Trump May be On His Way Out but America's Far Right is Here
to Stay
When
I listened to Chuck Schumer and the other hypocrites talking about the
invasion of the Capitol building in Washington as an attack on ‘the
temple of democracy’ it was difficult not to laugh. According
to Joe Biden Congress was a ‘beacon of hope and
light for democracy’. This is the political centre of the
United States Empire, the place that has overseen the overthrow of Allende and
the attempts to overthrow Castro, Chavez and many other radical leaders.
It is the centre of corporate corruption, the place where lobbyists of all stripes
ply their trade, the epicenter of support for tyranny the world over.
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Congress
is the enabler of Apartheid Israel, the initiator of attacks on any regime brave
enough to stand up to Uncle Sam.
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Most
sickening of all the comments was the tweet of
Christian Fundamentalist Secretary of State Mike Pompei
‘violence, putting at risk the safety of
others including those tasked with providing security for all of us, is
intolerable both at home and abroad
Does this, I wondered, apply to assassinations
like that of Qasem Soleimani or the overthrow
of the democratic President of Bolivia by a US trained and instructed military?
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| The right-wing Zionist who heads the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer |
Of
course it does have its amusing side. Trump in his determination to overturn
the election result first tried to bludgeon
the hapless Georgia Secretary of State Raffsenberger into ‘finding’ him an
extra 17,000 votes. In Trump’s eyes the votes of those who cast their ballots
are merely chips to be traded in return for favours.
Trump
is not only a narcissist and sociopath who cannot distinguish between reality
and fiction, truth and lies, but he has no sense of self awareness. But that is how he made it in the first place.
Life is a reality show.
Having
failed to 'persuade' any state into changing its election results, despite
multiple court cases, Trump fell back on his last option – to pressurise
his Vice President, the servile Christian bigot, his trained human puppy, Mike
Pence, into unilaterally rejecting the decision of the electoral college.
What had previously been a formality was now invested with a critical
importance.
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| Congress members take cover |
Pence,
despite being a fundamentalist Christian, is not as stupid as he looks or at
least not that stupid. If he had tried to abuse his position as
Chair of Congress then there would have been, not only uproar in Congress but more
importantly outside. It would literally have triggered a revolution and brought
down the whole edifice of constitutional government in the United States.
Trump
is addicted to his crooked habits of old. Everything for him is transactional
and he must therefore feel a bitter sense of disappointment. Firstly the
Supreme Court, a third of which he picked, didn’t return his
favours by blocking Biden’s election and then Pence, who owes his position
of Vice President to Trump, followed suit.
In
Trump’s diseased mind, Pence owed everything to Trump. By what right did he refuse to obey Trump’s instructions?
This
is the mentality of Trump but let us be clear, not only Trump. It’s how
Congress operates. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. It’s pork barrel
politics writ large. Ideology counts for little in this palace of a corrupt
ruling class. The only difference is that most Congressmen and women are not so
blatant and obvious about what they do. A few, like the Squad, are even honest!
The
invasion on Capitol Hill was certainly violent with one video showing a cop screaming
in agony as he was crushed between a door and the wall. But just imagine if this had been say a crowd
of Black Lives Matter supporters. Does
anyone imagine that the riot cops would have gently pushed back? There would have
been a bloodbath
and Trump would have been the first to congratulate the police.
The massed ranks of robo cops would have willingly gunned down anyone got within a hundred yards of Capitol Hill. But that wasn’t possible on Wednesday since Trump delayed
the deployment of the National Guard.
Even Joe Biden accepted,
having been sent a photo of soldiers guarding the Lincoln Memorial in June by
his granddaughter, that
‘No one can tell
me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they
wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that
stormed the Capitol.’
Finally
we saw in the wake of Wednesday’s riots Republicans dissociating themselves
from Trump, though not enough to impeach him. Those who supported his racist
rhetoric against Black Congresswomen who were told
to ‘go back where you came from’, who were silent when Trump accused Mexican
immigrants of being rapists, who supported his encouragement of police violence
against BLM supporters, took fright when their own safety and security were
endangered.
Trump, having summoned his
far-Right rabble and encouraged
them to be ‘wild’ eventually told
the assorted White Supremacists, neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, QAnons, loony
tunes and fruitcakes ‘Go home. We love
you, you’re very special.’
