Three more dead rappers found in Detroit brings up that question of "responsibility" again.

 

Last week three wannabe rappers reported missing after an aborted concert in Detroit several weeks ago turned up dead in a basement of an abandoned apartment, shot to death. The discovery of the bodies was entirely by accident, with state police roaming the building while conducting a different investigation. Three people have been arrested, one a juvenile caught driving a vehicle belonging to one of the dead men, and another “person of interest” turning up in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I’ve written before about the high “unnatural” death rate of rap/hip-hop “artists.” We’ve got to get “real” here,and what is “real” today seems to be self-fulfilling prophecies, no thanks to a media (both news and “entertainment”) that paint a picture of “normalcy,” where blacks are either a highly visible part of what white America calls “culture”—meaning not the “rap” culture that would turn-off many white viewers and hurt ratings—or “victims” of a society in which black lives  “don’t matter.”

The problem with these images, of course, is that they are completely incompatible with each other, yet have the same reality, but in varying measures. A 2020 story from People’s Policy Project noted that income inequality within the black community is worse than in other groups. It isn’t hard to see, with professional athletes making millions a year, while some rap and hip-hop artists get rich selling people misery, victimization and revenge. The Project noted that blacks in the lower 10^th percentile made less than a quarter of the black median household income, while the 90^th percentile made 11 times the median income—and that from an already lower level than whites and Asians.

The other reality is that blacks tend to be killed by other blacks, and thus one wonders why blacks are the ones who don’t seem to think other black lives “matter.” But oh gosh, let’s blame it on “society,” but I’ll get to that later. Last year the New York Times reported that 65 percent of all homicide victims in the city were black people, with a slightly larger number of perpetrators also black, who were also responsible for 74 percent of the shootings. Of course, that is not the “picture” we get from television crime shows like CSI or Law & Order, when most of the victims are white women.

Of course there can be an “explanation” for that, other than white women also have an out-of-control victim complex: homicides involving white victims—and especially white female—are much more likely to receive investigative resources, while the “anti-snitch” culture in the black community also prevents “easy” solving of black homicides.  Unless, of course, the homicides are committed by police wearing body cams, which also tend to show the victims in usually uncooperative postures to avoid detention.

An assistant district attorney, Jim Quinn, wrote an op-ed in The New York Post in 2020 that this country is a “coward” when it comes to talking about race, and of course that is from both the right and the left. Blacks killed by police is but a tiny minority of the total black homicide victims, but those cases get nearly all the coverage. Quinn spoke of the “moral catastrophe” in the black community in New York City, and that “These are real problems that require real work. But our politicians paint murals and political slogans on Fifth Avenue, thinking they have accomplished something.”

You know, I dislike contemporary music in general today, and that it is quite a surprise given that up until the mid-1990s there was always music I liked. In fact my musical tastes include classical music, and the fact I like music from the 1970s more than any other could be explained by the fact that many producers, especially black producers like Thom Bell, had “classical” pretensions. Black music during the Seventies was heavy on the orchestration; while it mostly propelled songs about love, peace and social harmony, social commentary was present, but it wasn’t the dominant ideology, nor did it advocate armed insurrection.   

But by the Eighties, artists like Lionel Ritchie who were still writing catchy tunes to melodious production were a dying breed (and not just from the black music perspective), although that wouldn’t become clear until the next century began.

We can “speculate” about the emergence of rap and hip-hop as the dominant form in black music by the 1990s and why it black music scene has a difficult time "evolving" away from it. The “rationalization” that rap “music”  was more “truthful’ is again more a self-fulfilling prophecy—and all the evidence suggests that “getting real” has not made things “better,” but worse. Singing about love and harmony tends not to have the same societal effect as "rapping" about hate, gangster culture, violence and whatnot with unhealthy doses of four-letter words does. People may not all feel "the love," and hate has always been a much easier emotion to draw back on. 

Why did this “music” became by far the dominant form in the black music culture going on 30 years with no end in sight? Most point to societal reasons, but those issues existed when soul, funk and disco were the dominate black music during the Seventies, and homicide rates were quite high in conjunction with demographic changes in the cities and de-industrialization effecting well-paying manufacturing jobs. But the music of the time didn't contribute to crime or actively embrace it like rap/hip-hop does today; if anything it tamped-down thoughts of violence; it was a way out, and nobody was killing each other over how well they sang about "love" or "peace."

