The Majestic Plural

There was a small handful of local lawyers who tried to make a name – and some coin – for themselves by challenging the government’s ability and right to impose quarantines and restrictions during a pandemic emergency. The Covid-19 pandemic killed well over a million Americans, and counting. Covid antibodies helped end the pandemic emergency – whether through infection or injection. Or both.

One of the lawyers in question is the person who penned the thing I reproduce below. It is important to remember that the pro-Covid argument he and others propounded was that the government did not have the right to, e.g., tell kids in school to wear masks, to keep school populations down to enable distancing, or restaurants to require patrons and staff to wear masks when not eating or drinking.

Below is a document that noted local emailer Carl Paladino sent to his broader campaign list. It is a shocking compendium of nonsense masquerading as legal analysis. In order for it to be valid, it would have to ignore and negate literally the entire text of the United States Constitution as adopted in 1789, and its various and sundry Amendments.

This is a Nixonian view of Presidential power – “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

The fundament of the American Constitution is that the people are sovereign; not any one individual. The entire point of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution was to overthrow a corrupt and unfair system whereby the people of the thirteen colonies had little or no say in their own affairs. The Declaration is most remembered for the clause that begins “[w]e hold these Truths to be self-evident…” but the remainder of the document is a list of grievances specifically directed against the King. The Declaration demands that a government be “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Constitution sets up the framework for the institution of this government. The preamble to the Constitution ironically turns the royal “We” – the majestic plural – on its head with “We, the People.” If you look carefully at George III’s 1763 Proclamation, partially reproduced above, his preferred pronoun was “we.” The same is true of many monarchs.

And so, the entire point of the creation of this republic was to eliminate monarchical rule and to replace it with representative democracy. It was a radically progressive notion at the time, one that Europe took seventy-or-so years to begin to duplicate in earnest.

There is, in the United States, a “presidential sovereign immunity.” In fact, many elected officials and public servants at every governmental level enjoy some level of immunity from legal action. (We prefer to call it governmental immunity because – you guessed it – the people are sovereign). The qualified immunity that an average police officer enjoys is currently a source of debate. Whilenot expressly mentioned in the Constitution, it is agreed that a President enjoys absolute immunity from civil liability – that is lawsuits for money or injunctive relief – for decisions taken while in office. A President is not immune from such liability for pre-office wrongdoing, however.

As to the question of whether a President can be prosecuted for criminality, he cannot, for so long as he holds the office. The method to deal with Presidential illegality is supposed to be impeachment, and after the President reverts to private citizen, he can then be subject to prosecution. The notion of impeachment is seemingly now an anachronism, as it requires elected officials to treat government and their offices seriously. We know now that the Republican Party has devolved into a personality cult that will literally tolerate and uphold any type of illegality from Donald Trump, including an insurrection. While the Parliament of the United Kingdom – including almost all Conservative MPs – take their duties to their government seriously, Republicans do not. Donald Trump was impeached on two occasions – once for threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine if its President did not help him smear Joe Biden, and once for fomenting insurrection. Republicans simply let him get away with it.

The criminality of the Trump Administration is unprecedented in American history and one which the Founders could not reasonably have foreseen. How could a person in the 18th century have envisioned that executive power would be wielded so clumsily and with such malign intent by someone doing, in turn, a bad imitation of late-1980s era John Gotti or Howard Stern.

The federal criminal charges against Donald Trump are set forth here. Aldinger recounts two recent cases, Bruen and Dobbs (both written by Supreme Court Justices who have in recent months been exposed as billionaires’ playthings ). Bruen overturned New York’s handgun registration laws while Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, presumably allowing states to ban all abortion in all cases, if they choose. Dobbs in particular has the dubious distinction of being the first Supreme Court decision to take away from one class of people a Constitutional right, which a prior Court had declared to exist.

Everyone knows that allowing any freak to waltz down Madison Avenue in possession of a concealed handgun is exactly what the Framers intended, what with that pesky “well-regulated militia” language being effectively ignored by successive Courts. Similarly, the idea of a right to privacy is very important when, for instance, it works with the First Amendment to prevent disclosure of million-dollar SuperPAC donors, but not at all important when it comes to a woman maintaining control over her own reproductive system.

Aldinger seemingly argues that the President of the United States should enjoy the same sovereign rights and privileges as the “King of England, the King of France, or the Holy Roman Emperor” as they existed in 1789. Aldinger argues that these three monarchs – hereditary heads of state – were “all above the law” and so, too, should the President of the United States, even though he is elected. Aldinger argues that even today, Charles III – the UK’s head of state – enjoys sovereign immunity. But that is because Charles III is, and Louis XVI, and Leopold II were, sovereign monarchs. In the United States, the people are sovereign, and in order to buy into Aldinger’s argument, you have to reject that idea entirely. We in the United States do not have a monarchy or a dictatorship, nor were Presidential powers set up in the Constitution to create a pseudo-monarch to wield supreme executive power by decree. Alexander Hamilton agreed with Aldinger that the President should be a quasi-kingly figure, and the Constitutional Convention rejected this in the 1780s, so why on Earth are we discussing it in 2023?

