I ended up walking through the Near North Side and the Rush Street area, where masses of well-dressed white folks out for dinner and drinks reminded me that many live comfortably under authoritarian regimes. I tried to count how many waiters, waitresses, bartenders, hostesses, bellhops, busboys. and valets (invisible people) I saw for four blocks. There were beggars on every corner, old Black men wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags.

I stopped on the Clark Street bridge across the river where 800-plus died on the capsized SS Eastland in 1915. With a full moon camped out between clouds somewhere over the lake, the city’s giant Merchandise Mart shone red. Imperial towers of capital gleamed against the darkening sky. “Decorative” colored urban structure-lighting gives the city a strangely dystopian glow.

Below the river, on State Street, there were more beggars and many fewer happy Caucasian bourgeois (real or wannabe). It reminded me of the old nighttime Loop, avoided by white folks who weren’t cops or Streets and Sanitation workers. I walked past packs of smiling young Black Men speaking loudly in the name of “The Twelve Tribes of Israel.” Six white cops. jumped out of their blue and white SUVs and bore down on two large young Black men dressed in flannel coats in front of a drugstore. An old Black officer was screaming at the pair, as if they were his special responsibility. As far I could tell the young men’s’ “crime” was loitering (it takes three to trigger the gang ordinance).

A middle-aged couple speaking Polish came out of a health club with cleaning equipment. I thought briefly of Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. I love Chicago almost as much as I hate it.

Monday, February 10th

Bernie Sanders’ Call for Mass Executions

+ World-class Jackass Chris Matthews has got to go. Thanks to Ted Sirota for alerting me to this write-up on an insane rant from the ever more unhinged Ted Baxter of MSDNC: Peter Wade, Rolling Stone, “Chris Matthews Connects a Bernie Sanders Win with Public Executions.”

“The Most Dangerous Criminal in History”

+ Thousands of white-Amerikaner Christians have made a pilgrimage to cheer the neofascistic and ecocidal Antichrist Donald Trump as he smites the supposedly “Radical Left” Democrats in New Hampshire tonight. Antichrist’s Handiwork. The W76-2: “Trump’s New Nuclear Weapon Has Been Deplored,” Defense News.

+ From a recent Noam Chomsky interview:

“Are the [UkraineGate] crimes discussed a basis for impeachment. Seems so to me. Has Trump vastly more serious crimes? That is hardly debatable. What might be debatable is whether he is indeed the most dangerous criminal in history (which happens to be my personal view). Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other ‘deviants,’ along with tens of millions of Slav ‘Untermenschen.’ But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is.”

True dat.

Bannon, Bernie, and Bloomberg

+ FOX News had global fascist organizer and grinning bastard Steve Bannon on saying that the Dems are screwing Sanders, that he “likes Bernie,” and that Bernie supporters need to come over to the “populist” Trump. Someone who never samples the rightmost cable network might be surprised at how much of that sort of talk one hears there.

+ Demented Orange would love to run against Bloomberg and go again and again with “the Bernie got screwed” theme to keep Dem turnout down. Imagine seriously progressive anti-“billionaire class” Bernie supporters trying to vote for billionaire Bloomberg.

+ I firmly believe that Bloomberg would be sexually assaulted by Demented Orange within the first 5 minutes of his first debate with Donald Trump. He would never recover as the nationally televised piss tape went viral. Millions of anti-Semitic Trumpenvolk will praise the president’s stream and then make and post piss tapes of their own, eating American beets to color their urine orange.

+ The media is asking if Bloomberg is really an “oligarch” like Nina Turner said he was. A related question: do bears defecate in forests?

Where the Real Crime Is

+ No, Mini-Mike Bloomberg, you transparent racist police-statist arch-plutocratic oligarch, the real crime is in the corporate suites of the billionaire class.

“Dog-Faced Pony Soldiers”

+ The MSDNC game is clear: admit that Sanders will win New Hampshire but set it up to look like a loss if he doesn’t win by like 20 points.