It has been suggested that both established and start-up record companies saw rap and hip-hop as an easy way to make money, since it didn’t require expensive production—you know, musical instruments and orchestras. All this “genre” needed was a “beat” behind spoken-word raps that were not really “songs,” but “performance art.” 

Nobody, for example, thought that MC Hammer’s relatively harmless “U Can’t Touch This” was actually anything more than a one-off, harmless novelty number. Later, those who were more “adventurous” might “sample” a memorable line from an old song, but that just demonstrated just how far love of music has strayed from the actual creation of “music.”  I was reading a recent edition of Rolling Stone; the only items about “music” were two album “reviews” that mentioned the “philosophical direction” of the groups (I wouldn’t call them “bands,” because that requires competence in musical instruments), and nothing about the musical production.  

Of course there the culture’s defenders; Take some guy name Touré, who hosts theGrio, a black news-oriented website, who tries to “explain” why there is so much violence related to rap/hip-hop . “Hip-hop is deeply connected to the Black community,” he says, ignoring a century or two when Hip-hop didn’t exist. “It takes much of its power and its energy from our swag and our cultural innovations.” Well, “swag” maybe, but if you want to call vulgarity that often glorifies violence and criminality set to what essentially a monotonous one-note monologue whose selling points are just how “badder” someone is than someone else  a “cultural innovation,” then someone has their terms mixed-up. 

Beyonce, we are told, is now the all-time leader in Grammy awards won. Really? Yeah, sure she can do the vocal gymnastic thing pretty well to some tuneless songs, but that just tells you the level of “competition” there is for her out there. I mean, who else are people going to vote for who is as popular as she is who doesn't sing rap straight up?

“Hip-hop is the child of all of us,” Touré says. Oh, so you are going to lump us all together in that “culture”? I mean, if that is all the last two generations of people are allowed to be exposed to in the black community, then it is that by default.  Then there appears to be a brief acknowledgement of reality: “But hip-hop can’t take what’s great about the Black community without also sucking in some of our problems. That’s the real issue—some of the central challenges in the Black community bleed into hip-hop because most rappers aren’t separate from the Black neighborhoods they live and/or work in. Hip-hop is an extension of Black America for better and for worse.”

Touré then goes on to list the names of rappers who have been killed by gun violence, something that has been going on since rap/hip-hop became the dominant way of expression in the black community. Guns are too easy to get, self-esteem “too hard to hold on to,” there is high unemployment and many feel “their only choice is criminality.” Of course we could say that since desegregation, black consumers stopped spending money in black businesses and people forgot how to be entrepreneurs in the basics (meaning not fashions "ordinary" people can't afford).  “Many young Black men are left feeling like their only choice is criminality. Given all that, we have a situation ripe for gang activity and the brazenness that comes with committing vicious and easily solved murders of famous people.”

But then he goes into the usual rationalizations that require our “understanding” and “empathy”—or else:

I am not saying Black people are to blame. Trust me, I understand how white supremacy and racism have led to this situation. I’m saying that decades of oppression have led to the gunplay and criminality you see in some of our neighborhoods, which is having an impact on hip-hop.

OK, so rap/hip-hop has nothing to do with a “cultural” shift toward the acceptance of violence as a fact of life? This was not the case in other eras when music was not associated with violence. Sure, you had artists like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye die from gun violence, but those were domestic situations, they weren’t associated with gang culture or the targets of such. Their songs were not mired in the bad things of life, as short as it is. Their music, like that of their eras in general, was about finding some moment of happiness in a world that has precious little of it. 

That is not what rap/hip-hop brings to the table—it is about “rebellion,” revenge and “respect,” the latter term more often perceived to be taken than given. That is another hypocrisy of the Black Lives Movement—it is more likely than not to be problem within the black community where you find a lack thereof; if you don't “respect” someone else’s “life,”  your life will be taken from you.

There’s more: “The stress of racism itself causes illness. So does segregation and food deserts that make it hard to get nutrition. Also, many Black people are afraid to visit the doctor because we fear that we don’t have the money for health care or we lack trust in the medical system. Most rappers come from families that have been poor for generations, so even though they have become rich, their bodies are still wrestling with the physical issues that were passed down to them, and in many cases, their minds are still grappling with the approach to health and medicine that they learned from their families.”