Aldinger argues that the example of European autocratic monarchies was the norm in 1789, so we must have somehow magically intended to adopt that model ourselves, despite all evidence to the contrary. Although Charles III is the head of state, he is not head of government. In the US, the President is both. France has no king and the Holy Roman Empire no longer exists. Extending Aldinger’s “place yourself in 1789” logic, women cannot enter into contracts or own property. Although women’s right to vote was guaranteed via Constitutional amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified.

Aldinger, however, misapprehends the idea of impeachment; he supposes that the sole and exclusive remedy afforded to our democratic republic to deal with a criminal and corrupt President is to impeach, convict, and expel him from office. He argues that impeachment is the sine qua non of any subsequent criminal prosecution – a substantive and procedural prerequisite, “…but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment, and Punishment, according to Law.”

I do not read that passage as a prerequisite because it is not drafted as such. There is no clear language setting forth that conviction on impeachment is a prerequisite to criminal prosecution; instead, they are separate and distinct processes. Impeachment is not a criminal sanction, but a political one – it removes the President from office. There is no fine or imprisonment that accompanies conviction on impeachment. Indeed, there is nothing in the Constitution that immunizes a former President from criminal exposure, whether impeached and convicted by Congress or not.

While Mr. Aldinger deems it necessary to repeat that Charles III has extraordinary rights as King, the Constitution does not “allow the President to give state secrets to anyone with impunity – including to themselves in their capacity of being a private citizen.”

It bears mentioning at this point that Aldinger’s argument about impeachment and sovereign immunity must fail because Donald Trump has not been Emperor-King President since late January 2021. The crimes alleged in the federal indictment all occurred after his departure from office. The allegation is that he illegally retained public documents – many of them classified and secret – without right or authority to do so.

Aldinger goes on to suggest that Trump – as the “sovereign equivalent of a monarch” has the full right to give any state secret to anyone, at any time. This would be true were we not a democratic republic with a system in place of checks and balances. In reality, the Presidential power to declassify is not absolute, is subject to limitation, and can typically only be done via Executive Order, as Trump himself was well aware. An Executive Order from 2009 sets forth the current guidelines for Presidential declassification, and this set of regulations from NARA further sets forth how the process of declassification must be administered. When Presidents declassify documents, some information contained therein may continue to be classified, as seen in these redactions. This is what it looks like when a President declassifies secret information, and it is not done lightly and the idea of a standing order of declassification does not exist in our country.

So, we know that Trump is not a king, and does not possess monarchical, absolute powers. We also know that Donald Trump, as a private citizen, was in possession of numerous materials that should properly have been left with the National Archives or otherwise protected due to their classification, and that Trump repeatedly failed and refused to cooperate with efforts to do that. Aldinger’s proposed scheme would enable the office of President to be a license to commit any crime under the sun, with impunity from criminal prosecution absent the precondition of impeachment, conviction, and removal from office. An outgoing President, he argues, could even pardon himself on his way out of the White House. How little Aldinger thinks about the office of President and our institutions of popular government.

In his text, Aldinger differentiates President Trump from “citizen Trump”, but that’s the whole point of this democratic exercise we’ve endeavored to perfect since the 18th century – the President is just another citizen. He has temporary powers and privileges lent to him through the Constitution – and laws and regulations promulgated thereunder – but he is not above the law.

If, as alleged, Trump retained classified materials that had not properly been declassified, then as a private citizen he had no right to possess them and had a duty immediately to return them. The indictment itself is damning. Others have improperly retained classified information inadvertently, and when discovered they have immediately rectified the breach – Clinton, Biden, Pence. But Trump refused to cooperate and knowingly kept some of America’s most sensitive secrets in his country club hotel/residence.

As mentioned above, Aldinger was big on suing the government for Covid restrictions – he simultaneously thinks the government possesses the powers of a king, but not enough power to take temporary emergency action to protect people from infectious disease. It is a good distillation of modern conservative thought – its “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” The law protects Trump and MAGA, but does not bind them. Trump can crime all day long with impunity. But were one to apply this reasoning to a Clinton, or even Joe Biden’s private citizen son, the law binds them but ought not protect them. The law binds governments and prevents them from requiring masks and distancing, and ought not protect them. As you would expect, the notion of government being powerless to act during pandemic is ahistorical nonsense.

