Opinion

By this point, almost everyone has heard of QAnon, the conspiracy spawned by an anonymous online poster of enigmatic prophecies. Starting with an initial promise in 2017 that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be imminently arrested, a broad group of interpreters divined a conspiracy that saw President Donald Trump's Democratic opponents as a global cabal of Satanic pedophiles.

Perhaps the greatest success of the conspiracy is its ability to create a shared alternate reality, a reality that can dismiss everything from a decisive election to a deadly pandemic. The QAnon universe lives on – now largely through involvement in local, not national, Republican politics.

Americans thought January 6 was the peak of the effort to end democracy in America and replace it with strongman authoritarian rule. But January 6 was merely the tip of the iceberg.

This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report

On a near-nightly basis, Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson conducts master classes in white supremacy and hate for his millions of viewers, nearly all of them white conservatives. His latest lesson involves the paranoid fiction that nonwhite people are coming to America to "replace" the majority white population, and that by implication the existence of the "white race" is imperiled both in the United States and around the world.

In his white supremacy tutelage, Carlson also routinely rages at the enemies of the MAGAverse and "real America," especially Black and brown people (and their white allies) in the pro-human rights and democracy movement known as Black Lives Matter. Their crime, for Carlson and his viewers? Demanding that the human and civil rights of Black people, and others marginalized in American society, be respected and protected.

In Friday's column, I said the Republicans seem to have frightened David Brooks, which suggests the party has frightened respectable white people, too. I consider the Times columnist to be representative of the conventional wisdom of that great globular middle of American politics. The more these people fear the Republicans, the better.

Today, I want to take this a step further. If I'm right in thinking that respectable white people are less willing to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt, on account of most of them being okie-dokie with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn a free and fair presidential election, this is an ideal time to push them, by way of persuasion, to an important conclusion, to wit: conservatism has become a byword for barbarism.

In Friday's column, I said the Republicans seem to have frightened David Brooks, which suggests the party has frightened respectable white people, too. I consider the Times columnist to be representative of the conventional wisdom of that great globular middle of American politics. The more these people fear the Republicans, the better.

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board

Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean had some choice words for the modern Republican Party during a recent interview with Molly Jong-Fast of The Daily Beast. He called the GOP "racist" and "neo-fascist" and, hilariously, compared the Republican congressional caucus specifically to a "sentient YouTube comment section." I expected there to be some outrage, but so far not so much. Apparently, even Republicans are running out of energy to deny what is obviously true about their party. Donald Trump's only been out of office for a little over three months and his once-shocking levels of racism have now become just normal Republican politics.

In August 2017, Trump incited one of the larger of his nearly infinite controversies by insisting that a crowd of neo-Nazis and other white nationalists who gathered for a race riot in Charlottesville contained "very fine people" in it. Over the next few days, Trump did his usual thing of backing off the racist comments and then backing off the back-off. Ultimately, everyone walked away with the same general understanding: Trump's heart was with the white nationalists and any half-hearted gestures otherwise were political theater no one actually took seriously. Efforts by conservative pundits to clean up Trump's comments over the next few years were merely meant to get liberals to stop bugging them about it, not a genuine sign of confusion over where he stood on the matter.

I'm sure you all remember the endless media forays into so-called Trump country after the 2016 election to find out what "the country" was really thinking. The media were fascinated by the fact that Donald Trump managed to pull off his narrow electoral win in places none of them had ever been so they sent out intrepid reporters to rural towns and small cities in the rust belt to find out what Real Americans™️ were thinking. And they went back every few months for years to take the temperature of these folks who always said the same thing: they just loved Trump and supported him no matter what. Trump's supporters believed with all their hearts that everything the press reported about him was a lie and the whole country was really with them if only the media would tell the truth about it. After all, just about everyone they knew and everyone on Facebook were in total agreement.

This article was originally published at Salon

Last week, social media lit up with screen grabs of Tucker Carlson's yearbook entry from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1991, which was confirmed by the college, listing the "Dan White Society" as a club to which Carlson stated he belonged.

This article was originally published at The Signorile Report

Too many Americans love guns more than they do other human beings.

There have been at least 50 mass shootings in America since the massacre and apparent hate crime attack against Asian Americans in the Atlanta area on March 16.

As reported last weekend, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, perhaps the two most right-wing members of Congress, were planning to create an "America First" caucus in the House. This is similar to the way neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and other members of explicitly white supremacist organizations beginning in the 1970s and '80s rebranded themselves as "white nationalists," with the goal of appearing more "respectable" and "mainstream." To counter that subterfuge, Greene's group could be more accurately described as the "White Power Caucus" or the "House Republican Klavern."

Punchbowl News obtained access to a seven-page statement of purpose and goals from the proposed America First Caucus, which includes such standard white supremacist talking points as: "America is a nation with a border, and a culture strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions."

The 21st-century version of the Confederacy is fixing to repeat the Big Lie strategy of its 19th century forebearers. And this one goes beyond the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Now they're trying to sanitize treason as well.

George Orwell famously pointed out that, "Those who control the past control the future," and the GOP is furiously trying to rewrite the history of January 6th to hide their participation in a heinous crime and promote their authoritarian agenda for the future.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is really determined to sell his audience on what is — and this cannot be stressed enough — a literal neo-Nazi conspiracy theory. Neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups have long pushed the idea that a shadowy cabal of Jews is secretly conspiring to "remake" America and "steal" it from its rightful owners, white Christians. They are supposedly doing this by "importing" non-white people — who neo-Nazis believe to be mentally inferior and therefore easily controlled by the shadowy Jewish conspiracy — into the U.S.

This article was originally published at Salon

Republican greed is why Americans can't have nice things.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or even subsidized higher education. In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis, nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick, and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.