In his book, “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), Sinclair Lewis wrote, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross.”
Though inaccurate as to both the quote and as an attribution to Sinclair, close enough from Debs.
So it can't come any other way than from the GOP, now can it?
In 2005 a letter to the editor of a Poughkeepsie, New York newspaper attributed the saying to Sinclair Lewis and incorrectly cited a book that does not contain the expression:
In his book, “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), Sinclair Lewis wrote, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross.”
In conclusion, this entry presents a snapshot of current research. In 1917 and 1918 labor leader Eugene V. Debs did speak about oppressors and tyrants who wrapped themselves “in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both”.
In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was depicted as a movement that metaphorically cloaked itself with a flag and employed religious symbols. In the 1930s James Waterman Wise and others stated that fascism would deceptively wrap itself in the American flag. The ascriptions to Sinclair Lewis and Huey Long are unsupported.
In 1917 “The Muncie Sunday Star” of Indiana printed an announcement for a speech that prominent labor activist Eugene V. Debs was planning to deliver. The announcement presented a quotation from Debs which partially matched the saying under examination:
Every robber or oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both. I am not a patriot as defined in the lexicon of the house of Morgan. I’d not murder my fellow men of my own accord, and why should I do it at the behest of the master class?
During a speech delivered in 1918 Debs made a similar statement:
No wonder Jackson said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” He had the Wall Street gentry in mind or their prototypes, at least; for in every age it has been the tyrant, who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both. (Shouts of “Good, good” from the crowd) (applause).
Lyin' Trump spreads new lies about foreign-backed voter fraud, stoking fears of a 'rigged election' this November Marshall Cohen
By Marshall Cohen, CNN Updated 2:43 PM ET, Mon June 22, 2020
Washington (CNN)Reeling after a weekend campaign rally with lower-than-expected turnout, President Donald Trump changed the subject Monday morning with a series of widely debunked lies about alleged voter fraud in US elections, stoking fears of a "rigged election" this November.
The apocalyptic myth that helps explain evangelical support for Trump
""Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes "Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Part 2 of Interview with Robert Paxton, Father of Fascism Studies [...] Professor Paxton, thanks for staying with us for Part 2 of this conversation. Have you been surprised by the rise and the popularity of Donald Trump? ROBERT PAXTON: Totally surprised. Not so very long ago, Trump was a guaranteed laugh line. He was considered a buffoon. All you had to do was to show the hair and call him “The Donald,” and everyone kind of snickered. And suddenly he’s this—he’s this immense power. He’s touched the nerve with his style, which has fascist overtones, encouraging violence, attacking the internal enemy and so forth, saying that the system is rotten and it needs an outsider to fix it, which is a fascist kind of appeal—make Germany great, make America great. Suddenly he’s touched a nerve, and for millions of people he is suddenly seen taken more than seriously. And that’s a strange flip. That’s a strange transformation.""
Energy Secretary Rick Perry leads a prayer during a Cabinet meeting at the White House last week. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
By Thomas Lecaque Thomas Lecaque is an assistant professor of history at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa.
“God’s used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn’t perfect. Saul wasn’t perfect. Solomon wasn’t perfect,” outgoing Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in an interview on “Fox & Friends” before going on to claim that he had given the president “a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago. And I shared with him, I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people who say, you know, you are the chosen one,’ and I said, ‘You were.’ ”
Perry’s statement — especially that “chosen one” bit — would be more surprising in a different administration. At this point, though, it could almost disappear into the background chatter of the administration and its allies. Presidential adviser Paula White, for example, uses the description of a demonic struggle to paint contemporary politics as a holy war .. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2019/11/paula-white-donald-trumps-new-white-house-adviser-ratchets-up-fake-news-rhetoric-denouncing-demonic-networks.html . In a sermon about Trump in June, she proclaimed, “I declare President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy of the enemy, every strategy, and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny.”
Perry’s and White’s praise may seem outlandish or extreme, but it is entirely in keeping with the way many of the president’s advocates speak of him. Indeed, the tenor of these public pronouncements help explain why he is supported by some 65 percent of white evangelical voters, despite his many improprieties and failings. As Perry’s and White’s remarks remind us, “modern” Christianity has not cast off old ideas. One of its oldest is evident in the “calling and destiny” that White evokes: Implicit in her bombast is a vision of the president as a triumphantly apocalyptic figure, one who evokes the medieval legend of the Last World Emperor .. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/nebuchadnezzars-dream-9780190274207?cc=us&lang=en&; .