How is it possible to seem “educated” and uneducated at once? Rationalizing ignorance doesn’t make it more “rational,” or less ignorant.

Then there’s the kicker: “The death rate in hip-hop doesn’t mean something is wrong with hip-hop. It’s an extension of the problems all Black people go through. It’s evidence of America’s oppression.” What is so curious to me is that in the various forms of media, the eye-test tells us that blacks are significantly more over-represented than any other group, and unlike Hispanic representation, almost always in “normal” occupations or life styles, and rarely a useful examination of the culture where violence is a way of life. Even the Oscar-winning film Moonlight (which many thought was a response to the complaints about the “no black” Oscars the previous year) eventually blamed the drug-dealing lifestyle of the main character on society’s reaction to his gay identity.

There is another viewpoint, by journalist and author Nathan McCall, who in a Washington Post op-ed “My Rap Against Rap” recalls his own youthful life of crime that was influenced by the film The Godfather, which instilled in himself and his friends the “ruthless code” that “real” gangsters lived by. Shootouts and “retaliatory murders…took the thrill of gang warfare to another level.” The message he recalled was that “if someone double-crosses you, he deserves to die.” 

After watching “the hippest flick I'd ever seen. My buddies and I stepped outdoors, inspired and hyped, so hyped that we bopped down the sidewalk talking loud and intentionally bumping into people, hoping somebody would protest and give us an excuse to do a bare-knuckled version of what we'd just seen on the movie screen.” He got a chance to do the “Godfather” thing when he was 19, when a man “disrespected” his girlfriend, and so he deserved to die, so McCall shot him (the man survived, and McCall received a 30-day jail sentence).

But sitting in a jail cell changed him. Unlike today when going to prison is a “badge of honor” for many in black community, for McCall he discovered that he was “a silly, scared teenager who was mixed-up in the head.” For him as in many people, being “bombarded with images of sex and violence often find it hard to separate fantasy from fact. And some can't resist the temptation to act out what they've seen.”

Then came the advent of rap/hip-hop as the dominate influence in many young lives. Not all of it was “bad,” but “gangsta rap” became the dominant “strain.” Back in 1993 when McCall wrote this piece, Dr. Dre was rapping

Rat-a-tat and a tat like that

Never hesitate to put a nigga on his back ...

McCall noted “Plain and simple, that is a boastful call for black men to kill each other. Lyrics like these have become so pervasive that they're the accepted norm.” Can we say that things have gotten “better” in 30 years? How about more violent? At the time of the writing of his op-ed, homicides (especially with firearms) in the black community had seen a dramatic increase from 1989 to 1993, which certainly appeared to coincide with the emergence of rap/hip-hop. There was a steady decrease in the homicide rate until 2015, when the homicide rate began its most dramatic rise since the 1960s, almost double the rate in 2021 than it was in 2014.

McCall observed that music does influence behavior in the black community, some more than others. “On its face, it may seem crazy for someone to tie music to behavior. But the history of African Americans shows that, from the days of slavery to the present, music has always played a monumental role in what we think and do. It has always been an agent of change…The key element is aggression -- in rappers' body language, tone and witty rhymes -- that often leaves listeners hyped, on edge, angry about ... something.”

At first those of a different generation “overlooked the harsh lyrics because they were viewed as gritty urban political expression -- outrage at a hostile white world. Then, over time, the language changed. Rappers who once sang about being oppressed began sounding oppressive and hateful themselves…Gangsta rappers often defend their themes by saying they reflect a reality that they're not responsible for. The rappers' justification would be more persuasive if the brutality they toast had always been part of our reality. But this is more a case of life imitating art in the worst of ways.”

Tupac Shakur, for example, before his killing at the age of just 25 in 1996 had a laundry list of shootings, assaults and sexual assault charges on his “rap” sheet. He is regarded as one of the most “influential” rappers of “all-time.” We can see why people might believe this.

