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."
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