+ Cone Pop done lost his shit for real: Joe “Never Called me Boy” Biden called a young woman in New Hampshire “a lying, dog-faced pony-soldier.” Get this man to a care facility. He’s been showing numerous signs of dementia, including a loss of impulse control, verbal and otherwise, for quite a while.

“Pragmatic Solutions”

+ I feel a twinge of flashback nausea every time I hear Barack von Obamenburg’s clipped neoliberal voice say “pragmatic solutions” in the ads Bloomberg is flooding Chicago with. Obama’s “pragmatic” approach was to give the rich what they wanted, bail out capital but not the working-class, expand oil and gas production, exonerate torturers and other perpetrators of crimes against humanity, blow-up Libya and North Africa, deport 3 million people, betray the labor movement, betray Black America, roll-back social programs, punish whistle-blowers, set new drone-kill and targeted assassination records, crush Occupy, expand surveillance and… the list goes on. Bloomberg is wrapping himself in the flag of emperor Obama, who opened the door for the neofascist Trump and then ran off to collect millions from the ruling-class he so obediently served.

Like a Pig in Shit

+ Where Amerika is now: “Don Jr. Calls Sen. Mitt Romney a ‘Pussy’ for Announcing Vote to Convict Trump.” The asshole son of the world’s biggest asshole posted a creepy picture of Romney in “Mom Jeans.”

+F[ascist]OX News/Trump TV is saying that the Dear Leader is getting rid of 70 “Obama holdovers” at the NSC. Will there be purge trials?

+ After all their high-decibel bitching about Sanders not being “a real Democrat,” a nasty mess of centrist Dems are ready to go with a Republican oligarch – the racist mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg – as their candidate! If you like absurdity, U.S. presidential politics will make you feel like a pig in shit.

Tuesday, February 11^th (New Hampshire Primary Day_

Thrills Up the Leg and Other Nonsense

+ MSDNC’s Stephanie Class-Ruhle and Lawrence O’Donnell got thrills up their legs listening to Kevin Costner childishly fail to explain his love for Alfred E. Wine Cave (AEOC).

+ Trump apparently claimed that New Hampshire Democrats brought in busloads of illegal voters from Radical Left Massachusetts in 2016.

+ Black voters are starting to poll more and more for Michael Stop&Frisk Bloomberg, who opposed the settlement paid to the Central Park Five.

+ “Liberal” talking heads are explaining that “far left” Sanders will really have lost in New Hampshire unless he wins it by 20 points or more.

In Other News

+ In other news, 700,000 needy Americans are being kicked off Food Stamps, the vicious Nativist-classist “public charge” (wealth-test) rule will adversely affect 4 million immigrants, Trump is rolling back regulations that protect children against mercury poisoning, Trump has slashed funding and programs for disease control prior to the Coronavirus outbreak, Trump is destroying nuclear arms control, and Trump has just deployed a deadly new “low-yield” tactical nuclear weapon in U.S. submarines.

+ For those of you who care about the problem of human self-extinction, gossip columnists are citing NASA data showing that Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier is melting faster than anyone knew thanks to warming undercurrents unmentionably heated by global capitalism and

+ Trump told the Masters of the Universe in Davos not to be “alarmist” about little old climate change.

Antichrist, to Block Socialism

+ Asked why he has aligned himself with the neofascist child-caging bully and ecocidal racist-sexist monster Donald Trump on CNN last night, New Hampshire’s mild-mannered Governor Chris Sununu explained that the Democratic Party is advancing “socialism “and that “socialism is very scary to the good people of New Hampshire.”

+ Sununu didn’t like it when Trump called New Hampshire a drug-infested shithole but he understood that Antichrist Trump was really worked up about the opioid epidemic and that Trumpism-fascism is necessary to keep the specter of socialism at bay. “He might the Antichrist but he’s our Antichrist,” Sununu said.

