Month: November 2018

“This is some banana republic stuff”
by Tom Sullivan

Ah, the good old days of post-racism. With Barack Obama in the White House and Eric Holder as Attorney General, the T-party and conservative pundits I-de-clared racism was a thing of the past. Liberals who suggested it was not were the real racists. The Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby v. Holder himself declared times had changed and the preclearance section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act had outlived its usefulness. Vote suppression laws spread through the land. Donald Trump rode white fear and a minority of the national vote into the White House where he spent his first two years vilifying and scapegoating minorities and immigrants.

And so in the fullness of time did the good people of Georgia last week receive a racist robocall from white supremacists. “This is the magical negro, Oprah Winfrey, asking you to make my fellow negress, Stacey Abrams, the governor of Georgia,” and so on. This same group last month targeted Andrew Gillum, another black Democrat running for governor in Florida.

So also did attempts by Republicans to rig elections to maintain their minority rule grow more brazen. Abrams’s Republican opponent, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp — whose office administers the state’s elections; he refuses to step down — announced Sunday an investigation into the state’s Democratic Party for bringing to his attention a potentially serious vulnerability in Georgia’s election machinery. He advertised the warning as a “failed hacking attempt” in a banner on his official website.

Election Law Blog‘s Rick Hasen chronicles this and others of Kemp’s misdeeds, calling Kemp’s election-eve stunt an “act of political chutzpah by an election official on par with nothing else I’ve seen.” Hasen continues, “This is some banana republic stuff.” Someone give would-be governor Kemp some mirrored sunglasses, gold braid, and epaulets.

Zachary Roth (The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy) concurs with the Brennan Center for Justice that what is happening in Georgia, Texas, North Dakota, Kansas, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, including a “decade-long assault on voting” North Carolina, represents “the worst voter suppression” of the modern era. Roth writes:

Put bluntly, the central question of politics in the Trump era is how long Republicans can undermine democracy effectively enough to maintain their hold on power. Success this year likely would embolden them to push even further, perhaps by shooting for the voter suppression holy grail: a national voter ID law, and a requirement that those registering to vote show documentary proof of citizenship. If they succeed at that, we could one day look back on this cycle as a relative golden age for voting rights.

Even with polls showing a lot of contested races like Georgia’s close, listening to them would be a mistake. Voting and lines were insane on the Saturday, last day of early voting in North Carolina. Those late polls may also have missed this:

Turnout among 18-29 year olds, compared to 2014 early voting:
– AZ +217%
– FL +131%
– GA +415% (!!!)
– MI +128%
– NV +364%
– TN +767% (!!!)
– TX +448% (!!!)
Data h/t: @targetsmart & @tbonierhttps://t.co/58E7PHqobF— Reid Wilson (@PoliticsReid) November 3, 2018

Over the last two and a half weeks, I have tracked early voting here by age, waiting for younger voters to exercise the power right in front of them. The curve below likely looks like most other states. Americans under 40 could be running this joint. They could end geriatric-mandering now and gerrymandering later. That blip at the left end of the voting curve (college students) appeared only in the last few days. This is North Carolina only, which does not appear in the striking list above. Nor do young, first-time voters likely in the late tallies of pollsters. There are still some surprises to come Tuesday night. IF. WE. VOTE.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

He always said that you have to “take out the families”

by digby

We had heard this already but this seems like a big confirmation of the details.

WASHINGTON — The Ritz-Carlton in Saudi Arabia’s capital bills itself as an “elegant oasis” that “completely envelops its discerning guests in majestic surroundings.”

But a year ago Sunday, on Nov. 4, 2017, the ultra-luxurious Riyadh hotel — with its marble floors and vast indoor swimming pool — became a gilded prison, when hundreds of Saudi royals, billionaires and senior government officials were detained in an extraordinary power play by the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The involuntary guests were told they had to sign away large chunks of their assets to be released. The detention involved both psychological abuse and — in some cases — torture, current and former U.S. officials say.

The move, described by Saudi authorities as a crackdown on rampant corruption, allowed the crown prince to tighten his grip and sent a shock wave through the kingdom’s elites.

“This was a shakedown operation and a power consolidation operation,” said one former senior U.S. official who was in office at the time.