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| It was very different last June with Black Lives Matter |
Then
when he realised that he had bitten off more than he could chew he backtracked
and issued a video condemnation:
"Like all Americans, I am outraged by the
violence, lawlessness, and mayhem," Trump said, adding, "To those who broke the law: You will
pay." Lies come easily to the man who, the day before, told the mob how much he 'loved' them.
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Clearly this wasn’t a
voluntary statement and reports have since surfaced that he regrets
issuing the video.
One suspects that it was
issued on the instructions of Mike Pence who otherwise threatened to invoke the
25th Amendment removing Trump from office on the grounds of mental
instability.
But
the outrage amongst America’s corrupt politicians is not shared by the people. A
full 45% of Republicans, a plurality, supported
the attack on the capitol buildings. Trump may be leaving the White House but
his legacy will live on. The far-Right has felt emboldened for the past 5
years. Trump openly sponsored neo-Nazis
and white supremacists like the Proud Boys whilst demonising
anti-racists and anti-fascists. No
greater enemy did he have than Antifa
and BLM. Yet the Republican Party
stalwarts saw no reason to condemn his racism and the Democratic Party largely
remained silent.
Trump will end his reign as the pathetic fascist he is. His final revenge will be to try
and ensure the execution of as many prisoners on the federal death row as
he can manage. This at a time when support for the death penalty in America is
at an all time low. But let us remember, as Lisa Montgomery chokes to death on
Tuesday, the first woman for over half a century to be executed at the Federal
level, that it was Barack Obama who refused
to commute her sentence and that of 61 other prisoners on death row. It was
Bill Clinton who enacted the 1994 Federal
Death Penalty Act which widened the number of offences that could receive
the death penalty and which expedited the appeal process.
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| They opened the door to the White Supremacists |
One thing is for certain. Joe Biden will not arrest the process of
widespread disdain for Congress and the corrupt politicians who inhabit Capitol
Hill. Trump came to office promising to ‘drain the swamp’. The swamp still remains, indeed it has
expanded but in the absence of a strong left in the United States the drift to
the Right will continue.
The growth of the Democratic Socialists of America to over
100,000 members is encouraging. Likewise the election of members of the DSA
such as Ilhan Omar, Rashid Tlaib and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez.
However they are likely to be sucked into the system unless the DSA becomes
more than a loose association of well meaning social democrats. BLM has to
abandon identity politics and embrace class politics and the DSA has to
transform itself into a class struggle organisation that can appeal to Trump’s
disenfranchised constituency, not least blue collar workers who have suffered the effects of globalisation and off shoring.
Biden will, in the
wake of the pandemic, follow a policy of austerity and retrenchment. He has
committed himself to vetoing a single payer, national health care system
despite the fact that the pandemic has shown that the existence of a privatised
health care system is contrary to the interests of capitalism.
The support of the
United States for repression and violence abroad has come back home with a
vengeance. Joe Biden is famous for ‘reaching across the aisle’ to the
Republicans. The idea that he will restore the United States to ‘normality’ is
a fantasy.
We should welcome the
humiliation of Trump who was forced to promise a ‘smooth transition’ to the
Biden Administration after having done his best to overturn the vote.
But there is one more
thing that Wednesday’s vote has shown and that is the fact that the United
States is not, even in a bourgeois sense, a democracy. Democratic rights in the USA are a
thin skin on a turbulent and poisonously militarised society.
If Joe Biden had been
a radical socialist, still less a Marxist, then Wednesday would have provided
ample opportunity to overturn the vote. Congress could have rejected the
electoral college votes on whatever spurious basis they cared to conjure up.
The certification of votes at state level would have provided more opportunities for the two capitalist parties to reject any results that they
didn’t like. The US Supreme Court demonstrated
in 2000 that it is capable of ensuring the vote they want when they prevented a
recount in Florida which went too late to Al Gore after Bush was declared President.
The US Constitution
has checks and balances designed to obstruct the democratic will of the people.
Wyoming with half a million people has two senators, the same number as
California with nearly 40 million people. The Senate is at the apex of the lack
of democracy in the United States’s political system. The obvious method of
electing a President, counting the number of votes for each candidate was
jettisoned in favour of an electoral college
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| They brought a gallows, the symbol of lynching, to hang the 'traitors' in Congress |
The Constitution is
sclerotic and it is deliberately designed to be so. Supreme Court justices, who are political
nominees, are there for life. There is now a 6-3 majority to make abortion
illegal despite majority support for it in America. Congressional districts are
purposely gerrymandered. The Republican Party openly seeks to suppress the votes
of poor and Black people through a variety of means such as ID requirements (which
Boris Johnson is trying to introduce here) and stipulations in some states that
ex-felons cannot vote. Remember that one
in three Black males sees
the inside of the US prison estate.