The Worst Americans

+ The worst Americans to me are the often professional-class white fake-“liberals” who don’t have the elementary common decency to back something as basically human and decent as Medicare for All and who vote for arrogant centrist neoliberal-imperialist assholes like Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. I loathe these folks more than I loathe the Trumpenvolk — and that’s saying a lot. If the moderately social-democratish neo-New Deal progressive Bernie Sanders is “too far left” for you, then you are truly dead to me, so to speak.

+ Alfred E. Wine Cave (AEWC), the neoliberal son of a leading Gramsci scholar, is certainly channeling the great Italian Marxist in an inverted way, running on bourgeois hegemony by calling Sanders “too radical” for America

+ Mayo Pete’s Marxian dad translated The Prison Notebooks and apparently was a good friend of the great Left spiritual and political leader Cornel West.

+ Like Obama (with whom Brother West tangled), Buttigieg has a hidden Marxian understanding of the sick bourgeois and neoliberal game he’s playing. I know for a fact (from my Chicago Urban League days – 2000-2005) that Obama liked to joke knowingly among confidants about where he fit in the great games of class and imperial rule. He laughed all the way to the bank. Obama wasn’t stupid; he was evil. Same with Pete.

+ I’ll take AOC over AEWC any day.

+ I remember doorstep conversations in 2007 with University of Iowa liberal academics who were not bamboozled one bit by Obama’s nasty neoliberal fake-progressivism. They saw it clearly and loved it. He was one of them, they thought.

+ I have a special loathing for people like that.

+ From a smart left Sanders door-knocker in Iowa: “I met one of these types you describe while canvassing in Dubuque. She would not support Sanders (or Warren), given that they advocated free tuition, which would put the private college she’s faculty at, at a disadvantage. Had to appreciate her candor. Most would be too ashamed to air that view.”

+ I guess the Dubuque professor is not too impressed with Sanders’ slogan “Not me. Us.”

Dead Joe Walking

+ By early reports, Joe “Record Players for the Poor” Biden is a Dead Man Walking in New Hampshire. “Lunch Bucket Joe” got 5% in blue-collar Dover. Single-digit Corn Pop has already fled for South Carolina. Maybe he’ll get surpassed in New Hampshire by regime-change war opponent Tulsi Gabbard.

+ Professor Elizabeth “Capitalist in my Bones” Warren continues to surprise by not doing better with a claim that she alone could unite the fractured Dems. She’s in single digits in her neighbor state New Hampshire. If Sen. Warren was actually a “left”-leaning “progressive” she would step down and endorse Sanders. She isn’t and she won’t.

+ An old white New Hampshire lady told an arrogant MSNBC talking head that’s MSNBC’s “cynical” reporting on Sanders motivated her at the last minute to vote for Sanders!

+ MSDNC is running wild with Amy K. exit polls.

+ My guess is that the bourgeois panic shifts its Stop Sanders hopes to Bloomberg. And of course pro-big business super-delegates are waiting to do their capitalist work at the DNC[onvention] if necessary/possible.

+ Strangest electoral story I’ve heard tonight: “Tom Steyer is moving up with Black voters in South Carolina.”

Beyond the Rule of Law Some More: A Bigger Deal Than Bernie Edging Pete

+ Cable news keeps running b-roll of Roger Stone in a wild white suit and his doting weirdo of a bouncy wife. Nixonian thug Stone will probably be pardoned by the Midtown Mussolini.

+ Rachel Maddow is awkwardly trying to break in on the New Hampshire election news with the story of Trump taking new steps in assaulting the rule of law. “That whole thing,” a learned friend writes me, “may be a bigger deal than Bernie edging Mayo Pete. Filled with all sorts of ugly implications.”

+ The demented fascist oligarch and his sick puppy AG are using the New Hampshire primary as cover to pull an openly perverse assault on what’s left of the rule of law.