We know that there is not a low low enough for Donald Trump, and that his depravity and illegality are limited only by his own imagination. That a lawyer would dream up and publish this piece of ahistorical, unsupported, un-American rubbish to justify it can only mean that we have found our next Sidney Powell.

The Big Distraction

While this country continues – systematically and on a daily basis – to fail its regular citizens, the GOP continues its Trumpist bandwagon to divide the country by distracting everyone with the shiny objects that make up the culture war.

If contemporary Republicans are to be taken seriously, the very fabric of our nation is at risk of being destroyed because a beer brand sent a can of beer to a transgender woman influencer. If contemporary Republicans are to be taken at face value, Target associates should be threatened with murder because the company is allegedly selling bathing suits that encourage “tucking” by boys so they can pass as girls. (The fact that this is just a lie does not matter. It sounds true). If contemporary Republicans are to be given a millisecond of your attention, asylum seekers are no different from “illegals” and must be hated when not feared, but excluded either way.

On the other hand, we have Republicans in congress who gleefully helped Donald Trump add fully a quarter of what constitutes today’s sovereign debt, but now refuse to raise the debt ceiling to pay their own bills because they believe it will hurt Joe Biden and the Democrats.

The Republicans do not care to make America better – they now care only to make America a safe space for their nominally Christian white supremacy. In order to do this, they now openly embrace fascism and say democracy is a failed experiment.

None of this is an exaggeration, as evidenced by the links accompanying each allegation.

Yesterday, sunshine fascist Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began his run for President. I do not know how it will fare because I have long ago stopped pretending to understand what motivates the Republican rank-and-file, apart from its reliance on hatred, division, and the culture war.

I heard him say via a radio report that, “the woke mind virus is basically cultural Marxism.” These are words that mean nothing in that order. This is just shorthand for the terminally online alt-right whom DeSantis is courting. “Woke mind virus” is a term used by cis-gendered older white people to express their misunderstanding, hatred, and fear of anything and anyone even mildly supportive of any ethnic, religious, racial minority or non-gender-conforming person. It is what fuels “all lives matter” and the so-called “Moms for Liberty.”

This is P.W. Botha’s Republican Party. They are the Christianist minority. If they don’t like it, it must be abolished and destroyed. They will bully and legislate the “woke” until they are too afraid to show up or speak up. They will take their AR-15s and threaten to murder the “woke”. They will erase the “woke” because they are little more than nihilist eliminationists pretending to be patriots.

“Cultural Marxism” – can you imagine Karl Marx, a bourgeois German philosopher of the mid-19th century having any inkling of what culture would be like in 2023? This term is not new. It was coined a couple of decades ago by the likes of Botha fan Pat Buchanan. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory because somehow the Republicans have magically paired an obsessive support for Israel with a pretty transparent fundamental anti-Semitism.

This is, I suppose, what one gets when one marries a political party to one set of religious sects and a gun lobby.

I am not someone who thinks that the squad are especially influential or persuasive, but they are pretty good at messaging. I am also not someone who thinks it’s cool to shit on Biden because he’s old. He won in 2020 precisely because he is not busy wasting time on Twitter. But I am someone who believes that immigration is a positive, regardless of someone’s visa status. I believe that gay and lesbian and trans and bi and any other queer or non-gender-conforming person has as much of a right to live a happy life, free from discrimination or violence as any other person. I believe that democracy is good, and that people who say “we’re a republic not a democracy” are idiots, because we are both – a democratic republic insofar as we have a popular vote and no monarchy.

I just sometimes wish that all of this idiocy and hypocrisy would end. This country – where guns are the biggest killer of children – is so deeply sick yet here we are talking about underpants sold at Target and a pretty pedestrian brand of beer.

Conservatism

Wilhoit’s law says that “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

One need only look and see what is going on in Tennessee and Montana as just two examples in the last few weeks to prove the truth of this law. It’s why we have gerrymandered electoral districts and Republicans calls to make voting more restricted and difficult.

I have to say there is nothing more hilarious than the party of Donald Trump crying about “decorum”, except for the fact that it’s all they can do to prevent Democrats from calling them out over their permissiveness over mass shootings and their cruel authoritarianism over transgender Americans.

It’s why the former Comptroller for Erie County – a guy who people used to like when he was on Channel 2 – posts things like this on his Twitter.

Baseball Bat Politics

Can we really be surprised by Donald Trump expressly threatening to assault or kill the Manhattan District Attorney with a baseball bat? Or, as Trump calls him, a “Soros-backed animal,” which is totally deranged and completely racist.