Trump merely tried to step up the voter suppression by invalidating the mail-in ballots of those who, in the middle of a pandemic, wished not to risk their life in order to vote.
This is the democracy that that pathetic mannequin of a Labour Party
leader , Keir Sturmer idolises. But whatever our views of the mob that attacked
Capitol Hill on Wednesday, let us not pretend that they were attacking
democracy.
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| Israel flag waving at January 6th MAGA rally, Capitol Mall |
Perhaps the most exquisite images of Wednesday’s events were seeing sweaters
embroided with ‘Auschwitz camp’ and 6MWE (6 million was not enough) side by
side with the Israeli flag. It is no coincidence that the
last defiant supporter of Trump is Netanyahu. If America’s electorate had
reflected opinion in Israel then he would have won by 70% to 13%. Trump has a settlement Trump Heights named after him. It is
more than fitting that Israel should pay homage to the man who has done more to
enable anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and White Supremacists than any other person on
Earth.
See below for two articles on collusion between the White Supremacists and the Police and the support of Zionists for the White Riot.
Tony Greenstein
Partners
in Crime: The Siege of the Capitol, Police and White Supremacy
That a throng of right-wing thugs, neo-Nazis, and
insurrectionists were able to barge into the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday
is, to make a severe understatement, troubling. Once again, American cops have
expressed support for a right-wing insurrection and, in at least three cases,
have taken part in the riot themselves. The obvious contrast between
Wednesday’s display and the treatment that Black Lives Matter protesters often
face is so easy that it risks obfuscating the long historical connection
between law enforcement and white supremacy.
The events on Wednesday didn’t occur without violence
and hostilities: U.S. Capitol Police announced on Thursday that one officer, who was injured
in a confrontation with protesters, later died; four protesters were killed in the chaos—one of whom
was shot by Capitol police. But the links between law enforcement officers and
white supremacists groups are appalling—and not surprising.
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| Rightwing Zionist on the right besides Confederate Flag |
On Wednesday evening, former Oakland Police Officer Jurell Snyder told Joe Vazquez,
a reporter with the Bay Area’s KPIX television station, that he believed it was
worthwhile to break the law in order to take a stand against Democrats who, in
his mind, had sold out the country.
“What do you think is worse, Joe? Storming the Capitol
with a flag, or committing treason against your country?” Snyder asked
rhetorically.
Worse yet, on Wednesday, New York magazine reported that David Ellis, the current police chief in Troy, New Hampshire, attended the
day’s events, though it’s unclear if he directly took part in the siege on the
Capitol. And, late Thursday night, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, which
oversees San Antonio, Texas, announced that Lt. Roxanne Mathai is under
investigation both internally and criminally for posting photographs on Facebook from the riot. Sheriff
Javier Salazar told reporters Thursday that his office had forwarded the images
to the FBI. San Antonio news station KSAT reported that Mathai has been on
administrative leave since October due to allegations that she’d had an inappropriate relationship with
an incarcerated person.
Not to be outdone, other cops announced their support
for the siege on the internet. On Thursday, Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff Mark
Lamb posted a video on Facebook in which he expressed support for the rioters and said he doesn’t
“know how loud we have to get before they start to listen to us.” He has since
deleted the video.
Likewise, in an interview with Chicago NPR affiliate
WBEZ, John Catanzara, head of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police union
lodge, expressed support for the mob and spouted debunked conspiracy
theories about the 2020 presidential election.
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| Congressmen fleeing the mob |
“They’re individuals,” Catanzara said. “They get to do
what they want. Again, they were voicing frustration. They’re entitled to voice
their frustration. They clearly have been ignored and they’re still being
ignored as if they’re lunatics and treasonous now, which is beyond stupid.”
A review by The Appeal shows that police forums are
awash in misinformation and right-wing conspiracies about the Capitol riots.
On Thee Rant, an anonymous forum for New York Police
Department members, one user named “James-Bond007” claimed that “2016 was the
last free and fair election that this country has seen.” Another user made the
antisemitic remark that someone in the federal government had been paid off
with “shekels.” On LEOAffairs, a forum popular with Florida police officers,
one anonymous user in the Miami Police Department’s forum wrote that this
election was “a push to start an agenda of future communism and dictatorship.”
