Faced with monsters like this, the Right feels everything, ANYTHING, is fair when it comes to fighting them. And since the Libs don’t believe in god, either, then god has given REAL Americans permission to do whatever it takes to wipe them out once and for all.

The diminishing, and increasingly impoverished, American middle and working class have been fed a steady diet of this just like deteriorating 1930s German civil society was systematically convinced that all their problems were due to the Jews. It is this deep, fundamental hatred, fear and ignorance of what they have decided Liberals are all about that is fueling modern Conservatism today.

And by “Conservatism”, I don’t mean a concern for balancing the budget, strong national defense and law ‘n’ order; nobody is against that. I mean the trembling, shivering hatred, the sputtering, lip-curling rage we see in the Tea Party, from all the Republican Candidates, and on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. This goes a lot deeper than a civil disagreement on tax policy or public health measures. This is a doomed ruling class fighting for its life, and painting their enemies as demons from hell to help bolster their courage. And in a pinch, any enemy will do, and any ally they can enlist to follow them is fair game.

Think of it, man. Who are the only people in this country today who are doing really well as a class? Not only are they doing well, they are better off than they were just a few years ago, and they are doing better every day. Put your finger on that and everything else falls right into place.

Read William L. Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. This is an old movie, I’ve seen it before and I’ve memorized the dialogue. And I don’t like how it turns out.

 Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

It’s one gigantic schadenfreudengasm to watch fifty years of chickens come home to roost at the Republican Party aviary. Events are so far beyond anybody’s control now that I can only watch in horrified bemusement.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy, as so memorably outlined by Lee Atwater, marks the beginning of the GOP’s modern outreach to RWAs, and in that sense it is the start of an era. But the history of Right Wing Authoritarianism is as truly ancient as the nostalgic fabulist history of the American “Conservative Movement” today is truly false.

There’s a cottage industry springing up of people writing talking-keyboard histories of how the GOP got here, and an emerging common thread is how the GOP became entangled with the RWAs in the process of creating an astroturf-populist message to get enough votes to stay alive as a party in the face of unfavorable changing demographics, starting in the late ’60s.

There are other interpretations. One piece I read recently marked the stock market crash of 1929 as the beginning of the modern schism among Republicans, between those who saw and became reconciled to the need for the New Deal (known as “RINOs” today), and the hardcore consiglieres who’d always protected the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

Which is true, and connects up with the post-war push by business interests and the wealthy to undermine and reverse the New Deal. I personally would mark the late 1940s as the founding of the “Conservative Movement”, with the work of Leo Strauss who prescribed a conservative civic religion to bring the masses to heel under their traditional masters.

Which is basically how you’d describe what conservatism has become: A religion, a science-denying lunatic and apocalyptic cult. The leaders of the astroturf “Movement” have been following Strauss’s prescription all along.

And so, two decades into the Conservative Era, Nixon moved to bring a gullible constituency under the sway of the “Movement” with dogwhistle racism. After another nearly half a century of spending billions of dollars and untold effort warping the Republican Party far to the right, the whole farce and facade is poised to come crashing down.

On the question of whether Trump is a bigot, I think it’s irrelevant. He’s deliberately appealing to bigots, but that’s just one of the standard tactics of a wannabe fascist dictator. The scary thing isn’t that Trump might be a bigot, but what he’ll do with an army of millions of bigots?

Remember, the man keeps a copy of the collected speeches of Adolph Hitler beside his golden throne of a toilet.

Tyrannies are big on oaths, especially those taken in public with everyone watching. Of course, the Trump call to voters is not directly comparable to Hitler’s coercion of the Army, but it reinforces a pattern. Its comparable to the “oath” taken by GOP candidates during a debate to refuse even a token concession of raising some taxes 10% in order to allow an overall tax cut of 90%. And then there’s the the infamous Norquist “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” that has made tax negotiations in congress impossible by making it impossible to elect a fiscally moderate Republican. Public oaths, over and above those prescribed by law at solemn but voluntary actions, like taking political office or joining the armed forces, is a thinly disguised technique to get the enslaved to collaborate in their own enslavement. It all goes back to the Pledge of Allegiance. Can you imagine anything more vile than making little kids in school swear to something they barely understand, to use peer pressure and coercion to plant and enforce ideological purity?

Oh yeah, the defenders of this obscenity will immediately object to this, but they can’t see how failure to publicly swear an oath will immediately employ the threat of public violence and group pressure through ostracism to establish a common civic religion. Of course the indoctrinated won’t see it that way, but just think how it looks to someone from outside the system, someone who hasn’t been exposed to it since childhood.

When my cousin left Cuba at age 16 (on the Pedro Pan program), he came to stay with us in Florida. It was about 1962. In our first day together in high school, we were subjected to the morning Pledge of Allegiance/Lord’s Prayer ceremony. My cousin was stunned, he remarked to me, “Getting me away from political indoctrination like this is why my parents got me out of Cuba in the first place.”

And at our first football game, when the audience rose to sing “Dixie”
(with much more passion and enthusiasm than was lavished on “The Star Spangled Banner”), he gasped in astonishment as I explained to him just what was happening. “But the your Civil War was fought and lost a hundred years ago.”

No, he was wrong about that. Its still being fought.

My take on it is that if you actively try to appeal to bigots, say and do bigoted things and advance the bigot agenda and your supporters are disproportionately bigots then you are a bigot…

Of course in reality someone who does all these things is much worse than that- he is pure evil…

But really, would an evil person trying to get in good with the Neo-Nazis do something like THIS?

What is going on in Washington politics now is not just an aberration of a few twisted politicians. It is the direct result of long-established policy that has been slowly and deliberately developed for decades. Like Fascism in early 20th century Europe, it has roots that spread deep and wide.

I’ve been doing a lot of comparative political archaeology lately.

But he knows racists are a big part of his constituency and he does everything he can to not alienate them without actually supporting their views explicitly. If you actually analyze the texts of his pronouncements you can’t really point to direct racist statements, not even in what he said about Mexicans or even Muslims.

But it is clear his statements and policies play on racist themes and appeal to racists. Of course, that can be said about all Republicans, to a certain extent.

People in position of power and influence are too smart too believe racist pseudoscience or propaganda. They are motivated more by questions of social and economic class than they are about genetics or race. However, they depend on the votes of individuals who DO harbor racist opinions, or have managed to justify them by calling them something else. For example, someone who claims he harbors no ill will against blacks may actually be saying the truth, and even sincerely believe it. But he also might have very strong opinions about welfare cheats and street criminals–which is subconscious slang for “black”. Similar stereotypes are employed against Hispanics, even by self-hating racists who may be Hispanic or black themselves.

Since racism is ultimately irrational, its not surprising racists sometimes twist themselves into ideological knots in order to carry off their hatred. Remember that white kid that killed all those black churchgoers in South Carolina? He had a Negro friend, I saw him interviewed on TV. This kind of schizophrenia is often employed by racists to convince others (and themselves) they are not racist.

The conservative movement has been very successful at harnessing and exploiting this pathology to channel racial hatred in ideological, political and economic directions. Lee Atwater specialized in this sort thing, look up his Wiki entry and convince yourself this sort of racist channeling has deep roots in the GOP.

Harvey LeRoy “Lee” Atwater (February 27, 1951 – March 29, 1991) was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican Party. He was an adviser to U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee.

In Atwater’s own words:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”[10][11]

You don’t have to be a racist yourself to cultivate it, use it, and promote it, if it serves your purposes. Does that add any light to what’s going on in Flint right now? No one wants to poison babies, but sometimes doing the Lord’s work inflicts a little collateral damage.