The Ritz detentions were designed “to remind people going forward that their wealth and their well-being would depend on the crown prince and not anything else, which is why it was so upsetting for many in the royal family,” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A year later, the event has taken on even more importance in the wake of the death of the Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2. Bin Salman is suspected of ordering Khashoggi’s death, and is struggling to defuse the crisis that has put the country’s international standing in jeopardy.

If bin Salman survives the fallout over the killing of Khashoggi, it will be in part due to the roundup at the Ritz, when he crushed his rivals and potential opponents. Some of those targeted included royals or officials linked to the late King Abdullah, who died in 2015. His relatives and associates are distrusted by the circle around King Salman, who now holds the throne.

But the crackdown generated deep resentment in the House of Saud and numerous enemies, experts and former officials said, and the crown prince could face more resistance from his internal adversaries. Bin Salman, keenly aware that Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal was murdered by a disgruntled nephew in 1975, devotes elaborate attention to his personal security, one former U.S. intelligence officer told NBC News.

The details of exactly what happened to those detained at the Ritz have remained shrouded in secrecy, and the fate of those still held also remains unclear. A second hotel, the Courtyard by Marriott, located just across the street from the Ritz, was also used as a high-end detention center when space ran out at the Ritz. Both hotels were closed to the public during the operation. The Ritz did not respond to a request for comment.

A U.S. intelligence official and two former senior U.S. government officials told NBC News that the detainees were coerced, abused and tortured. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to divulge details, which were contained in classified intelligence reports.

The detainees were deprived of sleep, beaten and interrogated with their heads covered. Seventeen were hospitalized, according to the New York Times.

One detainee, a Saudi military officer, Maj. Gen. Ali al-Qahtani, died in custody. The Saudi authorities have yet to offer an official explanation in the case. He was a top aide to Prince Turki bin Abdullah, a son of the late King Abdullah.

Saudi Arabia has denied that any abuse or torture took place during the detentions. The Saudi embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s on board because he believes in torture and had it in mind that this was about money, which is the only way his mind can wrap around world affairs. It was — MBS was shaking down his realtives. But it was really about seizing power and getting rid of rivals.

Trump has certainly kept that last hope alive here in the US too — the “lock her up” chants have now evolved to include all Democratic rivals.

How many of Trump’s Redhats are law enforcement?

by digby

Disturbing? It should be:

Telling passage where Trump portrays Antifa as a Democratic paramilitary vs "his" "bikers", cops, military, ICE and border patrol. #fasc pic.twitter.com/cKzJAtVG8F— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 4, 2018

Sadly, if things really get out of hand, I’m afraid he’s right. Many, many cops are Redhats.

It’s hard to find polling information about law enforcement political affiliation. But this pretty much tells the tale:

I’m not sure about the military but I’d guess that many of them would be with him too. I seem to recall that the officer corps, presumably made up of many of those college-educated voters, are less enthusiastic about Trump but the rank and file white guys (and some Latinx) are with him all the way.

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Ken Starr sees no evidence of Trump having unauthorized sex

by digby

via GIPHY

Apparently, that’s the only thing he believes is an impeachable offense:

Former independent counsel Ken Starr said that he has not seen President Trump commit any offense that is “even close” to being impeachable.

John Catsimatidis in an interview airing Sunday on AM 970 in New York asked Starr, who led the investigation into former President Clinton’s sexual misconduct with Monica Lewinsky, if Trump had committed any “impeachable offenses.”

“Not even close,” Starr replied. “I know of no evidence … that would suggest that [Trump] has committed high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“You can hate the way he tweets … you can disagree with his policies … but be very careful before you move the country toward impeachment,” he added. “It’s inherently divisive.”

He would know.

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“Let us have faith that right makes might”

by digby

President Obama is on the campaign trail wondering why the people who won the election are so mad all the time. And a lot of people are saying “good question” on social media.

I will offer, once again (I know some of you are sick of it) my post attempting to answer that from the early days after the election.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

We must be avowedly with them

by digby

As I have many times before, I wrote about the right’s strange “winner” psychology for Salon today:

It’s not surprising that the election of Donald Trump would cause an upheaval in civil society. The differences between the two visions of America that were presented in this campaign couldn’t be more stark, and it’s inevitable that they would play out beyond the political system.