The Last World Emperor originates in the apocalyptic sermon known as “Pseudo-Methodius .. https://medapocalypse.wordpress.com/texts/pseudo-methodius/ ,” written in Syriac between 685 and 690 after the Arab conquest of the Middle East. The prophecy speaks of a Byzantine or Roman king who would lead a successful war against the forces of Islam and establish a new era of peace. That calm would hold for a decade, at which point the forces of “Gog and Magog” would attack. Instead of resisting them, the king would travel to Mount Golgotha to lay down his crown, fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel and setting the stage for the Second Coming and a final apocalyptic battle between good and evil. The Last World Emperor and Daniel differ most notably in that the former demands a flawed secular hero as the champion. It therefore offers a model that allows the religious to cast secular political leaders as apocalyptic heroes, regardless of their personal failings.
This quality likely contributed to the story’s long afterlife. In Western Europe, the Last World Emperor became a Frankish king, who would unite Christendom before retiring to Jerusalem at the arrival of the Antichrist, the Second Coming and a final apocalyptic battle. Charlemagne was cast as a Last World Emperor model for centuries, despite rumors that he slept with his daughters or sister. It also inspired Otto III in the year 1000, members of the First Crusade in 1096 and later figures such as Charles V of Spain. It even informed the thinking of Christopher Columbus, who wrote a “Book of Prophecies” after his fourth voyage in which he depicted King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in the dual role of Last World Emperor.
VIDEO - Opinion | Trump represents the grotesque inflation of the presidency Conservatives once believed in congressional supremacy but became intoxicated with the power of the presidency after Ronald Reagan, says George F. Will. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
A theology for times of crisis, real or imagined, the Last World Emperor narrative actually requires a flawed lay hero in the model of the biblical King David — proud, combative and sexually impure but beloved by God not just despite his transgressions but because of them. The prophesied leader must also be militant, prepared to cleanse the West of the impure (which includes not only dissidents and unbelievers but also, as in many Christian religious myths, Jews), reunite “Western Civilization” and violently destroy the power of both the Antichrist and Islam. In the process, he will bring about the second coming. It is, in other words, an ideology built on anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim and anti-heretic persecution.
Perry’s and White’s implicit allusions to this tradition would just be rhetoric if others in the administration weren’t actively bolstering similar notions. Within the government, Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo .. https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pompeo-christian-leader-speech-trump-secretary-state-separation-church-1465143 , Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and others bolster .. https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/mike-pence-will-be-the-most-powerful-christian-supremacist-in-us-history/ .. the connection between Trump’s presidency and the promise of a Christian Empire. None of them are speaking explicitly about the Last World Emperor, of course, and it’s entirely possible that none of them has even heard of the story, but that’s not how powerful prophecies work. Even when they’re not an explicit part of the conversation, they provide a framework to guide and justify actions, or to give hope for the future. In this case, the framework of apocalypticism is a framework of hope: A dominant power group, feeling their power threatened, applies a prophecy from a time of similar power collapse to justify actions that range for immoral to unconstitutional via religious doctrine.
Though such apocalypticism is sometimes treated as a fringe belief .. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/worldview.html — a series of “wild claims” — it forms a heart of certain brands of evangelical Christianity. “Apocalypse” tends to be synonymous with catastrophe, but the heart of Christian apocalypticism is hope: a desire for the new heaven and the new Earth, the coming of the Kingdom of God. And if the kingdom is the goal and a desirable outcome, is it any surprise that there are those who want to usher it in faster? The problem is that any attempt to usher it in requires radical change — and often radical violence to bring it about.
We’ve seen this mentality in practice when apocalyptic evangelicals praised Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Contemporary Christian apocalyptic thought focuses on Israel and especially Jerusalem, and the response shows how that sector received the announcement. Republican state Sen. Doug Broxson of Florida said at a rally: “Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heard about Jerusalem — where the king of kings, where our soon coming king is coming back to Jerusalem — it is because President Trump declared Jerusalem to be [the] capital of Israel.”
There’s also the Christian nationalism showcased by Pompeo and Attorney General William P. Barr in October, mixing the administration with Christian nationalist doctrine. Pompeo’s “Being a Christian Leader” speech in Nashville emphasized his role as a Christian leader in government service and was advertised on the State Department’s official website. Barr’s speech at the University of Notre Dame was even more extreme, claiming to describe “the force, fervor and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today” and offering an image of a war between Christians and “militant secularists” who “take delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.” Barr reaffirmed this sentiment in his Nov. 15 speech to the Federalist Society, saying that “the so-called progressive treat politics as their religion.”
“Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection,” he said while also arguing for increased executive power to respond to great challenges that include “most recently, the fight against Islamist fascism.”