Rupert Murdoch’s foreign-owned NYPost

The answer is no, we cannot be surprised. Trumpism and the MAGA movement, (which currently controls the entire Republican Party), is nothing more than a neo-fascist, eliminationist, nihilistic, strongman cult. I mean, these people are literally praying to Trump now, which goes well beyond the definition of “cringe.” He is not just their dictator, their king, their Leader – he is their God and deity.

And if you are his enemy, he will threaten you and one of his well-armed – but poorly regulated – cultists will kill you.

Is it really any different from anything this lunatic has said or done in the last 13 or so years?

Via YouTube

Hey, maybe when Chrissy Casilio says she’s MAGA and proud of it, this is what she means? Someone should ask her, since she’s literally running for office and this is MAGA.

Michael Knowles at UB’s Thursday Night Pogrom

The hilariously misnomered “Young Americans for Freedom” right-wing club has invited Michael Knowles – a right-wing polemicist angling to be a dollar-store Julius Streicher for Gen-Z – to speak at SUNY Buffalo. Knowles made headlines literally just this week by calling for the “eradication” of “transgenderism” from “public life entirely,” then whining about coverage that correctly interpreted this as genocidal.

Universities are places of higher learning and by their very nature they should default to the free and open exchange of ideas. This is especially true with state-owned universities, since any act of censorship has direct First Amendment implications. So, the question becomes whether an overt public call for genocide is enough for SUNY Buffalo to disallow Michael Knowles from spreading his eliminationist rhetoric here in Buffalo.

Thing is, probably not. Even the expression of morally depraved ideas cannot easily be silenced.

Instead, this will devolve into a lowest-common-denominator, dumb culture war issue-of-the-week with right-wing commentators decrying how the “intolerant left” is trying to cancel this poor guy who just thinks transgender people don’t exist and should be eliminated somehow. The right will quite overtly find itself defending the free speech rights of a barely-known propagandist who simply rejects the fundamental humanity and existence of an entire group of Americans.

As always with conservatives, they’re punching down at one of the most defamed, misunderstood marginalized populations around.

UB’s YAF chapter endorses this message

I see all the different attempts to silence, cancel, or otherwise to protest UB and Knowles, but honestly what is the best way to combat this genocidal clown? Personally, I would find great satisfaction if Slee Hall was literally filled with people who just laugh hysterically at his every pronouncement and condemnation. Point and laugh at the absurd right-wing blue check who says this with a straight face:

According to the event flyer, Knowles is going to give a speech about how “radical feminism destroys women and everything else.” That’s an oldie but a goodie. Radical feminism – in this day and age? What is this, a Limbaugh bit from 1993? When there’s big bank to be made calling overtly for extermination? Pretty lazy for this guy to take student money and fall back on passé right-wing greatest hits such as “women are men’s property and not individuals with free will.” Maybe they can get Andrew Tate to Skype in from his Romanian jail cell.

Honestly, the best argument for keeping Michael Knowles off campus is that he’s really really bad at this.

This banal, provocatively unbuttoned twit claims that some amorphous “they” is “encouraging” transgender people to “mutilate themselves” to be more like the gender with which they identify, and that this is incompatible with the “radical feminist” idea that men and women are the same. His argument is that normal people are inconsistent when they argue that, on the one hand, e.g., both women and men can be good at math or science, while simultaneously agreeing that “transgenderism” exists as a thing in the world.

This is what passes now for conservative thought? That the left’s belief that a person’s sex chromosomes or genitals don’t affect their abilities or intelligence is somehow incompatible with a belief that in some they might adversely affect how a person interacts in life and how they feel? I mean, what’s one more depressed or suicidal closeted transgender person to YAF and Michael Knowles, right? As long as they don’t have to refer to someone who looks, e.g., vaguely masculine as “they”, it’s worth it, right?

We know all about genitalia, Michael. They don’t affect one’s abilities or intelligence any more than skin pigments do. This UB speech is nothing more than a warmed-over reactionary EIB microphone eruption. Whatever it is, know that it will be as boring as it will be stupid. UB should shut this speech down because it is so fundamentally dumb as to defeat the purpose of higher education. Of what use is a “free exchange of ideas” when the idea itself is so facile? YAF and Michael Knowles, when “conservative intelligentsia” emphasizes the “moron” in oxymoron.

Streicher Knowles is now crying foul at suggestions that he called for the eradication of transgender people, but this is a distinction without a difference. Knowles is just another in a long list of right-wing loudmouths making millions out of spreading fear and hatred – this time of transgender people – all the while pretending like his words are not thinly veiled incitements to commit violence against his targets.

Transgenderism” is the weasel word Knowles concocted to allow him to feign outrage and demand retractions from entities which rightly characterize his language as explicitly genocidal. He claims that he is not calling for the eradication of transgender individuals or the transgender community – but of “transgenderism.” He claims that “transgenderism” is some sort of ideology, but that’s not how he really defines it. What he is saying is that the state of being a transgender person is not something that exists.

