I’m wary of succumbing to my own biases by seeing the risks of the rise of the far right looming around every political event no matter how minor, but it’s hard to not to feel a certain amount of hopeless despair when it comes to forthcoming US election.
Perhaps I’ve overdosed on Timothy Synder’s excellent books, but when one sees things like the Madison Square Trump rally it’s hard not to hear several extremely loud metaphorical warning klaxons go off.
Trump vowed to win New York, saying it would be an “honor” to win his home state. But his remarks were overshadowed by the crude and offensive speakers that went before him, which included racist jokes about Puerto Ricans and Black people as well as prominent Democrats.
In the lead-up to Trump, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” made a crude joke about Hispanics and birth control, inferred that Jews are cheap and Palestinians are “rock-throwers” and made a racist comment about a Black man in the audience eating watermelon.>
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Other warm-up acts called Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a b***”, another referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as the “antichrist” and a third said Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy the country.” Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Harris is “on the side of the terrorists.”
For all their many harmful, dangerous and deadly faults, it’s hard to imagine the UK Conservatives PRing themselves like that. It feels qualitatively different.
Next up, I suppose there’s no need to spend time lying about vote fraud when you can just burn the votes
A ballot box in Portland and another in Vancouver were set on fire, potentially disenfranchising the wise folk who had already voted early via depositing their ballot into one of them. I don’t think we know much about the what and why this happened yet, but it doesn’t seem exactly normal let alone good. If it makes any difference, the states concerned are (usually) safe Democratic seats.
Finally for now, continuing the habit that US MAGA-style Republicans have of saying the quiet bit out loud, we have ProPublica’s reporting about the previously private speeches of Trump’s “key ally” and previous director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vough. He’s thought to be very likely to get a high-level governmental role should Trump get back into power.
A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.
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Other policies mentioned by Vought dovetail with Trump’s plans, such as embracing a wartime footing on the southern border and rolling back transgender rights…decrying the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and referring to gender-affirming care as “chemical castration.”
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“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
Cruelty as praxis, once again.