As I read about Ezra Levant’s extreme-right (and now anti-masker) website Rebel News lying about scoring an “exclusive interview” with Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, I am reminded once again that writing for its now-defunct group blog a few years ago probably wasn’t one of my better life choices.
That said, the stuff I did write for them has held up pretty well, if I say so myself. Especially this piece, which called Donald Trump out on his persecution complex long before he took office:
Even his critics will admit that Trump is exceptionally charismatic and often very funny. (Occasionally, the laughs are intentional.) And when Trump bragged about the landmark buildings he owns, I found myself legitimately admiring the fact that he makes absolutely no apologies for being fabulously wealthy. Compared to sons of privilege George W. Bush and Al Gore trying desperately to make themselves look like regular country folk (and, more recently, spouse of privilege Hillary Clinton straining to look middle-class) it's kind of refreshing to have a candidate who gloats about being rich.
But the real reason Trump may be doing so well is on full display during his interview: he appeals to many Americans' feelings that they've been hard done by.
Mexicans are sneaking into the country by the thousands, taking jobs and bringing crime. Meanwhile, big corporate fat cats are taking their business the other way, shuttering factories in the United States and opening them in Mexico. America is run by "idiots" who constantly get taken advantage of by other countries, whether they're ostensibly friendly or openly hostile.
Thousands of American troops protect South Korea while television sets once made in America are now made in Korea. Why, his pals in the construction industry are forced to buy Komatsu tractors instead of Caterpillars, because the sneaky Japanese are undercutting American competition. (Hearing Trump bash Japan, I thought I was listening to Lee Iacocca circa 1992 again.)
Trump's message boils down to, the country is a mess and it's everyone else's fault. And his audience is eating it up, because it can be downright intoxicating to be a victim.
This applies all over the political spectrum - check out Tumblr on any given day to see how left-wingers consider themselves perennial victims - and it's not just an American phenomenon. Even during this Canadian election cycle we have people who oppose Stephen Harper loudly proclaiming he's not just a centre-right politician with whom they disagree, but the new Hitler incarnate. Meanwhile, people who support Stephen Harper think the media (including the newspapers that overwhelmingly backed the Conservatives in 2011, and whom I predict will endorse them again) have launched a jihad against the Prime Minister.
Nothing gets the blood pumping like a pervasive feeling that everyone else is out to get you.
“Maybe Donald Trump is just a flash-in-the-pan candidate who will fizzle out like Herman Cain last time around,” I concluded, “or maybe he's the wave of the future.”
We know how that turned out (especially for Herman Cain). And once Trump was in office, the persistent victim mentality never went away. If anything, it got worse after he became the most powerful man on earth, and absolutely boiled over once the election was “stolen” from him.
David Frum, on the pity party that modern American conservatism has become:
After the attempted coup, the mood in the pro-Trump world became one of profoundest self-pity. The president’s supporters compare themselves to victims of Stalin’s purges, to the unpersons of George Orwell’s 1984. They watch their Twitter followers disappear as the company closes QAnon accounts, and they feel persecuted. They invoke Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about Nazi Germany: First they came for those who plotted the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and I said nothing.
Again and again since Election Night 2020, Republicans have urged sympathy and accommodation for those who refused to accept the election outcome. Give them space for their feelings. What harm will it do to humor them a little longer?
Over the past half decade, we have turned much of the country’s mindscape into a group-therapy session for Trump believers. Reporters play the part of the therapist, reassuring the analyzed of a safe space for their grievances and complaints. The pro-Trump world has accepted the invitation. Even as Trump commits one constitutional, legal, and ethical abuse after another, his followers depict themselves as somehow the people truly suffering unfairness. Trump was a perpetrator who thought himself a victim, and American society has indulged that same illusion among Trump supporters.
Hawley described himself as a victim of a “woke mob” after his publisher terminated his book contract because of his leadership role in propagating the falsehoods that inspired the attack. Cruz, who shoved himself to the forefront of the movement to overturn the 2020 election, has accused his critics, beginning with Biden, of “vicious, partisan rhetoric that tears our country apart.” The head of the American Conservative Union—a lobbyist married to Trump’s communications director—lamented that he and his fellow Trump supporters were being sent to a “digital Gulag.” A co-publisher of the conservative news site Human Eventstweeted: “The conservative movement is about to face a level of collective discrimination by the institutions of our society not seen since Jim Crow.” The op-ed editor of the New York Post topped that analogy: “We're now going to see US sanctions—à la Iraq and Iran—applied to religious conservatives, economic leftists and others who reject the reigning corporate woke orthodoxy. Oh, you don't think there are 157 genders? There goes your access to banking!”
[…]
Unlike the looters who sacked stores during the protests in the summer of 2020, these pro-Trump groups were engaged in political action, not private criminality. Unlike the radicals who besieged the federal courthouse in Portland, the pro-Trump groups are not a hopeless fringe group. They mobilized to support the man who heads the government—and they are praised and encouraged by him.
The world has already met some of the people who executed the attack on Congress: the former military man with the honorable record, the successful real-estate agent, the six Republican elected officials who participated in an attempted violent overthrow of a democratic election. Many more will be met in the months ahead, as police make arrests, and employers terminate jobs. Some of those we meet might be deeply committed radicals. Most will probably turn out to be gullible people with grievances, who were manipulated and deceived by the cable-news network they watched and the politicians they trusted. We will all have many occasions to wonder: Who converted these once-ordinary Americans into enemies of democracy?