“I don’t know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to genes, it refers to genetics, it refers to biology,” Knowles said on The Michael Knowles Show. “And the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with biology.”

“Nobody’s calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category,” he added. “It’s not a legitimate category of being.”

See? It’s simple. Since being transgender is “not a legitimate category of being,” it’s ok for UB’s YAF chapter and Knowles to call for the extermination of the very idea of “transgender,” which by definition, (to anyone with a brain sharper than that of a garden slug), includes transgender people. Not being able to countenance people different from him being happy in their own skin, this is Knowles’ last answer. It’s his “final solution,” if you will.

Knowles isn’t clever. He’s just another in a long line of amoral but media-savvy people cashing in on hate. He justifies his eliminationism through a somewhat novel feint – by simply declaring that transgender is a made-up thing that does not really exist. He’ll sue you if you correctly decipher what he’s saying. He doesn’t have to say that transgender people are Untermenschen – they are Niemalsmenschen; not inferior, but non-existent and the bare idea of them is fair game for extermination. What if Knowles decided that “Catholic” was a wholly made-up thing that does not exist in nature. His argument would be that it was not actually genocide for someone to call for the extermination of Catholicism because (1) no one said “Catholics,” per se, and (2) etymologically, Catholicism is a belief and not “genetics” or “biology.”

As he mansplains genocide, Knowles ignores that one cannot have what he calls “transgenderism” without there being transgender people. Whether or not he believes in them is irrelevant, but his argument can be boiled down to: he cannot call for the extermination of that which does not exist.

It is especially galling that the UB chapter of YAF has invited idiot Michael Knowles to speak in Buffalo less than a year after another adherent of the “great replacement theory” came to Buffalo from Binghamton to carry out his retribution at a Jefferson Avenue supermarket. Knowles, for his part, is also a big proponent of the “great replacement theory”.

The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles accused the left of attempting to “radically change American culture” through immigration in order to “flood this country with people who will — are more likely to support them politically.” 

Wow. Knowles is sexist, bigoted, and racist. The YAF trifecta!

What we are witnessing is a reactionary neo-fascist nascent modern pogrom against anything not explicitly ye olde cisgendered. The violent protests and unconstitutional state legislative bans against drag shows is part of this pogrom.

The normalization of professional Fox-hit pundits calling for the extermination of transgenderism-wink-wink-we-all-know-what-he-means is part of this pogrom.

The denigration of anyone or anything having to do with homosexuality as “grooming” is part of this pogrom.

The pogrom itself seeks to completely eradicate and eliminate from America anything and everything that is not explicitly heterosexual and cisgendered from public life, pushing it underground.

Why? Mostly because right-wingers are so deeply triggered by the idea of people not like them being happy; calling someone by their preferred pronouns. The thing that is evident to anyone with an even passing, casual knowledge of history is that pogroms are about violence, expulsion, and murder. There will be more and worse acts of violence against drag queens and gay people and transgender people. People like Knowles don’t think this is enough – they want this elimination and violence to be state-sanctioned, systemic, and final.

They will tell you to your face they don’t want to exterminate transgender people while they’re measuring the camps for bunks.

UB doesn’t have the power to silence Knowles the way Knowles would silence transgender Americans, female Americans, gay Americans, and whomever else he targets. We have the power to ridicule and condemn him and his hosts.

Performative Culture War Takes A Village

Go ahead and tell me what an American small-c conservative stands for nowadays. Better yet, tell me one concrete policy that is a Republican Party priority.

You can’t. There is no idea or ideology there anymore. In the long ago, when politics was fun and made a modicum of sense, you could say that Republicans and conservatives were for a strong military, low taxes, minimizing public spending, and generally limiting the scope of public involvement in the economy.

Then came the 90s and Newt Gingrich. The internet. Drudge. Lewinski. Bush. 9/11. War in Iraq. Katrina. 2008 financial crisis. Obama.

Gingrich was a demagogue who lay the foundation for today’s excuse for conservatism. Bush weakened America through his ill-advised adventurism in Iraq. He showed that a poorly managed government generates poor results with Katrina. The 2008 crisis really underscored how it seemed as if Republican governance exists for the sole purpose of ruining the economy and leaving it to Democrats to repair. Hence, the Keynesian responses to that 2008 meltdown.

Obama broke a lot of right-wing brains and led to idiocy like the birther debacle, which led ultimately to the election of an ignorant empty-vessel culture warrior in 2016, Donald Trump. Trump is now the leader of a cult that still idolizes him as the anti-Obama who unironically called his ideology “America First” as he further weakened and divided America. Every accusation is a confession – from “snowflake” on down.