That an angry mob of armed right-wing insurrectionists
was able to so easily push itself into the U.S. Capitol is nightmarish on its
face. But it may be a much darker fact to realize that quite so many people
vested with the authority to kill others seem so willing to sympathize with
those who dream of a violent revolt against the government.
This is, of course, a trend as old as American
policing itself. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, police
forces—which, in many cases, began as patrols to catch runaway slaves—counted
scores of Ku Klux Klan members within their ranks. (In fact, Klansmen across
the country routinely bragged about the group’s ties to law-enforcement during
the terrorist group’s heyday.) In the 1920s, both Los Angeles County Sheriff William
Traeger and Los Angeles Police Chief Louis D. Oaks admitted they’d been members of the so-called Invisible Empire as
well. On America’s other coast, the Miami Police Department throughout the
1920s worked openly alongside Klan members to harass Black residents in the
city’s segregated areas, Miami historian Paul George wrote in the 1979 journal
article “Policing Miami’s Black Community, 1896-1930.”
In the years since the Klan fell from prominence,
researchers and even the federal government have warned that white supremacists
have continued to work closely with local cops. In 2017, The Intercept obtained documents confirming that the
FBI had investigated “active links” between local law-enforcement members,
white supremacists, and members of armed militia groups. Some of those “links”
aren’t entirely secret: According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a
worryingly large number of American sheriffs have expressed sympathies with the a group
called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA),
a militia-adjacent group that pushes cops not to enforce gun-control laws that,
in their opinion, violate the U.S. Constitution.
Indeed, CSPOA’s 2012 sheriff of the year—former Grant
County, Oregon Sheriff Glenn Palmer—was known for his close ties with local
militia groups. According to the SPLC, Palmer had repeatedly met with and
expressed sympathies for the armed, right-wing insurrectionists led by Ammon
Bundy who, in 2016, occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney
County, Oregon.
Another CSPOA sheriff of the year, Dar Leaf of Barry County,
Michigan, made headlines in October, after reporters exposed that he
had shared a stage at an anti-coronavirus-lockdown rally with
one of the men charged with attempting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen
Whitmer last year. Speaking to West Michigan’s Fox affiliate, Leaf defended the
men. He said he knew two of the accused plotters, but said he thought they were
good people who might have been, in his opinion, trying to perform a citizens’
arrest on the governor.
“It’s just a charge, and they say a ‘plot to kidnap’
and you got to remember that,” Leaf astoundingly said. “Are they trying to kidnap? Because
a lot of people are angry with the governor, and they want her arrested. So are
they trying to arrest or was it a kidnap attempt? Because you can still in
Michigan if it’s a felony, make a felony arrest.” In December, Leaf filed a lawsuit alleging voter fraud in 2020’s
presidential election.
That police officers—who count massive numbers of
Trump supporters in their ranks—treated a pro-Trump mob with kid gloves should
surprise no one. Deeper than a question of policing, the event displayed
American law enforcement’s centuries-long links to white supremacy.
At
MAGA Rally, Israeli Flag and Neo-Nazis Co-Exist…Awkwardly
Richard
Silverstein
If you’re Jewish (and even if you’re not) you may be
wondering what the hell was going on with yesterday’s MAGA rally and
Lootapalooza at the Capitol. And I’m not talking about the overall madness of
hundreds of white Supremacists, neo-Nazis and Trump Kool Aid drinkers, who
stormed the Capitol and made American democracy look like a beer-soaked frat
party.
No, I’m talking about some closely related incidents of special interest to Jews. First, of course was the glaring presence of anti-Semites proudly bearing their “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts or their “6MWE” (“Six million was not enough”) t-shirts. It almost goes without saying that Donald Trump’s most devoted followers are irredeemable anti-Semites. And of course, they’ve committed far worse acts against Jews in other settings than they did yesterday: like Pittsburgh, Poway and elsewhere.
But the real Twilight-Zone-stuff involved Jews who joined
in the mayhem. Jews who overlooked the inherent anti-Semitism of the MAGA
movement because it fulfils some higher sense of duty.
Exhibit A is Aaron Mostofsky, prominently featured in photographs yesterday donning a coonskin fur pelt, as another protester parades past him with a Confederate flag. He looked like a cross between a stoned-out freak and a Yiddishe Daniel Boone. When questioned, Aaron proudly identified himself and his hometown, Brooklyn. This enabled his relatives and NY reporters to expose his family background: his father is Judge Shlomo “Steven” Mostofsky of Kings County Supreme Court. The elder M is a power in Democratic Borough politics and former president of National Council of Young Israel.