Much of the unrest has taken the form of protest marches and school walkouts on the left while the right is more inclined to drunken hooliganism, flying the Confederate flag and the like. This is America. We have free speech and a right to assemble, and regardless of how we feel about the “message” being sent by the other side, they have a right to say it.

But there have also been many reports of anonymous defacing of property with white power slogans and other racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic phrases. And there are now hundreds of stories of individual acts of bullying and even hate crimes coming from people who call themselves Trump supporters, aimed at fellow Americans they see as their enemies.

We could see this in the Trump rallies, of course. They bristled with resentment and barely repressed violence. And no one can possibly argue that the candidate didn’t use those dark emotions to motivate his followers. In the “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, Trump admitted that he did that consciously. When Stahl pointed out that people are scared, Trump had to be coaxed to say this:

Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.

Has any president-elect ever been asked to reassure the American people that they needn’t be afraid of him and his followers? It’s astonishing. Trump’s lack of understanding about why they are afraid is even more so. He seems to think people are soothed by him saying “don’t be afraid” followed by “we’re going bring our country back,” as if that were a threat. And that’s exactly what scares them. It’s clear he wants to go back to a time when women, people of color, immigrants and minority religions were second-class citizens. They are terrified of what Trump has promised to do to deliver that lost world back to a swath of America that seems to hate them.

Trump outfoxed the system and won the whole thing without even getting a majority. He heads an undivided government and has the chance to leave a mark on the country for generations with at least one appointment to the Supreme Court. He has the power to enact his entire agenda with very little institutional resistance. And yet his followers are still filled with outrage and frustration, lashing out at the reeling and defeated left.

This incident in Brooklyn over the weekend illustrates the phenomenon. Two women were in a restaurant bemoaning the election of Donald Trump when a man and his wife sat down next to them and became incensed about what the women were saying. The manager moved the couple to a different table and gave them their meal without charge to calm them down, but after leaving the restaurant the man stormed back in and punched one of the women in the face. He told the manager he wanted to kill her. (Fortunately, the woman was not seriously injured.)

This is just one random incident but it raises the question: who gets that mad when they’ve won? It’s not as if those women were rubbing his nose in defeat. Why would something so ordinary as complaining about the election cause a man to hit a a stranger, a woman, in the face?

In fact, America has been divided along two moving tribal lines for a very long time, and this odd reaction has happened before when this political faction came to power, although it doesn’t normally get this violent or this ugly. The political right often seems to take little joy in its victories, instead remaining focused on its defeated enemies. Compromise is unacceptable — right-wingers seem to demand total capitulation and when the their adversaries continue to resist, they are enraged.

The best description of this phenomenon comes from Abraham Lincoln in his famous address at New York’s Cooper Union in 1860. Trying to explain how impossible it was to deal with the Southern slave states using normal democratic means, he asked, “What will it take to satisfy them?”

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

This is why they are so angry. It’s not enough for them to win. Those who opposed Trump must stop opposing him.We must agree that Muslims should be banned from entering the country, agree we should torture and kill suspected terrorists and their families, agree immigrants should be rounded up and deported, agree there should be guns in schools, agree women should be punished for having abortions and agree to all the rest of it. Until we stop resisting completely and declare that we are “avowedly with them” they will continue to believe that “all their troubles proceed from us.”

That is not going to happen. Trump’s forces may have won the election but they have not won the hearts and minds of the American people who didn’t vote for him. And they won’t. This administration will be met with fierce resistance from millions of people, from the moment Trump takes office until the day he leaves. There will be no appeasing him, and no easing of his followers’ guilt for what many of them know in their hearts to be an ugly and cruel impulses in consenting to this white nationalist program. It’s all on them.

Lincoln had this to say to his fellow Unionists about how to proceed in a situation such as this:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

What else can we do? 

Citizens all over the country rose to the occasion and went out and organized and ran for office and gave their money.

Hopefully, Tuesday will show that their faith was not misplaced.

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The conservative, white, female Trump voter

by digby

Yes, it’s another story from the New York Times about Trump voters. This time the focus is on the women who worship the pussy-grabbing miscreant.

Standing in an airplane hangar in the mid-autumn chill awaiting the arrival of President Trump, Joan Philpott said she was angry and scared. Only Mr. Trump, she said, can solve the problems she worries most about.