Covid came along and, ultimately it became Republican dogma to reject vaccination, reject masks, and reject pretty much even the gentlest public health measures that were put in place to mandate that people give a shit about each other, since there is clearly no way in hell that such a thing would happen in this country voluntarily. It’s why professional assholes like Ben Carlisle don’t think people should have a choice to wear a mask to protect themselves from disease – he thinks those people should be mocked.

Now, the Republican Party doesn’t even have a platform anymore, really. It was supposed to have dominated the midterms, but didn’t. Its biggest and brightest stars are walking, talking culture war memes who rail against Ukraine, masks, Covid, vaccines, etc. ad infinitum.

It is this descent into neofascist anti-democratic hero-worship of Trump that results in people such as “Mayor Deb” in Williamsville. She isn’t the first weird right-winger to run for office in the town of Amherst, but boy did she make a splash by drawing attention to herself and her town with things that really were beside the point of running a village.

The thing that people tend to forget is that while these culture war people who, e.g., get upset that M&Ms aren’t sexually attractive enough for them anymore and whose existence and political ethos can be summed up as “owning the libs” make up a small percentage of self-identified Republicans. No matter what happens, this country will continue for the foreseeable future to have about 30 – 35% of its population in the thrall of a right-wing populist like Trump. Now, I happen to think that right-wing populism is a bad thing and objectively so.

Mayor Deb shows what the vast majority of regular people – “normies” think of her idiocy. When no one was paying attention, she won election. When people paid attention, she lost in a landslide. Like her buddy, Ben.

These culture warriors may win the occasional cancellation of M&Ms characters and the firings of hospital administrators over their Facebook posts, but luckily America isn’t quite stupid enough to keep them around elected office.

“Libs of TikTok” and the Right’s Hysterics over Drag Shows

Incidentally, Twitter is dead. It is now a private company owned by a right-wing narcissist who behaves there like a 13 year-old incel reply guy. He has reinstated Trump and Kanye West, he pushes right wing dogma and memes, and he is a completely toxic personality who has done real harm to his personal brand. Not just that, but his repugnant antics now render Tesla and his other brands unappealing and something I won’t support, ever, as long as he is still at the helm.

Musk’s solar roof tile business in South Buffalo was supposed to be cruising right along by now, producing a revolutionary product that would expand solar use at a cost equivalent to that of a conventional roof. How is that working out? How many properties in WNY, for example, sport a solar roof?

With that out of the way, the right wing – nationally and locally – are in a constant state of vitriol and panic over – of all things – drag shows. Among the usual suspects on the right, drag queens are all pedophiles and “groomers” and drag shows are tantamount to the peep shows that used to line the streets in and around Times Square before the 90s.

What do these people like Chaya Raichik and Matt Walsh and local malcontents think goes on at drag shows? Obviously, some are NSFW and adult-themed through language and sexual content, but what are these people so threatened by if a man dresses flamboyantly to read stories to children at a library? How is “dress-up” not age-appropriate?

Their rhetoric now comes dripping with the blood of innocent people who were minding their own business. They don’t care.

DeSantis, Migrants, and Gratuitous Cruelty

Buffalo is the city of “Good Neighbors.” It’s a sort of marketing tagline. Is Buffalo friendlier than its New York peer cities? Who knows – I doubt such a thing could be quantified. Ultimately, it makes us all feel better about ourselves. We’re not like the other people. We’re not like New York City. We’re more midwestern. We’re nice.

There are plenty of examples of good neighborliness (see, for instance, the outpouring of support for the West Side Bazaar, hit recently by a major fire.)

But there are a slew of examples of ugliness. Consider if you will this letter to the editor of the Buffalo News, penned by one Joseph Fahey of Williamsville.

The hypocrisy of the Democrats is unending. Fifteen thousand illegal aliens showed up in the small community of Del Rio, Texas, in one day, and we barely heard about it. Fifty willing undocumented immigrants are sent to the super-wealthy Martha’s Vineyard, and the elites declare it a humanitarian crisis.

Del Rio Texas is on the US-Mexico border. The Mexican city of Ciudad Acuna lies on the other side of the fence. The 15,000 immigrants Mr. Fahey mentions came mostly from Haiti in September 2021. In order to reach that spot, those brave people had to make their way across the sea to Mexico and then to the US border on a perilous journey. They come to the United States seeking refuge from a failed state, gang violence, and crushing poverty. They come here seeking the same opportunity that your ancestors sought when they came here, no matter when or from where.

Humanitarian crises such as the ones Mr. Fahey mentions in Del Rio are more than just an opportunity for men in Williamsville with Irish surnames to revel in their misfortune and to own the libs. These are human beings and they deserve to be treated with respect.