Again, it is the “messages” being conveyed. It isn’t like in the “old days” when the blues were just about feeling blue, or soul music that spoke to the “soul.” Now it is all you hear in some communities, there is a failure to put “negative rap” in perspective, especially by those “vulnerable” to such influences—meaning those with “faulty parenting,” or no parenting at all. They don’t listen to preachers or teachers either for guidance. They do see the rap “lifestyle” might make them rich, or so they think.

McCall noted even back then, nationwide juvenile homicide arrests doubled or tripled—mostly black-on-black—coinciding with the rise of gangsta rap. And it wasn’t just in urban hell-holes either: “The sudden, unexplained change in the values and behavior of young blacks in rural American towns is another development that has only taken place in recent years. Earlier generations, who were cut off geographically from violent urban influences, now have ready access to hip-hop music and videos. Now we've begun hearing more about random violence in places such as Kansas and North Carolina, where a few murders a year were once big news.”

McCall also made this observation: “Nobody fantasizes more than young black men. When you live in a world that limits your hopes, reality is often too much to bear. Because they are largely invisible, black males fantasize about becoming professional athletes -- stations they think will make the world acknowledge them. Because they are powerless, they are consumed with the symbols of power -- guns and gangstas. They imagine themselves as godfathers and, sadly, some actually get up the nerve to act out such roles. So they spray gunfire into crowded swimming pools, as happened in Washington last summer; or they gun folks down on a recreation field, like the men whose stray bullets killed a 4-year-old girl.”

He remember that time when he shot a man over “disrespect,” he was “mired in the weirdest logic”—that if the man had died, he still didn’t believe he had actually committed murder. The man simply deserved to die over ill-chosen words. Since blacks are the one bearing the brunt of this behavior, “you’d think blacks would have moved decisively to stop it. In the 1960s, we mobilized when white police, dogs and hoses were our most immediate threat.” 

But now the “enemy” is really “us,” writes McCall. But the black community is still looking for scapegoats when it is not inured to the violence (if not necessarily to property crime),  and that only at such times when a cop is the "perp."

McCall noted at the time of the writing of this op-ed that there were efforts to curb what people heard on the radio, and of course we would eventually see records with “ratings” labels, but mostly for “sexual” references. It has been noted in this country that "sex" often seems a far worse "crime" than killing people, and you can’t “silence” people for having a political or social “message” even if it does inspire crime and violence.

It would seem that while for some people, life has gotten better, sometimes a lot better—we know, we see them every day on television--but for others human life is a transient thing.  But like in society in general the “gap” between who is doing well and who isn’t is increasing in the black community more so than in other communities. But in the minds of "gangstas"—and this is true of the Latino community, where to be honest, there are some people who insist on being real assholes—this “gap” can be “closed” by what gangsta rap "promises." At least we can say that there were those like Ice-T and Snoop Dog who thought it was a good idea to "branch out" into acting or business.

It is of course a false promise, but even after three decades when McCall first warned what was happening, many wish to learn nothing, because lives don't really matter to them.

Andrew Tate case could be about intenational politics and local resentment as much as alleged "crimes"

 

You know, the last thing (or maybe one of the last things) I want to do is to get into the Andrew Tate case, but just because someone is a narcissistic jerk and is an Internet “influencer” who has riled-up a lot of feathers for being the male alternative to radical misandrist feminist doesn't mean we should ignore his rights.  He and his brother are currently under arrest in Romania for “human trafficking,” “rape” and “organized crime” without what we would call due process rights, with their possessions of considerable value being confiscated by authorities in a country rife with corruption. My feeling at the moment is that just because many people don’t like Tate doesn’t mean we should try to use that to go down that slippery slope that will hurt more people than just Tate.

Further, I suspect that Tate’s arrest has more to do with international “politics” in the same way the Russian arrest and conviction of Brittney Griner was, although I seriously doubt that anyone here is interested in the likelihood that Tate is innocent of the charges against him to make a “trade” for him.  (OK, Viktor Orban is the dictator-president of Hungary, not Romania). 

But back to the Tate case. The BBC reported today about a new accuser (“Sophie”), who's claims are almost entirely BS, and shows us how expanding the definition of "victim" negates such things as "consent" and "personal responsibility." While the story reports that 2 of the 6 women Romanian authorities have named as "victims" have denied that they claimed to be so, there was a response to a comment I made about this on YouTube that claims that now four of the women denied being “victims,” and the other two are “missing.”  