We may laugh when President Trump calls himself “the chosen one” or likens himself to the “King of Israel” or like “the second coming of God,” and it’s even possible that he’s joking when he borrows this religious vocabulary. But there are people who take him and this ideology seriously .. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2018/oct/26/rep-matt-shea-takes-credit-criticism-for-document-/. Trump does not have to think of himself as the Messiah for others to take it up .. https://religionnews.com/2019/08/23/why-trump-and-some-of-his-followers-believe-he-is-the-chosen-one/ . In the end, all that really matters is that “God’s used imperfect people all through history.” For Trump’s devotees, then, his failings are actually reason to be hopeful, if only because they suggest he’ll lead us into the world to come.
Trump and the Republican party exemplify these five elements of fascism
"Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes "Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Part 2 of Interview with Robert Paxton, Father of Fascism Studies"
---------- Related: European fascism was popular because, for those not persecuted, it was a welfare state [...]An analogy is haunting the United States—the analogy of fascism. It is virtually impossible (outside certain parts of the Right-wing itself) to try to understand the resurgent Right without hearing it described as—or compared with—20th-century interwar fascism. Like fascism, the resurgent Right is irrational, close-minded, violent, and racist. So goes the analogy, and there’s truth to it. But fascism did not become powerful simply by appealing to citizens’ darkest instincts. Fascism also, crucially, spoke to the social and psychological needs of citizens to be protected from the ravages of capitalism at a time when other political actors were offering little help. [...]There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism—much less ethnic cleansing—but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem. In response to the horror of fascism, in part, New Deal Democrats in the United States, and social democratic parties in Europe, also moved to re-negotiate the social contract. They promised citizens that they would control capitalism and provide social welfare policies and undertake other measures to strengthen national solidarity—but without the loss of freedom and democracy that fascism entailed. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167097658
The Jan. 6 Committee Is Promising It Has the Goods. We’re About to Find Out ... down some .. Madeleine Albright: I'm warning the American public - maligning of the press, talking about the press as the enemy of the people - a president who believes he is above the law - use of slogans and meetings to generate even more division in society -a lack of sense of what democratic institutions are about
'Unprecedented': Trump calls media 'enemy of the people' as concerns of violence spike - threat of political violence rolls over every aspect of American civil life - attacks on prosecutors who have charged him -threats to them, their families, their staff - Democrats are spending record sums on security for themselves, their families, their staffs - call MSM enemy of the people - accuses US top military officials of treason - has attacked the jurors, the grand jurors and the vast jury pool
Trump is often described as ‘authoritarian’. But that doesn’t really capture the more alarming aspects of his movement
‘Authoritarians do not stir people up against establishment elites. They use or co-opt those elites. By contrast, fascists galvanize public rage at presumed (or imaginary) cultural elites to gain and maintain power.’ Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
Sat 17 Jun 2023 20.05 AEST Last modified on Sat 17 Jun 2023 20.34 AEST
That vision includes mandatory stop-and-frisk. Deploying the military to fight street crime, break up gangs and deport immigrants. Purging the federal workforce.
“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said at his first 2024 campaign rally in Waco, Texas. “Today, I add I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
How do we describe what Trump wants for America?
“Authoritarianism” isn’t adequate. It is fascism. Fascism stands for a coherent set of ideas different from – and more dangerous than – authoritarianism.
To fight those ideas, it’s necessary to be aware of what they are and how they fit together.
Borrowing from the cultural theorist Umberto Eco, the historians Emilio Gentile and Ian Kershaw, the political scientist Roger Griffin, and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, I offer five elements that distinguish fascism from authoritarianism.
1. The rejection of democracy, the rule of law and equal rights under the law in favor of a strongman who interprets the popular will.
“The election was stolen.” (Trump, 2020)
“I am your justice … I am your retribution.” (Trump, 2023)
Authoritarians believe society needs strong leaders to maintain stability. They vest in a dictator the power to maintain social order through the use of force (armies, police, militia) and bureaucracy.
By contrast, fascists view strong leaders as the means of discovering what society needs. They regard the leader as the embodiment of society, the voice of the people.
2. The galvanizing of popular rage against cultural elites.
“Your enemies” are “media elites”, … “the elites who led us from one financial and foreign policy disaster to another”. (Trump, 2015, 2016)
Authoritarians do not stir people up against establishment elites. They use or co-opt those elites to gain and maintain power.
By contrast, fascists galvanize public rage at presumed (or imaginary) cultural elites and use mass rage to gain and maintain power. They stir up grievances against those elites for supposedly displacing average people and seek revenge. In doing so, they create mass parties. They often encourage violence.