I am disappointed but not surprised that while many
are calling for the resignations of Sens. Cruz and Hawley for their role in
that days proceedings, no one in the Brooklyn political or Jewish community has
called for the Judge to consider his own position and acknowledge the evil
perpetrated by his son. Nor has the elder Mostofsky made any statement that I’m
aware of. He’s refused to comment to reporters who’ve repeatedly sought him
out.
Worth noting here is that Young Israel is on the
extreme right end of the modern Orthodox movement. It not only ardently
supports Israel’s right wing government and Israeli settlements, it was among
the first Jewish supporters of Trump’s candidacy. Young Israel threw
a gala fundraising event honoring Igor
Fruman and Lev Parnas, close associates of Rudy Giuliani. Also present were
Kevin McCarthy, Mike Huckabee and Giuliani. Hebrew MAGA caps were
prominently featured. Among the epithets bestowed that night on the candidate
were “Trump, King of Israel.” I don’t know if Judge Mostofsky attended this
shindig, but as a past National Council president he very well may have.
Only in New York Orthodox Jewish politics could someone be a leader of a Jewish
group supporting Trump while being a fixture in the local Democratic Party.
Many New York Orthodox Jews live in majority minority communities in New York. Though relations have been better with local African-American and Hispanics over the past few decades, some of the most conservative of Orthodox Jews continue to mouth racist tropes regarding their neighbors. They view them in much the same way that MAGA and White supremacists view them: with fear and loathing. That may be what fuels the hate of some Orthodox Jews like Mostofsky.
Mostofsky’s brother, Nachman, attended the rally. But
he claims he did not enter the Capitol building. Nachman is a local
district leader and head of the South Brooklyn Conservative Party. In an
interview, he blamed
the incursion on Antifa, a concoction invented by far-right conspiracists.
He is also the executive
director of the political arm of Young Israel, Chovevei Zion, which is
all-in for Trump and his agenda.
There was another anomalous sight at yesterday’s
“festivities.” There among the fluttering flags of MAGA, ‘Trump is My
President,’ and Old Glory was the Israeli flag. What was it doing in such a
setting? Again, how does an American Jew fly that flag in that place and think
it’s an appropriate thing to do?
To understand the answer you have to grasp several
complex and contradictory ideas at once. Both anti-Semites and Zionists often
make a distinction between Israel and Jews. Jews, especially those in the
Diaspora, are bad. Israel is good.
How do they make such a distinction?
Anti-Semites who admire Israel, separate it from Jews. They
admire Zionism not just as a form of nationalism, but as a movement that
proudly boasts of its exclusiveness. Israel is the nation state of the Jewish
people; just as white supremacists want a state for the white race. In this
sense, race and religion become almost interchangeable.
When neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer visit
Israel as he has, he marvels at the Judeo-supremacy he sees both in Israel
proper and in occupied Palestine. A state offering superior rights to Jews and
which has expelled huge numbers of non-Jews is music to his ears. He sees
Zionism as the same fight he is mounting within American society to separate
from non-whites and empower his own race by demanding sovereignty. He told an
Israeli TV interviewer this:
“As an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identify, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me who has analogous feelings about whites. I mean, you could say that I’m a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland that for us and ourselves just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”
It’s no accident that Bibi Netanyahu’s closest
political allies in Europe are anti-Semites: Hungary’s Viktor Orban and
Poland’s Andrzej Duda. It’s also no accident that almost all the Jews in these
two countries were exterminated by the Nazis with varying levels of
collaboration from local officials. European anti-Semites hate the Jews among
them, but love Jews who emigrate to Israel. Because they live in exactly the
sort of state these national-supremacists want for themselves: a sovereign
state for pure Hungarians or Poles. One that excludes non natives like Roma,
Jews, Muslims or African refugees. It is, ironically, the same reason
Adolf Eichmann said that if he were a Jew he
too would be a Zionist.
The most troubling aspect of this increasing alliance
between Israel’s dominant right-wing and its European counterparts is that
Israel is rapidly becoming precisely the sort of state Germany was under the
Nazis. The same fascist tendencies; the same repression of speech and
individual liberty; the same impulse to eliminate enemies, both internal and
external; the same readiness to make war as a means of pursuing national
interests.
When you look at yesterday’s developments with these
phenomena in mind what seems strange becomes clear.
The Police Enabled the Far-Right Mob That Violently Stormed the Capitol Building