“He wants to protect this country, and he wants to keep it safe, and he wants to keep it free of invaders and the caravan and everything else that’s going on,” said Ms. Philpott, 69, a retired respiratory therapist.

Ms. Philpott was one of thousands of women who braved a drizzle for hours to have the chance to cheer Mr. Trump at a rally here on Thursday. While political strategists and public opinion experts agree that Mr. Trump’s greatest electoral weakness is among female voters, here in Columbia and places like it, the president enjoys a herolike status among women who say he is fighting to preserve a way of life threatened by an increasingly liberal Democratic Party.

“He understands why we’re angry,” Ms. Philpott said, “and he wants to fix it.”

As Republican candidates battle to keep their congressional majorities in the midterm elections on Tuesday, Mr. Trump is crisscrossing the country to deliver a closing argument meant to acknowledge — and in many cases stoke — women’s anxieties. At rally after rally, he has said that women “want security,” warning of encroaching immigrants, rising crime and a looming economic downturn if Democrats gain power.

Some of Mr. Trump’s female backers initially supported him only reluctantly or do so now in spite of reservations about his bawdy language and erratic behavior. But they shared in his victory after the bitter and partisan battle over the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. And many believe the president when he reminds them during each of his hourlong pep rallies that the world they know — largely Christian, conservative and white — is at stake on Tuesday.

They are evangelicals. That is the heart of Trump’s base.

These women have been opponents of everything I believe in for as long as I can remember. If you have ever done any abortion activism these are the people with whom you most like lock horns. They are hostile to feminism on every level. They are very, very conservative.

I have them in my family. They are the “poorly educated” as Trump called them. They like Trump for the same reason all those evangelicals love Trump. He is the leader of their tribe, he hates all the people they hate and tells them what they want to hear. And they love patriarchy and their place in it. Trump, to them, is a rich alpha-male who makes hem feel all warm inside.

They are unpersuadable. Unlike like the white men who love Trump, they are also a minority of white women.

Clinton won 47% of white women in 2016, the largest margin in history. We’re going to see if Trump has finally driven a majority to the Democrats. It was happening anyway, but he may have super-charged it.

But don’t kid yourself. There are always going to be a large number of conservative white evangelical women who vote with their conservative white male leaders. Being a second-class citizen (what they think of as being “put on a pedestal”) is fundamental to their worldview. They don’t break away. And there are a lot of them.

Update: LOL! Now HERE’s a REAL Trump follower:

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For My Evangelical and Catholic Friends — From Thomas Merton

by tristero

From the chapter entitled “Christianity and Totalitarianism” from Disputed Questions by Thomas Merton:

A mass movement readily exploits the discontent and frustration of large segments of the population which for some reason or other cannot face the responsibility of being persons and standing on their own feet. But give these persons a movement to join, a cause to defend, and they will go to any extreme, stop at no crime, intoxicated as they are by the slogans that give them a pseudo-religious sense of transcending their own limitations. The member of a mass movement, afraid of his own isolation, and his own weakness as an individual, cannot face the task of discovering within himself the spiritual power and integrity which can be called forth only by love. Instead of this, he seeks a movement that will protect his weakness with a wall of anonymity and justify his acts by the sanction of collective glory and power. All the better if this is done out of hatred, for hatred is always easier and less subtle than love. It does not have to respect reality as love does. It does not have to take account of individual cases. Its solutions are simple and easy. It makes its decisions by a simple glance at a face, a colored skin, a uniform. It identifies an enemy by an accent, an unfamiliar turn of speech, an appeal to concepts that are difficult to understand. He is something unfamiliar. This is not “ours.” This must be brought into line – or destroyed. 

Here is the great temptation of the modern age, this universal infection of fanaticism, this plague of intolerance, prejudice and hate which flows from the crippled nature of man who is afraid of love and does not dare to be a person. It is against this temptation most of all that the Christian must labor with inexhaustible patience and love, in silence, perhaps in repeated failure, seeking tirelessly to restore, wherever he can, and first of all in himself, the capacity of love and which makes man the living image of God.

Chris Cuomo read these great paragraphs beautifully the other day on CNN, starting around 40:00.    Special thanks to my dear friend JR for passing these on to me.

A certain paranoid style
by Tom Sullivan

“For ye have the poor with you always…” A certain paranoid style as well, and simmering bitterness with it.