+ Trump’s fat and frumpy Roy Cohn William Barr is on board with Trump’s twitter tampering with the sentencing of Stone. DOJ prosecutors are resigning in protest!

+ “I just saw those silly Democrats are calling on Barr to resign,” Terry Thomas writes. “and they are demanding documents related to this most recent outrage. I doubt Barr will resign, and I doubt they will get documents. These guys have to come up with a new response to their ritual humiliations.”

+ Also in the category of “politicizing Justice,” Attorney Trump Counsel General Barr is considering mob lawyer Giuliani’s investigation of Hunter, Corn Pop, and Burisma.

+ Did anyone else notice that Demented Orange paired “drug addicts” – yes, drug addicts, not drug-dealers – alongside “murderers” in his complaint that DOJ prosecutors were trying to over-sentence his syndicate underling Roger Stone? How Duterte of the Donald.

+ The constitutional transition to fascism will be televised, drip by accelerating drip.

Stop Sanders, ctd.

+ All in the manufacturing consent game: “MSNBC Anchor Chuck Todd Is Under Fire for Comparing Sanders Supporters to Nazis.”

+ Republican-led voter suppression (residency shenanigans with college students) is costing Sanders votes in New Hampshire.

+ Sanders is up in early returns. MSDNC should try to blame this on criminal interference by the Maduro regime. I hope Chris Matthews has doubled up on his Depends.

A Bernie Speech We Won’t Hear

+ When will Bernie Sanders call for the reign of the associated producers? Workers’ control aside, this is what would really impress me: if Bernie in his victory speech (assuming that happens) would take time to mention the dark fascist shit Trump is doing and tweeting today and call for millions of people to take to the streets beneath and beyond the election cycle. This vile Trump-Pence regime is committing horrible crimes right now and not just this DOJ bullshit. Going into voting booths for two minutes once or twice every two or four years is not remotely close to the citizen engagement and activism required to confront the authoritarian darkness that is enveloping this nation and world.

So Obama

+ What’s with Alfred E. Butt Cave’s victory speech? He hasn’t won the state, Sanders has. But hey AEBC declared victory at zero precincts reporting in Iowa so what the Hell.

+ He sounds so much like Obama, so transparent in his mimicry of Obama’s clipped intonation, strategic pauses, and fake-progressive center-right “pragmatism.” Claiming to represent the “middle” and “third” way between scary ‘’revolution” (supposedly the Sanders path) and “status quo” (Trump and Biden). He’s denouncing “ideological purity” (that’s a shot at Sanders’ and his fathers’ “Marxism” as well as Trump’s white nationalism, which they just can call fascism or at least neofascism).

+ A key part of this stale old Clinton-Obama-Blair-Macron game is to call this neoliberal centrism “fresh” and “new” —- this in a very canned way.

Wednesday, February 12th

“In Any Sane Country”

+ I have this vague memory of being in a coffee shop yesterday and seeing a cable news headline that Demented Orange had told folks not to worry about the Coronavirus cuz coming warm weather in April will wipe it out….or was that just in a dream l had last night? (So the four DOJ prosecutors dropping out of the Stone case after Trump tweeted and Barr intervened wasn’t a dream either, I’m guessing.)

+ This neo-fascistic Beelzebub Donald Trump is literally trying to kill you — here is one of many ways: “Amid Coranavirus Outbreak, Trump Proposes Slashing Center for Disease Control Budget.”

+ “Cutting the CDC in the middle of a pandemic,” writes Esquire’s Charles Pierce, “is not viable in a functioning republic. We do not currently have one.” (A functioning democracy went down the memory hole so long ago we can’t remember ever having had one.)

+ The title of the article in which Pierce made his dark observation: “In Any Sane Country, Trump’s Budget Would be Political Suicide.” Indeed.

+ The budget also steals from Medicare and Social Security and slashes the Environmental Protection Agency by 25%. Insane.

