Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

And, all must understand Trump's supporters don't care about any of Trump psychopathy or his narcissism. They only care about fixing America to more back in their own image. In that sense they dislike democracy, and see themselves as Gods.

The conservative movement is rejecting America

A recent essay in a prominent right-wing outlet gives an unusually clear window into the modern right’s anti-democratic worldview.

By Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp [e-mail] Apr 1, 2021, 1:40pm EDT

[...]

The implications of Ellmers’s worldview are chilling. In a January 2020 essay, he predicted — more in sorrow than in anger, of course — that a civil war is coming.

“Not for the first time in our nation’s history, if this state of affairs continues force may be embraced as the only alternative when reason fails,” Ellmers writes. “We must fervently hope that things will change before they become violent. But if the clueless attitudes of our sclerotic elite remain unaltered, it is not hard to see what’s on the horizon.”

Freedom against democracy

If the extremism of Ellmers’s essay strikes you as similar to what you’ve heard from authoritarian political movements of the past, you’re not alone.

John Ganz, a perceptive critic of American conservatism, recently wrote that Ellmers’s essay should properly be termed “fascist .. https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-week-in-fascism .” Excommunicating a large percentage of the population from the body politic, describing once-idyllic society hopelessly corrupted by the forces of change, describing one’s enemies as animals or diseases, invoking the threat of physical force in a political context — these are all historically hallmarks of fascist rhetoric.

This analysis holds despite the fact that Ellmers speaks in a democratic idiom, portraying himself as a defender of the American democratic tradition against its enemies. Ganz notes that calls to restore “freedom,” “liberty,” and even “democracy” were used by fascist intellectuals and movements in interwar Germany, France, and Italy because they were culturally powerful — a way of recruiting the people to one’s way of thinking by speaking their language.

“In the US context it also makes sense that the reactionary mind would inevitably mythologize a ‘truer’ version of our republican and democratic traditions as the author does in this piece, because those are the basic symbols of our political tradition,” he writes. “In the French context, many fascist and para-fascist groups declared fealty to the ‘republican’ tradition, which is as nearly predominant in that country as it is in our own.”

One does not need to go to Europe to see political oppression defended in democratic terms. In 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace delivered an inaugural address in Montgomery .. https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/voices/id/2952 , casting the South’s long tradition of oppression of African Americans as integral to southern freedom:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom- loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Ellmers’s essay is in line with this tradition, identifying freedom as a right that only a certain section of the population deserves. Those outside of it, either because they come from the wrong background or think the wrong way, have no just claim on our political system. When they wield power, it is by definition oppression.

In some ways, this is the central animating idea of the broader conservative movement in America. Ellmers is a radical who sees himself as opposed to “establishment” conservatism, but in reality, many on the broader right share a more attenuated version of his worldview — and pursue the disempowerment of their political opponents.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/1/22356594/conservatives-right-wing-democracy-claremont-ellmers

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Another Trump hate rally: The threats get worse, and polite America turns away
Trump spreads the poisonous gospel of white supremacy week after week — and we keep pretending it's not happening

By Chauncey DeVega

The American news media has collectively decided to ignore Donald Trump's threats of white supremacist violence and sedition. If you believe this will keep you safe from his schemes and machinations, or from what his legions of followers may do, you are greatly mistaken.

Apparently, the gatekeepers of the approved public discourse have convinced themselves that they are somehow serving the public interest by ignoring these escalating threats. In reality, these gatekeepers are doing exactly the opposite: They are normalizing American fascism by minimizing its dangers. In a moment when the news media as an institution should sound the alarm even more loudly about the threat to American democracy, safety and security represented by Trumpism and neofascism a choice has been made to mock or whitewash the imminent danger.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168566734

Going on seven years ago

Johns Hopkins’ Top Psychologist Releases Terrifying Diagnosis of President Trump

Zach Cartwright | January 28, 2017

One of the nation’s top psychologists just broke one of his profession’s ethics rules to give President Donald Trump a professional diagnosis.

John D. Gartner, a psychotherapist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, told US News that he believes Trump has “malignant narcissism,” which is incurable, and different from narcissistic personality disorder. Gartner violated the “Goldwater Rule” of the psychology profession, in which a diagnosis of a public figure without personally examining them, and without their consent, is considered unethical.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=128231379

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'The Most Dangerous Man in the World’: Trump Is Violent, Immature and Insecure, Psych Experts Say

[...]

After the American Psychiatric Association expanded its so-called Goldwater Rule into a gag order on mental health professionals, the forensic psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee organized a conference at Yale with the title, "Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?" to discuss the rule and its relevance during the increasingly alarming Trump presidency. While only two dozen attended physically in an atmosphere of fear, the conference tapped a huge groundswell of interest in the forms of hundreds of communications from mental health professionals: just as football players don't give up their right to free speech when they take the field, they agreed that the moral and civic duty to warn about the president's dangerousness should supersede professional rules about neutrality. This led to Dr. Lee editing a new book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President. Here are excerpts from four of the essays in the book.

A Persistent Loss of Reality
— Dr. Lance Dodes

Because Donald Trump has been a very public figure for many years, we are in an excellent position to know his behaviors—his speech and actions—which are precisely the basis for making an assessment of his dangerousness, whether we assess him using the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for antisocial personality disorder, as below, or whether we apply our knowledge of malignant narcissism, both of which include the signs and symptoms of sociopathy. Let us consider these in turn.

Lack of Empathy for Others; Lack of Remorse; Lying and Cheating

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