But what, Mr. Fahey, does a 2021 crisis of Haitian migrants in Texas have to do with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis? Why would Florida’s governor pay six figures of taxpayer money to fly a handful of Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard. While I am old enough to remember when Republicans supported immigrants fleeing failed communist states, Mr. Fahey misstates the facts.

DeSantis retained the services of an unknown vendor to select refugees to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. Plying them with McDonalds coupons and having them sign a waiver written only in English, a woman known only as “Perla” arranged for their transportation. The migrants could not legally work – an idiotic policy that only worsens these refugees’ plight. At a time when there is a supposed labor shortage, certainly work could be found for migrants ready and willing to do work.

Mr. Fahey says the Venezuelan refugees whom DeSantis tricked were “willing”, but the facts say otherwise:

“I don’t like the way they treated us,” said Jose, who made the journey to the border with two stuffed animals given to him as a gift by his 5-year old son, whom he left behind with relatives. “We’re human beings.”

Most of the migrants who seek asylum at the Southern border are released pending a court date. Most of them already have friends or family in the US. The asylum seekers intend to move along to other spots throughout the US. Barring a fundamental change in immigration law and policy, I have no doubt that other states would cooperate with Texas and other border states to facilitate this transportation. Resettlement agencies exist throughout the US to do help new immigrants start their new lives. In Buffalo we have several of them.

But DeSantis is instead kicking off his Presidential campaign by being deliberately cruel to refugees from a communist state and dropping them off on an island off the mainland – not anywhere near where their people are. None of this was done out of compassion or empathy or any sort of earnest desire to help. It was done out of hatred.

What Mr. Fahey is too inarticulate to say is that he supports Republican governors cruelly worsening the suffering of migrants from Venezuela because it’s a good meme.

Mr. Fahey gleefully continues,

NBC News published a statement by a Vineyard resident who said, “Florida Gov. DeSantis sending asylum-seekers to Martha’s Vineyard is like ‘me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there.’” Other observers perversely compared sending these people to Martha’s Vineyard to the Holocaust.

Well, it is. DeSantis took people from Texas and spent Florida money to send them to a tony island off the coast of Massachusetts, under false pretenses. It was a form of human trafficking and accomplished no positive outcome.`

Because our system deems Martha’s Vineyard residents to be more important than regular Americans, the “crisis” was dealt with in one day. The Massachusetts National Guard was activated, and the migrants were removed to a nearby military base. I wonder what the Democrats’ reaction would be if Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott activated their National Guards and dumped these people off at a military base? I don’t really wonder.

Not sure how “our system” deems people on the Vineyard to be more important, but it is true that Martha’s Vineyard, an island of 15,000 residents, is ill-equipped to properly and adequately handle the resettlement of migrants flown from Texas as part of a meme. To their credit, the people on the Vineyard sprang to action and helped to feed, clothe, and house these migrants until such time as their onward travel could be arranged.

Mr. Fahey sees the quick action put in motion by Massachusetts’ Republican Governor, Charlie Baker to help and accommodate these refugees, whom DeSantis duped, as an indictment. Really, though, it reveals that treating immigrants as worthless cattle is a choice. Republican Governor DeSantis made that choice while Republican Governor Baker did not.

They were not “dumped … off at a military base.” They are not in custody and they have been offered shelter, food, clothing, and services as they plan their next steps with the help of resettlement agencies and immigration attorneys. They are getting the help they need and deserve, without any craven grandstanding Republican using them for a meme.

Unlike the Trump Administration’s behavior, the children were not separated from their parents.

I saw some people on Twitter allege that Martha’s Vineyard “deported” the refugees. One cannot “deport” someone from an island in Barnstable County, Massachusetts to mainland Barnstable County, Massachusetts.

I hope DeSantis and Abbott continue this practice. Perhaps the governors should send more undocumented immigrants to progressive communities in Western New York, such as the Elmwood Village, or tony East Aurora, where I’m sure the reaction would be the same.

Journey’s End, Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Services, and the International Institute are among the agencies in WNY tasked with helping immigrants start a new life in western New York. Erie County is especially welcoming of migrants, and large communities of people from places like Burma, Somalia, Ukraine, and Yemen have brightened our community.

Whether he realizes it or not, Mr. Fahey is, in effect, paraphrasing Heinrich von Treitschke and Der Sturmer. He sees immigrants as people to be foisted upon his political opponents. They are a scourge to be used primarily to wipe that shit-eating grin off those libs’ faces. The underlying attitude is that immigrants sind unser Unglück.

I wonder where Mr. Fahey lives, but I’m willing to bet that 14222 is more diverse than his zip code, and that the Elmwood Village doesn’t need lectures on inclusion or welcoming of immigrants from the likes of him.

To be fair, it was not very nice sending those people to a community inhabited by hypocritical, elitist snobs.