Once Every 1,460 Days!

+ Trump can do anything he wants and Dems and their media will just say, “well, there’s an election coming up and you’ll get your once-every 1460-day 2 minutes in a booth to vote for somebody so just stay home and go to work and keep calm.”

Denial

+ People are in denial about how bad the current situation is, If you seriously think you can justify just sitting around and waiting for the quadrennial extravaganza and some neoliberal asshole like Pete Buttigieg or Mike Bloomberg — or even an often decent social democratish progressive like Sanders — to magically fix things you are completely insane. You have lost your mind. Just one recent example of what unbridled bourgeois class rule is doing to livable ecology: NASA, Earth Observatory: “Thwaites Glacier Transformed.”

What Doesn’t Kill Trump Strengthens Trump

+ My nomination for either the stupidest or the most cynical thing said by a U.S, Senator so far this year (and that’s saying a lot to say the least) is Susan Collins’ ridiculous statement that Trump will change his ways since his impeachment by the House taught him “a pretty big lesson.” As the Trump presidency’s astute chronicler Michael Wolff observes in his latest book Siege: Trump Under Fire:

“One of the many odd aspects of Trump’s presidency was that he did not see being president, either the responsibilities or the exposure, as being all that different from his pre-presidential life. He had endured almost countless investigations in his long career. He had been involved in various kinds of litigation for the better part of forty-five years. He was a fighter who, with brazenness and aggression, got out of fixes that would have ruined a weaker, less wily player. That was his essential business strategy: what doesn’t kill me strengthens me. Though he was wounded again and again, he never bled out” (emphasis added).

Aspirational Thinking

+ As Chomsky recently noted, Trump is trying to wipe out all living things. It sounds like a crazy charge until you examine the climate and nuclear weapons policies this demented fascistic oligarch is advancing. If people have elementary natural, social, and political intelligence linked to willpower there will soon be millions upon millions in the streets demanding the end of this regime and the system it both reflects and serves. The passivity and resignation in the face of this deadly freakshow so far is frankly soul numbing. S

+ Chomsky’s recent must-read Truthout interview on Donald worse-then-Hitler (I agree on that) Trump ends by praising Sanders for sparking a movement that “would proceed beyond the narrow realm of electoral politics to far broader and constant activism and engagement in public affairs.” That strikes me as more of an aspirational than an accurate description of the Sanders phenomenon, which by my observation is 97% electoralist so far.

+ The sooner it goes beyond that and becomes what Chomsky says it is, the better. Nothing Sanders is calling for will have a snowball’s chance in Hell without massive mobilization beneath and beyond the election cycle

Remember That?

+ Hey, remember this – Masha Gessen, “The Russia Conspiracy Trap,” New York Review of Books, March 6, 2017, where Gessen wrote the following:

“The dream fueling the Russia frenzy is that it will eventually create a dark enough cloud of suspicion around Trump that Congress will find the will and the grounds to impeach him. If that happens, it will have resulted largely from a media campaign orchestrated by members of the intelligence community [!]—setting a dangerous political precedent that will have corrupted the public sphere and promoted paranoia. And that is the best-case outcome…More likely, the Russia allegations will not bring down Trump [!!] He may sacrifice more of his people, as he sacrificed Flynn, as further leaks discredit them. Various investigations may drag on for months, drowning out other, far more urgent issues. In the end, Congressional Republicans will likely conclude that their constituents don’t care enough about Trump’s Russian ties to warrant trying to impeach the Republican president [!!!] Meanwhile, while Russia continues to dominate the front pages, Trump will continue waging war on immigrants, cutting funding for everything that’s not the military, assembling his cabinet of deplorables—with six Democrats voting to confirm Ben Carson for Housing, for example, and ten to confirm Rick Perry for Energy [!!!!] According to the Trump plan, each of these seems intent on destroying the agency he or she is chosen to run—to carry out what Steve Bannon calls the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state.’ [!!!!!] As for Sessions, in his first speech as attorney general he promised to cut back civil rights enforcement and he has already abandoned a Justice Department case against a discriminatory Texas voter ID law. But it was his Russia lie that grabbed the big headlines” (emphasis and exclamation points added).

