Every day it seems like there is some new absurdity emanating from the sluices of Donald Trump, William Barr, Kayleigh McEnany and the like, and Fox News generally. If it isn’t Democrats loading up airplanes with paid agitators to fly around the country to selected “hotspots,” it is Barr and McEnany trying—and failing—to “explain” Trump’s enjoining his supporters to “vote twice” to see if they can get away with it. Trump isn’t suggesting that his supporters do anything “unlawful”? I thought that McEnany told us she would “never lie” to us; well, at least she is always “well-prepared” with her lies.
We’ve seen this before from Trump; instead of denouncing Russian hacking and election interference in 2016, he not only welcomed it, but publicly encouraged the “help.” After being caught blackmailing Ukraine’s president for “dirt” on Joe Biden and his son, he first denied it, then defended it as a “perfect” phone call, and then even “invited” China to interfere in the election by “investigating” the Bidens. He installed one of his bigger campaign fund-raising boosters, Louis DeJoy, as Post Master General in order to do what he publically stated he wanted to do—to handcuff the Post Office’s ability to handle mail-in ballots. It also appears that DeJoy took the job to steer Post Office contracts to businesses in which he has an interests in.
All of this is indefensible, yet Trump’s familiars have been doing everything they can to make it “defensible.” George W. Bush never claimed to know more than he did; Trump, on the other hand, claims to know “something” simply by parroting the far-right conspiracies he finds on far-right websites, and no doubt he is told about them when he gets his daily “briefing” from Sean Hannity, or by Stephen Miller during his website scouring for anti-immigrant stories. And Trump has a ready and willing audience; in their new book Authoritarian Nightmare, John Dean and Bob Altemeyer write that like many Germans in the Nazi era, many Americans actually support authoritarian dictatorship—so long as they are the “favored” group and the “others” are its victims.
Of course, an authoritarian dictatorship relies on fearmongering propaganda. I’m not going to speak for what is happening in other cities, but here in Seattle the Fox News propaganda machine that characterizes the city as a “war zone”—and unfortunately reinforced by local media and the almost exclusively local right-wing talk radio “personalities—is 95 percent bullshit. The same outlier scenes, mostly perpetrators by outside troublemakers, are recycled over and over again. The CHOP “zone,” which was disbanded months ago mostly peaceably in a matter of hours, was limited to the Capitol Hill area. Property and business damage was minimal, in part due to most businesses boarding up their windows; who was responsible for damage that did occur could not be so easily ascertained. The broken windows of the Gay City establishment would in “normal” times be blamed on some far-right person or group, and might even be classified as a “hate” crime; why should we believe that is not the case now?
Yet Seattle has been singled out with three other cities, obviously because they are regarded as noticeably anti-Trump, for “defunding” of federal grants that the Trump administration has no authority to do. Trump’s “memo” the other day says that “On July 1, Seattle declared the protest zone dismantled. But such failed leadership continues to harm the people of Seattle as, in recent weeks, rioters have engaged in violence and destruction of property across Seattle, resulting in at least 59 police officers being injured and multiple businesses and vehicles vandalized.” Not surprisingly to those who actually live here, the “injuries” sustained by police were mostly minor “owies” that didn’t require hospital attention, but just enough for a PR stunt; no mention of the number of people beaten on and gassed by the police. The damage that did occur was mostly confined to the Capitol Hill district, images of which were recycled over and over again to provide the illusion of a city in a constant state of chaos.
For the past month or so there have been what is called “everyday marches” which probably wouldn’t be happening without the stay-at-home orders, but the only thing preventing them from being completely “peaceful” gatherings is the fact that it is now the police who have been acting like “rioters” and creating the illusion of a “war zone.” Downtown and most of the rest of Seattle remains virtually untouched, and there is no visual evidence to suggest that there is (or was) a “war” going on outside of Capitol Hill—and even there you have to look hard for it. There have been no downtown businesses burned down or looted; I wouldn’t be surprised if the window-smashing of the AT&T store a block away from Gay City was also perpetrated by someone like the “Umbrella Man” in Minneapolis.
The downtown business owners who have appeared on Fox News blaming city government and rioters for their woes need to be called out for mostly lying for their 15 minutes of “fame”; 99 percent of the time, this city is quiet as a mouse, which of course is the business owners real problem, since normal foot traffic is non-existent; their normal clientele are “working” at home. There are of course “radical” types, but I’ve said before that a lot of these “progressives” in this city are frauds, and I stand by that. The Trump Nazis are easy to spot; they are the non-mask wearers with the “I dare you to say something” look, and salute each as they pass each other on the sidewalk, as if they are acknowledging each other as if belonging to some secret society. Those are the kind of people I am more concerned about, because they are the ones who Trump is encouraging to violence.
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