Perhaps Mr. Fahey should put himself in the shoes of these migrants fleeing poverty and violence and see them as fellow human beings rather than culture war ammunition.

They Plan the End of America

The fake patriots. (Faketriots?) The phony law-and-order-for-thee-but-not-for-me types. The cretins who think America is about waving flags at overpasses and owning libs rather than representative democracy and the rule of law. We are witnesses to some unique things in the last 18 months.

We have witnessed an attempted coup. Coups d’etat are especially rare in the Anglophone world – countries created through British colonialism, which adhere to common law and rely on some form of parliamentary representative democracy to hold the reins of power.

Did you know there was a “stop the steal” astroturf group ready to accuse a victorious Hillary Clinton of stealing the election? Miracle of miracles, Trump won so that plan was tabled until 2020, when it was revived. The 2020 election was run in the midst of a global pandemic, which resulted in states making temporary changes to make ballot access easier and contact-free. As the in-person vote was tallied, it looked good for Trump. But the absentee and mail-in votes needed to be counted, and the Republicans have pretty uniformly decided that these votes were somehow unworthy and uncountable.

So, “stop the steal” was revived, Trump and his henchmen worked overtime to literally try to steal the election. The Roger Stonification and Steve Bannonization of America They had Republicans in swing states concoct fake, unchosen slates of “electors” in an effort illegally to change results in places like Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. They falsely claimed the machines were rigged by faraway Communists. They brought lawsuits – almost all of which were summarily dismissed – trying to change the results of various states’ elections. Trump himself used the power of the Presidential office to demonize and harass innocent civilian election workers. Trump pressured state officials to rig the election in his favor and to overthrow the will of the people – the ballot box.

It culminated with an armed insurrection on January 6th that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the Congress from carrying out the will of the American people, and to force – literally – that Donald Trump be re-elected as President for life. These people are not the principled heirs of our Enlightenment-guided Founding Fathers – they are instead the ignorant offspring of Confederate traitors. Local fool Carl Paladino is their pro-Hitler avatar.

To call the Trump MAGA cult un-American is an understatement. This was a coordinated coup attempt. It was a conspiracy to defraud the United States and to end our system of rules, laws, and elections as we know it. Our republic still hangs by a thread as an entire major political party remains in the thrall of a grifter charlatan who would destroy the country for the sake of vanity and power.

Maybe in addition to vanity and power, it is also a last gasp of good old-fashioned white Christian nationalism as a reaction to societal changes that they fear and reject. It all starts with abortion and it has morphed into equating anything having to do with LGBTQ+ rights as pedophilia and “grooming“. It has to do with terrorizing drag queen library readings and abolishing Pride Month displays at libraries.

I mean – drag queens. They say that this is somehow sexualizing kids. Kids who play dress-up all the time.

Florida banning the mere mention of anything having to do with gender identity, likely unintentionally banning kids playing house.

But it’s not just discriminatory legislation and terroristic action – it is the legitimization of this transformation of this country into a white Christian nationalist authoritarian country by a Supreme Court hand-picked by one trad Catholic man, Leonard Leo. By the time you read this, the Supreme Court will have likely overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1972 SCOTUS opinion, which held that states cannot restrict abortions in the first trimester of a pregnancy. Many Justices likely to vote to do this also told the country and its elected representatives that Roe is “settled law,” lying to convince people they would not do what they have done. To lie to the people to gain a lifetime appointment should be disqualifying in a functioning republic, but it isn’t. The libs will be owned, and this is the primary goal. Doctors, medical providers, and ultimately women will have a medical procedure rendered illegal overnight, and they will all of them face criminal sanctions or perhaps, if the Christian nationalists have their way, involuntary psychiatric committal. This is all an Orwellian nightmare of democratic backsliding – of reactionary authoritarianism, which one can only hope is short-lived.

As usual, Democrats as the sole political organization of sanity and western liberal democratic values are ill-equipped rhetorically to combat this right-wing eruption of sheer insanity.

Western New York, which was recently the target of a racist attack by a white nationalist terrorist from Binghamton, has a disproportionate number of homegrown Trump cult fascists in its midst. WBFO is doing a great job on this front right now, as has Investigative Post. A must-follow is Heidi Jones on Twitter. When you see indicted insurrectionist Pete Harding lead a group of people to wave flags on Walden or on an overpass by the blue water tower, this is not some grassroots outpouring of patriotic love for democracy and the rule of law, but an outspoken effort to end them in favor of right-wing authoritarian hegemony.

The battle isn’t about left-of-center pragmatism versus fiscal conservatism anymore. It is about American democracy versus authoritarianism. It is an existential battle of normalcy against nihilism, and now is the time for choosing.

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