+ Hey, as Chris Farley would had said, do you remember when Gessen wrote that, to paraphrase Chris Farley?

+ Here’s another one: does anyone remember when Adam Gopnik wrote this about Trump and Trumpism in The New Yorker in May of 2016:

“There is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word “fascist.” The sum may be crypto-fascist, neo-fascist, latent fascist, proto-fascist, or American-variety fascist—one of that kind, all the same. Future political scientists will analyze (let us hope in amused retrospect, rather than in exile in New Zealand or Alberta) the precise elements of Poujadisme, Peronism and Huck Finn’s Pap that compound in Trump’s ‘ideology.’ But his personality and his program belong exclusively to the same dark strain of modern politics: an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government, whether Léon Blum’s or Barack Obama’s, is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and “success.” It is always alike, and always leads inexorably to the same place: failure, met not by self-correction but by an inflation of the original program of grievances, and so then on to catastrophe. The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history (emphasis added).” [Adam Gopnik, “Going There With Donald Trump,” The New Yorker, May 11, 2016].

+ Remember that?

Red-Baited/Baiting Dems and Their False Dichotomy

+ CNN, MSDNC, NYT, WaPo, Politico etc have run religiously and consistently with a false dichotomy: either progressivism or electability. While I suppose capital and legions of moron centrists would undermine Sanders in a general election, it’s also true that a centrist Dem creep is going to be badly hurt by the inability of many if not most Sanders supporters to vote for some Wall Street plaything or plutocrat like Cornpopa-bin Biden, Alfred E. Wine Cave Amy “I Pretend to Know You” Klobocop or Mini Mike the Megabillionaire Oligarch…not to mention the unwillingness of millions and millions of ordinary lower and working- class people to vote for yet another dismal, dollar-drenched Dem running on behalf of the Party of Fake Resistance.

+ Half of Sanders’ backers will not vote for the Dem if it isn’t Sanders according to a recent poll. That # will come down as November and specter of a second and worse Trump term looms if Sanders isn’t the nominee but the alienation will still be too great to be overcome. Dems need to get it that they nominate and get behind Sanders or they lose. As my readers know, I think the evidence is clear that the Democratic Party establishment and its bankrollers would rather lose to the neofascistic right-wing party than lose to the moderate left in their own party.

+ All the centrist fake-progressive fake-liberal snotbags who play along with the reactionary nonsense about Sanders being “too left” and how Trump will be able to win by going all anti-socialist/-communist on Sanders can kiss off. I am a left-socialist and have been since the late 1970s and I’ve got to report from the actual Left that Sanders is not all that left. He’s a social-democratish neo-New Deal progressive.

+ The fake-progressives afraid of “socialism” are enabling neo-McCarthyism and putting me and many others like me at risk by playing along with the right’s red-baiting. They should speak up against neo-McCarthyism, which screws over everybody, including them.

+ Those “liberal” Dems who play along with the notion that Single Payer and free public college and green jobs programs are “too expensive” in the world’s richest nation should admit that they are actually less progressive than an Eisenhower Republican.

+ Maybe capital can chill over the big bad Judeo-Bolshevik Bernie Sanders: Nir Kaissar, “Bernie Sanders Could be the Stock Market’s Best Friend,” Bloomberg (no less), February 12, 2020.

What Can We Do? What Can We Do?