“Sophie” herself makes some rather remarkable claims. She admits that she doesn’t necessarily see herself as a “victim,” since everything she did, including working in Tate's adult chat room (she admits to having previous experience in "adult entertainment"), and having sexual relations with him, she consented to. However, she claims that she did not "consent" to "rough sex" even though she knew that was what he was into, so in “retrospect” what was entered into as a consensual act must have been "sexual assault."  See where we are going here? She also asserted that Tate could be "violent," although she based this claim on one incident she could recall.

Romanian authorities also claim that Tate was involved in "human trafficking." How so? This woman admitted that Tate didn't “pack her up in a bag” and force her to come to Romania; she did it on her own volition, with the promise of making money, which she in fact did, but apparently she also believed that Tate was interested in a "romantic" relationship with her (or her with his money), allegedly part of his "sales pitch." 

The BBC also admitted that women who were working in the chat rooms (talk about "easy money") at the time of the arrests denied that they were coerced into doing so, or felt like "victims." So do we want to expand what the definition of "human trafficking" is? What about anyone working for a "legitimate" business who moved to a different country who thinks they were promised something they didn't get?

Unless Romanian authorities actually come up with something in which a “criminal act” isn’t just a matter of “definition,” then we are forced to defend Tate’s legal rights because not doing so is dangerous to the rule of law. After all, there is the revelation that anti-trafficking advocate Eliza Bleu completely fabricated her own past trafficking victimization; her claim that she didn't "hurt" anyone is of course a self-serving lie, as she used her connections to censure or wreck those people who questioned her stories, and how her lies harm real victims by putting the question mark in people's heads.

In a final obsevation, Romania was (and is) a notoriously anti-Semitic society, and there was great antipathy toward Jews who seemed to be economically more successful than non-Jewish Romanians. Here we see a non-white "alien" resident who apparently flaunted his wealth too much for the citizenry, and we may suspect that along with international political reasons, there was also local resentment at play as well as the greed of corrupt officials. These factors have to be taken into consideration as motivations for the charges against Tate and his brother.

The "agenda" of far-right extremists is maintaining power--but the "power" of who? Certainly not that of the "people"

In the BBC documentary The Nazis: A Warning From History, we learn that Allied forces prevented the destruction of the contents of a Gestapo field office where rows upon rows of files were found that contained denunciations from ordinary citizens against their neighbors, friends and even family members. It was discovered that only a handful of field agents were assigned to a metropolitan area of a million people, so they relied almost exclusively on these denunciations, many of them anonymous, to ferret out "traitors"--although many letters were simply marked with a "?" and put aside as having "questionable" motivation.

We are seeing that in Russia today, where neighbors, friends and even spouses and parents are reporting each other to police for not being sufficiently "loyal" to the regime in its illegal war in Ukraine. While we are not necessarily seeing that on a wide scale in the U.S. (yet), we can see what is happening in Florida schools after the passage of a law by the state's fascist governor, Ron DeSantis, banning the teaching of this country's racial past (and present), with teachers who mention it being "denounced" by children to their white nationalist parents. 

You want to know what "whitewashed" history looks like? I was watching a recent video documentary of the 2006 Goleta postal facility mass shooting, where a white woman with apparent mental health issues named Jennifer San Marco shot to death six coworkers. The documentary, made by the British network ITV, only provided an image of a blonde white woman who was San Marco's neighbor, and who she apparently shot the night before because of some bad blood concerning loud music. 

But at the postal facility the killings were described as methodical and deliberate. But never once did we see images of the victims, nor in the "confusion" about her motives were we ever given a single hint about the most pertinent "clue"--that all of her victims at the facility were racial/ethnic minorities. The documentary unscrupulously avoids interviewing anyone who might suggest a racial motivation. That is the kind of "hate-free" history DeSantis wants people to know.

Thus we shouldn't be surprised that when a political party overrun with a fascist "fringe" control one or more branches of government, that their crimes will not only be not investigated and unpunished, only those who investigated them before are the ones "investigated." Hypocrisy is of course  part of the mix, with the far-right Republican conspiracy nutcases who say they will begin investigating the “weaponization” of the government by Democrats ignore the little fact that Republicans started this supposed “weaponizing” with its illegitimate attacks on the Clintons--or even further back with the  McCarthy "Red scare" hearings in the 1950s that led to many innocent people being "blacklisted." 