3. Nationalism based on a dominant “superior” race and historic bloodlines.
“Tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border.” (Trump, 2015)
“Jewish people that vote for a Democrat [show] great disloyalty.” (Trump, 2019)
“Getting critical race theory out of our schools is … a matter of national survival.” (Trump, 2022)
Authoritarians see nationalism as a means of asserting the power of the state. They glorify the state. They want it to dominate other nations.
Authoritarianism seeks to protect or expand its geographic boundaries. It worries about foreign enemies encroaching on its territory.
By contrast, fascism embodies what it considers a “superior” group – based on race, religion and historic bloodlines. Nationalism is a means of asserting that superiority.
Fascists worry about disloyalty and sabotage from groups within the nation that don’t share the same race or bloodlines. These “others” are scapegoated, excluded or expelled, sometimes even killed.
Fascists believe schools and universities must teach values that extol the dominant race, religion and bloodline. Schools should not teach inconvenient truths (such as America’s history of genocide and racism).
[ INSERT: Nearly half of Republicans polled say schools shouldn’t teach history of racism by Brooke Migdon | Nov. 10, 2021 | Nov. 10, 2021 Story at a glance * More than 40 percent of Republicans in a Monmouth University poll said they don’t approve of teaching the history of racism in public schools. * Overall, 75 percent of adults surveyed across political lines said they supported teaching the history of racism in schools, but only 43 percent said they supported teaching critical race theory. * Critics say critical race theory teaches white children to feel guilty and Black children to feel disempowered. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/581029-nearly-half-of-republicans-polled-say-schools-shouldnt/ ]
4. Extolling brute strength and heroic warriors.
“You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong. (Trump, 6 January 2021)
“I am your warrior.” (Trump, 2023)
The goal of authoritarianism is to gain and maintain state power. For authoritarians, “strength” comes in the form of large armies and munitions.
By contrast, the ostensible goal of fascism is to strengthen society. Fascism’s method of accomplishing this is to reward those who win economically and physically and to denigrate or exterminate those who lose.
Fascism depends on organized bullying – a form of social Darwinism. For the fascist, war and violence are means of strengthening society by culling the weak and extolling heroic warriors.
5. Disdain of women and fear of non-standard gender identities or sexual orientation.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” (Trump, 2005)
“You have to treat ’em like shit.” (Trump, 1992)
“[I will] promote positive education about the nuclear family … rather than erasing the things that make men and women different.” (Trump, 2023)
By contrast, fascism is organized around the particular hierarchy of male dominance. The fascist heroic warrior is male. Women are relegated to subservient roles.
[Trump, DeSantis vie for evangelical vote in D.C. face-off [...]DeSantis also talked up Florida's law that bans abortion at six weeks, one of the most restrictive in the nation. "We have stood up," he said. Trump also addressed abortion at the council event, saying he supports bans with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother, a position that was received coolly by the crowd. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172834532]
In fascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order.
Fascism seeks to eliminate homosexual, transgender and queer people because they are thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior.
These five elements of fascism reinforce each other:
Rejection of democracy in favor of a strongman depends on galvanizing popular rage.
Popular rage draws on a nationalism based on a supposed superior race or ethnicity.
That superior race or ethnicity is justified by social Darwinist strength and violence, as exemplified by heroic warriors.
Strength, violence and the heroic warrior are centered on male power.
These five elements find exact expression in Donald Trump .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump .. and the white Christian nationalist movement he is encouraging. This is also the direction that most of the Republican party is now heading.
They are not the elements of authoritarianism. They are the essential elements of fascism.
America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about Trump’s authoritarianism. In describing what he is seeking to impose on America, the media should be using the term fascism.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
UNFORCED ERROR— Since Donald Trump emerged on the national political scene in 2015, journalists and pundits have been debating whether it’s appropriate to compare him and the MAGA movement to the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe — and, more specifically, to the Nazism that gained traction in Germany throughout the 1920s. Some of Trump’s critics — including Biden’s campaign — argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison. Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders — and even some of his more historically-minded critics — argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.
Yet the ongoing “f-word debate” seems to ignore one key dynamic: Trump and his campaign keep inviting the comparison themselves.
Trump’s latest self-inflicted juxtaposition came on Monday evening, when Trump’s official Truth Social account shared a pro-Trump video containing a reference to the “unified reich” — echoing the term that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party used to refer to the fascist empire that they aspired to create before the Second World War. The video was deleted from Trump’s account, and a Trump campaign spokesperson promptly stepped in to clarify that the clip was “not an [official] campaign video,” adding that it was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word.”