+ Rachel Maddow Maddow did this almost semi-eloquent rant about the nation’s transition to full-on authoritarianism (the word “fascism” was even thrown in to her long heartfelt and no-commercial talk along with other variants of the disease) in which she just kept lamely saying “so what can we do, what can do?” The answer apparently was to (1) herald Georgetown University professors and students for giving that fired US lady ambassador to Ukraine (I won’t try to spell the name) a standing ovation; (2) have on a lady law professor who reminded viewers that there are still some good judges and that Trump would have been removed in a more normal time; (3) bring on Amy Klobuchar to say that “there are Republicans and independents out there who don’t like what the president is doing.”

+ It is beyond the pale for these neoliberal professional class know-it-all Know Nothings to call for real popular resistance to the creep of American fascism. “What do we do? What do we do?” We go to lectures at Georgetown and we applaud good bourgeois judges and we vote for centrist neoliberals!

+ I never cease to be amazed by how passive and resigned liberal and left academics and other intellectuals are. The British tea would have never gone into Boston Harbor if these sorts had led the “resistance” in December of 1774!

“Prepare for the Coming Civil War”

+ “It is no great leap,” writes Bill Lueders in the latest issue of The Progressive, “from threatening violence against the Constitutional remedy of impeachment to employing it to overturn the results of an election. If, as is likely, Trump survives the ordeal of impeachment over his efforts to compel a foreign leader to assist his campaign, he quite possibly will continue to solicit interference in the 2020 election. And, if that is not enough to overcome his historic unpopularity, he may proclaim the result fraudulent and urge his supporters to nullify it, guns in hand.” Further:

“Normally, discussion about a President and his supporters either stealing an election or refusing to accept the result would register as crazy talk. But in this case, there are two countervailing factors that make these things a real possibility: the President and his supporters…Trump is a lawless President, unbound by the norms that have governed others, unmindful of appearances, and utterly amoral. He has been a liar and a cheater his entire life. He has cavalierly violated the Constitution, especially the emoluments clause that prevents federal officials from using their office for personal gain. (In a testament to his penchant for creating his own reality, Trump has labeled the clause itself ‘phony.’) He has routinely condoned violence, and even encouraged his supporters to engage in it.”

“And his base has been all-too-happy to oblige. The Guardian compiled a list of more than fifty instances in which Trump supporters have committed or threatened acts of violence either against his critics, or while explicitly stating that they support or were moved to act by him. One Trump admirer, Cesar Sayoc, sent sixteen pipe bombs to media and others the President counts among his enemies. Others have bombed mosques or threatened Muslims. A pair of brothers in Boston beat and urinated on a homeless Latinx man, telling police, ‘Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.’ Their victim was a permanent U.S. resident.”

“So the violence is real, as is the possibility that it will be unleashed on a much larger scale in 2020…”

+ Smart fellow, Bill Lueders. His article is titled “Prepare for the Coming Civil War.”

+ If people respond to losing an election by declaring Civil War does it become legal to kill them? How does that work? Any legal precedent on that? Please advance citations…

Thursday, February 13th

“There Need to be Mass Protests”

+ Affluent white, urban, and older male Marxists I know continue to lecture me on how fascism isn’t really something to worry about in the U.S! They know who they are. These sheltered old men who won’t suffer the worst consequences should take a trip out of their metropolitan bunkers to a flyover zone and/or attend a Trump Hate Rally!

+ Three cheers for Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, author of the important political-ideological analysis How Fascism Works. “The system is enabling Trump,” Stanley recently told Business Insider. “There need to be mass protests,” he said, adding that “these are historic times. Someone has got to push back…The deeply worrying moment is when you start to become a one-party state,” Stanley added. Stanley said that recent actions by Republicans and Trump were “straight from the literature on authoritarianism.” Stanley thinks there needed to be mass protests in the streets after the Senate vote against witnesses. The absence of significant public outcry was “a further sign to the party in power that they can go ahead and do what they want.”

+ Maybe Rachel Maddow would like to give Stanley a call — I doubt it.

+ “Refuse Fascism” has been in the streets – the only left group in Chicago to consistently call out Trump’s neofascist shit – though all of this and well before.