symbol generalized for the “American rebel” of any age, color, or state. The once seriously “Rebel Flat” became also a benign decorative element fit for beach towels and everything else that would become part of our common multicultural, multiracial American heritage.
We Americans together embrace compassion, dignity, equality, freedom, individualism, justice.
We should not need to erase or suppress our history or its symbols but take note of them and together move forward.
Now the mob seems to have taken aim at that regional and integrated southern pride in heritage while giving publicity to the KKK and other marginalized forces remaining not from the Confederacy but coursing through the Viking heritage of white northern Europe and flowing through history into portions of northern British culture (which would be influenced today by Russia’s white nationalist push against EU/NATO and modern progressive — and color and heritage integrating — multicultural values).
For Americans who abhor the idea of “race war”, the so-called progressive forces may be setting the stage for one.
Whiteness.
Blackness.
How special we are!
Not.
We should be true with our national heritage, our collective past, and come together for our future.
Visitor Center, Antietam National Battlefield Park, Sharpsburg, Maryland, June 1, 2017. (c) 2017 J. S. Oppenheim
Editor’s Afterword
The title has turned out larger than the post.
🙂
I don’t see much difference between ISIS tearing down Palmyra and America’s present Far Out Left getting governors (and event producers) to remove the presence of American Civil War symbols — flags or statues — from public view.
FTAC: From the Post-Publication Follow-Up
For addressing politics, it’s better to have whatever is behind the woodwork come out and make itself known.
Now we’re going to have cadre on dark or obscure web platforms being chased by a limited law enforcement community. They will be brewing up evil in their own virtual corners and spilling out into reality when they’re ready for “action”.
Police here have lost at least one precinct to “CHAZ” and that to me would be unfathomable but for having grown up near the “Nuclear Free Zone” of Takoma Park, Maryland, a location I have referred to as the “Berkeley of the East” (not far from the University of Maryland).
I understand the liberal outlook and America’s instinct for pursuing ideals and producing practical improvements in governance. I don’t understand the growing divide between a multicultural progressive culture, which I believe in, and a reactionary Christian White Nationalist putsch. I view the latter development as backward, bullying, brutal, and feudal.
Where sources in business and government withhold information, there are are going to be some gaps, aren’t there?
That might be a source of incomplete news.
Where businesses and governments make up stories — or just lie — the press will catch them where it can, or the liars might just get away with it.
That might be a source of inaccurate news.
The mainstream journalists won’t be damaged.
Public trust will be damaged where businesses and governments choose to be dishonest.
Where that happens, democracy is dead.
Democracy is dead in China and in Russia and in other states where leaders refuse even the risk of a peaceful handover of power by way of the mechanism of (authentically) fair and free elections.
Trump is actively encouraging Republicans to join his election-year revenge play against those who led investigations that ensnared him, his associates and his presidential campaign. Rubio, on the other hand, appears more concerned about Russian interference in the next presidential election — a sensitive subject for Trump, who bristles at any mention of Moscow swaying American elections.
Will American Democracy — and America’s leadership of the Free World — be done by the time Americans catch on?
To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Nearly all of these agencies are headquartered in and around the capital, making it easy for Attorney General William Barr to enlist them as part of his vast effort to “flood the zone” in D.C. this week with what amounts to a federal army of occupation, overseen from the FBI Washington area command post in Chinatown. Battalions of agents were mustered in the lobby of Customs and Border Protection’s D.C. headquarters—what in normal times is the path to a food court for federal workers. The Drug Enforcement Administration has been given special powers to enable it to surveil protesters. It is the heaviest show of force in the nation’s capital since the protests and riots of the Vietnam War.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s aggressive deployment of officers donning riot gear with no identifiable markings has increased tensions with protesters, raised the specter of a “secret police” force and prompted Speaker Nancy Pelosi to demand that President Trump identify the federal forces he has put on the streets of the capital.
Imagine a world in which uniformed police geared up to boogie in black produced as part of their presence no identification of themselves or their control or funding agency or organization.
Imagine that world was yours.
Now.
Call them “Black Vests” or “Black Jackets“.
Why not?
They’re apparently not laying claim to being anything else.
In one short bash at the keyboard, this, “anti-globalists”, is what “globalization” looks like and, for the most part (the Valdai Discussion Club may be an exception, but it is what Russia offers at this time), with focus on democracy, freedom, and justice in opposition to authoritarianism and the capricious, exploiting, and venal pursuit of power.
In place of fear about “globalist ambitions” (is someone summoning anti-Semitic tropes back to life?), I would suggest a change of axis toward feudal absolute and modern democratic systems of economic, political, and social organization. Modern and visionary outlooks needs must be global while remaining careful of the cultural, ecological, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity extant on our one “pale blue dot” of a planet.
The Free (!) World is a complexly knitted global enterprise, like it or not, and it needs a well educated and comprehending human base for its better stewardship and for our collective improved global security. Responsible people are "on it" worldwide. https://t.co/jE3PKHkrbK
Early in this video, Candace Owens mentions the propensity in the black community for turning criminals into heroes, and she notes that whites are not on the march for George Floyd’s (alleged) murderer Derek Chauvin.
BackChannels 