The Associated Press subsequently reported that the language in the video, which featured old-timey newspaper copy in the background, was referring to the 19th century unification of Germany, not Hitler’s Third Reich. It was copied from a Wikipedia entry that said: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.” (The specific date from the Wikipedia article was not visible in the video that Trump shared.) But the political damage was already done: Within a few hours, an account associated with the Biden campaign had already posted screenshots of the video to X, claiming that the Trump campaign was “echoing Nazi Germany.”
Regardless of how or why the video made its way onto Trump’s social media feed, the incident highlights a broader problem for the GOP: Right-leaning corners of the internet are absolutely inundated with fascist or fascist-adjacent content, and that content is increasingly making its way — either intentionally or accidentally — into more mainstream conservative discourse.
After all, this isn’t the first time that the porous digital boundary between the online far-right and the MAGA movement has created real-world political problems for Trump. In July 2015, during Trump’s first bid for the White House, his campaign’s official Twitter account posted — and then quickly deleted — an image featuring Nazi soldiers reenactors .. https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/14/politics/trump-photo-nazi-uniforms/index.html , superimposed between the stripes of an American flag. At the time, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization — a fellow by the name of Michael Cohen — blamed the incident on a “young intern” who apparently “did not see very faded figures within the flag.”
The problem is not unique to Trump. Last year, Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign fired a staffer who reposted a video featuring the Nazi sonnenrad symbol on an official campaign social media account. In a now-familiar refrain, a DeSantis campaign spokesperson wrote the incident off as a mistake by a young staffer.
The credibility of these explanations has been drawn into question by Trump’s own invocations of fascist language — including his recent comments calling immigrants “vermin” who “poison the blood” of America — as well as his repeated overtures to white nationalist figures like Nick Fuentes. During his time in office, Trump reportedly claimed that Adolf Hitler “did some good things” and berated his generals with insults like “you f—king generals, why can’t you be like the German generals .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-complained-generals-werent-hitlers-book-says-rcna42114 … in World War II,” according to the account of former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Yet in some respects, the narrow focus on Trump’s actions obscures the broader problem for the GOP, especially as campaigns lean more heavily on digital content to spread their message: The conservative internet is so thoroughly saturated with fascist and neo-Nazi content that it’s increasingly difficult for campaigns operate in right-leaning spaces online without running into it.
The problem has gotten so bad that some conservatives are starting to quietly sound the alarm. In March, the conservative activist Chris Rufo .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/24/chris-rufo-desantis-anti-woke-00088578 .. took to X to note the proliferation of “Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting [and] extreme conspiratorialism” on the online right, nothing that, “The economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement.”
------ [Insert: [...]How a Conservative Christian College Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot [...] Arnn remains Claremont’s vice chairman, and from the first, he embedded Hillsdale into the institute’s intellectual orbit. Any number of Hillsdale academics are Claremont-affiliated scholars as well. (West Coast Straussianism’s “citadels are Claremont and Hillsdale,” according to the political philosopher Paul Gottfried.) Arnn also signed on visiting scholars like Christopher Rufo, the activist most responsible for making the academic discipline of critical race theory a boogeyman of the right. Arnn’s own CV lists longstanding affiliations with a run of influential conservative organizations. He serves on the Heritage Foundation’s board and is a member of the Council for National Policy, a secretive coalition of conservative heavyweights. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175224366 .. and .. conix, Political correctness. "Woke". Critical Race Theory. Now Kendi. The latest conservative/GOP whipping post. Policy? C'mon. We just attack. Kendi has always been with the others on the conservatives dart board. Just more in the background. Some others "Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith" [...] How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory Thanks. You saved me chasing those videos. I never heard of that Rufo dude before, yet seems he's a key - even the KEY - player in the present political outrage around CRT. P - To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like the perfect weapon. [...] ...Rufo summarized his findings in an article for the Web site of City Journal, the magazine of the center-right Manhattan Institute: “Under the banner of ‘antiracism,’ Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.” P - The story was a phenomenon and helped to generate more leaks from across the country. Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi .. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-redefine-racism .. and Robin DiAngelo .. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism . Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw recently explained .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/01/us/critical-race-theory-explainer-trnd/index.html, critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.” [...] Since his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last fall, Rufo’s rise had matched that of the movement against critical race theory. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164563458 https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166080529] ------
that Republicans wield to achieve their real-world political aims. But as the latest incident with the Trump campaign shows, Rufo was not wrong to note that the proliferation of neo-fascist content online creates a potential liability for the Republican Party.
The question now is how serious of a liability it actually is. The Trump campaign’s past run-ins with the fascist right have done little to weaken his support within the GOP — and the blowback to them may have helped solidify his support by fueling the narrative that the media is trying to gin up new controversies to attack Trump. Will this latest incident be any different? If recent history is any guide, don’t count on it
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