Republicans have also “weaponized” the U.S. Supreme Court with far-right “culture warriors” who simply ignore the wishes and well-being of the majority of people in this country, and enforce their own narrow perspective on everyone.

Will the far-right radicals take a “hint” by the findings of the Durham investigation that there was no “deep state conspiracy” against Donald Trump? Are they at all concerned about the revelation that Italian officials not only denied any involvement in the Russia investigation, but gave evidence to Durham and William Barr of financial crimes by Trump, and that not only were these charges not made public, but apparently were deliberately buried?

Not likely, and Democrats should demand that the House committees now controlled by the likes of Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene investigate the government-weaponizing fraud that was the Durham investigation, that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars, and it’s concealing of Trump’s crimes—or be denounced as ethical fraudsters themselves, which of course they are already anyways.

Meanwhile, we starting to understand what those “secret codicils” are that the far-right conspirators in Congress were demanding in exchange for supporting Kevin McCarthy’s leadership position: plumb committee seats from which they can use to exact their “revenge,” and keep out Democrats like Adam Schiff who have been  a thorn in the side of the doings of the Trump and the extremists in the Republican Party. The fact that McCarthy succumbed so easily to the blackmail of the handful on the lunatic fringe of the party shows just how deeply the corruption of the party has gone.

In his new book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, David Corn notes that what we see today almost occurred in 1964, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, who rode a wave of anti-JFK/LBJ hatred in response to social changes in the country (especially in regard to civil rights) and fanatical Red-baiting of targets foreign and domestic. Today, things have turned around a bit: white people wearing red caps can be assumed to be white nationalists/racists. 

In one last ditch attempt to stop Goldwater’s nomination and control of the party by the far-right extremists, the moderates sent in Nelson Rockefeller:

Clenching his square jaw, Rockefeller had hit the stage with an immediate task: to speak in favor of a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform denouncing extremism, specifically that of the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the ultraconservative, Red-baiting John Birch Society. The platform committee, controlled by Goldwater loyalists, had rejected this resolution. Yet the moderates hadn’t given up. On the opening night of the convention, Governor Mark Hatfield of Oregon had declared “There are bigots in this nation who spew forth their venom of hate. They parade under hundreds of labels, including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society. They must be overcome.”

But Hatfield’s speech was “met with a barrage of hisses and boos.” He later commented that “it spoke to me not merely of strong political disagreement, but of a spiteful kind of enmity waiting to be unleashed to destroy anyone seen as the enemy—domestic or foreign.” Even former president Dwight Eisenhower was nearly booed off the stage when he denounced the “real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, highly disciplined minority…wholly alien to the sound and honest conservatism.”

Goldwater’s landslide defeat in the 1964 election to LBJ temporarily sent the message that most Americans were uncomfortable with far-right extremism. Richard Nixon was a relatively "moderate" Republican, even allowing his former Red-baiting self to lapse by seeking détente with the Soviet Union and China, and to make “nice” with liberals by supporting civil rights and environmental issues. Subsequent Republican presidents through George W. Bush were far from “radical,” even Ronald Reagan, who in retrospect actually had “principles” in which he based the damage he had done.

If Trump had lost the 2016 election (as he himself apparently expected)—especially by a substantial margin—it is likely that the party would see the extremism of people like Jordan, Paul Gosar, Gaetz, Lauren Boebert and Greene a “loser” when it came to presidential politics,  where “culture wars,” white nationalism and racism still made most Americans “uncomfortable.”

But Trump’s “victory” in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by 3 million opened the Pandora’s Box of extremism by giving the radical, conspiracy-minded minority a forum which they could now exercise real power for the first time. Once they experienced power, like all radicals they didn’t abide by any limits to their abuses, nor did they betray any recognition for the positions of those who had a different worldview. 

Their only goal in life was to maintain power, and to destroy everyone who got in their way; they might hypocritically trot out their last slim lifeline to traditional conservatism via tax cuts for the rich and budget deficits, but on both counts these are aimed not to “help” people, but as a way to damage the “enemy," basically anyone opposed to their dogma of intolerance.