There are many depressed, declining places in America whose residents I could understand voting for a burn-it-all-down populist candidate like Donald Trump. The status quo wasn’t helping them very much.
But the barbarians who stormed the Capitol last week included a Texas real estate broker who got there by private jet.
And she still sees herself as a victim:
During the chaos, she also shared photos on social media of her posing at the rally, which she claimed was attended by 'working class people' and described as 'one of the best days of my life'.
Ryan, shared snaps with her friends en route to the event in a private plane after flying out of US Trinity Aviation in Denton.
She captioned a picture of herself and some friends: 'Here we go!!! #stopthesteal #dfwpatriots #PatriotParty #MarchForTrump.'
The day of the march, Ryan documented the chaos in a livestream, claiming they had flown to Washington 'for freedom.'
'We the people are pissed off… We flew by a private jet, God wanted us here today. Trump is my president,' she said in the video.
[…]
In one of her videos, Ryan revealed she was marching 'for you' and 'for freedom', claiming they are 'sick and tired of the Communist take over'.
She continued: 'All these working class people taking the week off. They want to steal the election, they want to steal everything.'
As the video continued rolling Ryan, who was dressed in Trump memorabilia, said: 'Stop the steal. They are taking our country from us. This is the prelude to the war that is about to happen. We are not messing around.'
Meanwhile, this is supposedly going ahead on Sunday. What could possibly go wrong?
The potential for imminent violence is a major reason why social media companies like Twitter have been so quick and forceful in cracking down on MAGA and QAnon accounts, including that of President Trump himself. Some brief Googling suggests that information about this event has been removed from online message boards, like “Gun & Game”:
They probably saw what Amazon Web Services did to Parler and want to make sure they don’t find themselves taken offline. I should hope the moderators have enough of a conscience that they don’t want to promote this madness.
The downside is that, instead of organising in plain sight, the militia wackos behind this “protest” will use the deep web and encrypted messaging apps to do so.
There are multiple Telegram channels for the right-wing group called the Proud Boys, and the largest of them have more than 28,000 members. One channel frequented by Proud Boys has been renamed to attract ex-Parler users.
"Now that they forced us off the main platforms it doesn't mean we go away, it just means we are going to go to places they don't see," a user posted in the chatroom intended for refugees from Parler.
[…]
[Computer Science Professor Megan] Squire said that when extremists are forced to shift from one platform to another it "creates an opportunity" for them "to make mistakes and reveal identifying information."
But Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director and an NBC News national security analyst, said he worries about the double-edged sword when a platform known to host extremists is shut down.
"We had all this success with ISIS: We took out their command site but we also took away the ability to see the next lone wolf. We force them into the dark corners of the internet," Figliuzzi said.
Either way, I hope to God that authorities are better prepared than they were on January 6.
As for the obvious question - whether armed African-American protesters would be tolerated like this - the answer is yes, probably. An armed black nationalist militia called the “Not Fucking Around Coalition” did hold several marches and rallies last summer, mostly without incident.
I wish I had as much confidence that the pro-Trump militias are as disciplined. This past week has given me every reason to fear the worst.
There’s an old, possibly apocryphal, story about the leftist Sandinistas who ruled Nicaragua in the eighties. When one of their spokespeople was asked why they forced an opposition newspaper to close, she responded, “they said we were against freedom of expression. That was a lie and we could not let them publish it.”
That’s what came immediately to mind when I read about “anti-fascists” trying to intimidate a bookstore to stop selling a book they don’t like:
Far-left activists surrounded Powell's Books in Portland on Monday and demanded the store stop selling Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, a book about antifa written by Andy Ngo. The protests forced the store to close early.
Powell's announced that it would not carry the book in its physical store, though it will still be available for purchase online.
"This book will not be on our store shelves, and we will not promote it," said Powell's in a statement. "That said, it will remain in our online catalogue. We carry books that we find anywhere from simply distasteful or badly written, to execrable, as well as those that we treasure. We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so."
[…]
The store's owners are entirely correct to assert their right to sell books on a wide range of subjects, even if some of these books do not meet with the approval of far-left activists. Antifa takes the view that no one should be allowed to report critically on its activities. Despite their benign-sounding moniker (which is short for "antifascism"), people associated with antifa deliberately practice illiberalism: They wish to deny free speech protections to the far-right and its enablers, a group of enemies that antifa defines very broadly. Indeed, in this case, the enablers of fascism evidently include a book store that isn't even carrying the objectionable tome on its shelves.
Few acts of censorship are as overt as a mob deciding which books other people should be allowed to read. The authoritarian behavior of Portland's progressive activist community is a subject well worth exploring in book form.
As I’ve written before, if you legitimately believe certain books are so harmful that their very existence constitutes violence, what is the principled argument against burning them?
I remember a Rebel piece on a Lesbian couple who were denied service...? that I rather enjoyed. It was both funny and to the point.
Anytime someone - whether individual or organization - finds it necessary to take extreme measures to prevent others from merely voicing their opinion, I personally find that fishy. Why not present their counter-arguments instead of breaking stuff and/or intimidating store owners, for example...? ...
It’s ironic that the founding fathers are mentioned on a poster for an event aiming to override election results. At least the need for security is being taken seriously this time around. The question is, will it be enough?