This is the “new” Republican Party that has been in the making since the 1950s, when it sought to “differentiate” itself from the Democratic Party by equating liberals with “Reds,” and ingratiating themselves with former white Democrats in the South by opposing desegregation and civil rights. This move to radicalism hit a snag in the crushing presidential defeat in 1964, although the white nationalist and racist element of the party continued to largely vote with the national candidate for lack of a “better” option.

But when the “Tea Party” movement emerged on the very day that Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and despite the media’s soft-pedaling of its motives, its members were a new kind of radicalism that saw Obama as an existential threat to white hegemony. It is these people who Trump spoke to and for, and Hilary Clinton was seen as too closely tied to Obama—and herself as a gender “radical”—and voted on their fears and paranoia. 

That Trump “won” by narrowly taking a few "blue" states and their electoral votes and not the popular vote shows us that many people voted for Trump as a “protest” vote and certainly not in the expectation that he would win, because he was clearly unqualified to be president; but a few votes here and there eventually added up. As president, Trump’s administration was a bit like that of Nazi rule, where government officials basically did what they wanted to do as long as it pleased Hitler, who like Trump  rarely committed policy to paper, whose "principles" were simple nationalism, prejudice and whim-based.

That Trump received as many votes as he did in 2020 is testament to the fact that far-right extremism was no longer viewed as a “liability” by the Republican Party. Although the January 6 insurrection and the culture war extremism of the Supreme Court probably did have an effect on the mid-term vote, we now see a party with another, equally dangerous problem: that it is the far-right extremists who are raking in the campaign money from billionaires who want the government to work for them, and not the people--and this is done by sowing the politics of division on a mass scale.

Billionaires like the Koch Brothers—their father a founding member of the John Birch Society—took advantage of the outrageous Citizens United decision by establishing a network where billionaires and corporations could funnel untold billions of "dark money" through their Americans For Prosperity PAC, whose sole purpose is to fund an oligarchy with de facto control of the country along supposed "libertarian" lines--which essentially means allowing the powerful to run roughshod over working people and the environment. 

You look at extremists like Greene and Gaetz and you think they are really “working” for the well-being of the “common people”? No, they are not; they are demonizing and dehumanizing whole segments of the country with propaganda that was retooled by Koch brothers and their ilk under the guise of the "populist" Tea Party, which of course continues as Trumpism, except worse. 

Those who vote for paid extremists call this "shaking things up," but it is more like a shake down. We see with Kirsten Sinema, who is willing to abandon any semblance of "principle" for cash from corporate donors; to hell with what her constituents expect from her. Sinema isn't even a far-right extremist, so we can "speculate" what people like Gaetz and Greene have promised their corporate donors, besides working to destroy the rights of workers and anything else that improves people’s lives by focusing their constituent's grievances on racial minorities and “liberals,” and not on those billionaires who are paying for this propaganda to be distributed. 

The Koch brothers propaganda schemes were successful in turning former progressive bastion Wisconsin into a "swing state" that would pummel the rights of labor after Republicans gained control of the state with corporate-paid stooge Scott Walker. The stupidity and ignorance of the radicalized Republican “base” this propaganda is aimed at is obvious to any thinking individual; with an ideology based not on legitimate, thought-out policies but on the most elemental form of hate—that comes from the “gut” and not from the head—there is simply no way to reason with it.

That’s where we are now. The new Republican “majority”—only a half-dozen votes by “moderate” Republicans could turn it into a “minority”—isn’t interested in governance, but being as destructive as they can be. In fact the only “governance” that Republicans ever seem interested in when they are in power is enriching their billionaire donors and essentially doing their bidding. You have to ask yourself “Who really benefits from the division being stoked by the far-right extremists? Who would oppose social, health and housing programs that citizens of other Western nations take for granted, unless it is seen as effecting their bottom line?”

When we see the current crop of far-right Republicans grandstanding idiotically today, we have to remember what this is really about. Billionaire donors fund crackpots like Boebert, Gosar, Gaetz and Greene  because they are “perfect” vehicles to dissemble the most outrageous propaganda and conspiracies to a “base” that may in fact “understand” that their antics don’t lead to anything constructive, but not its implications for the future or its destructive effect on democracy. Demonizing Democrats and the "others" is about “power”—but whose’ “power”? Certainly not that of the "people."