At a Miami rally last week, former president Barack Obama found his remarks interrupted by angry hecklers. It is an occupational hazard.

“You know what?” Obama told the crowd. “This is what I look forward to, is having a few hecklers to get me back in the mood. I enjoy that. You always got to have a few in order to know that you’re on the campaign trail.”

After several interruptions, Obama observed, “Why is it that the folks that won the last election are so mad all the time?”

The crowd roared.

“It’s an interesting question,” Obama continued, turning back to the crowd. “I mean … when I won the presidency, at least my side felt pretty good. You know, I don’t know why … it tells you something interesting, that even the folks who are in charge are still mad, because they’re getting ginned up to be mad.”

"Why is it that the folks that won the last election are so mad all the time?" former Pres. Obama asks at Miami rally.

"When I won the presidency, at least my side felt pretty good." https://t.co/7C4hl2rViA pic.twitter.com/drNOxRXbPt— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 2, 2018

What is it American conservatives have to be angry about? They control the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and two-thirds of state legislatures, with trifectas in over half. “Once again,” Paul Waldman wrote, “Republicans are the sorest of winners … a story that has become all too familiar.”

The Washington Post reports:

On Friday, federal economists reported that the nation had produced 250,000 new jobs in October, the 97th straight month of gains, as The Washington Post’s Heather Long and Danielle Paquette reported. The average worker’s earnings rose by 3.1 percent since last year and unemployment remained at 3.7 percent, the lowest percentage in half a century.

And still, they are mad.

In advance of Tuesday’s election, our current president, Donald Trump, is not promoting that good news or boasting about his tax cut, but whipping up fear of a line of Central American refugees headed north on foot, still many hundreds of miles from the southern border. An invasion, he calls it. Unarmed refugees. They are coming to “get us” (or something) sponsored by George Soros and Democratic sleeper agents in the State Department.

Trump has called for sending more troops than currently deployed to Afghanistan to repel the migrants … when and if they arrive in a month or more. A group of former generals characterized the move as a political stunt.

The Soros/caravan conspiracy theory pulls off another trifecta, the Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach observed, an admixture of “anti-Semitism, fear of immigrants and the specter of powerful foreign agents controlling major world events in pursuit of a hidden agenda.”

It is as tiresome and familiar as it is dangerous.

Richard Hofstadter half a century ago addressed America’s history of conspiratorial thinking from the McCarthy hearings to the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1964). Hofstadter wrote of America’s perpetually aggrieved:

The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Also from a free press that refuses to write fawning paeans to He Trump.

Hofstadter observes that ethnic and religious conflict as well as class conflicts contribute to the paranoia of those predisposed to it, but also circumstances they feel powerless to change. The expansion of women’s political power, now, and the anticipated decline in status of America’s traditional white majority.

Why are they so mad all the time? They have so much power and it still is not enough. They want it all. And they want the rest of us to accede to their having and not sharing it. For the bitter aggrieved, democracy is an affectation. They want to rule. It is not simply paranoid style, but a personality type.

Not to step on Digby’s riff, but Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union address summed up why Republicans could never satisfy the complaints of southern conservatives (then Democrats) vis-à-vis slavery:

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Replace “arrest and return their fugitive slaves” with “separate and deport the illegals” and you have our present situation. Already more groups are in the cross-hairs, literally, as the last weeks have shown. The aggrieved are with us always.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

America Today

By tristero

This is a true story. Dr. Stanford was on a plane when a woman nearby began to have some kind of episode. The doctor began to help her. A flight attendant questioned Dr. Stanford’s credentials: “Are you actually an MD?” Then a second flight attendant did. Then the two asked Dr. Stanford pointed questions: they apparently still didn’t believe the medical license that Dr Stanford showed them was real.

Dr. Stanford was African-American. Dr. Stanford was also female. She was carrying the credentials with her because it turns out, her qualifications are often questioned.

Sigh. In an America with a crazy president who has access to nuclear bombs, mass bombers, anti-semitic murderers, and maniac incels, this kind of moral assault on a person’s dignity seems less important a social problem. It isn’t because, for one thing, it’s far more common.

The entire article is worth reading.

Oh look, a sexual assaulting misogynist shot five women

by digby

He killed these two and wounded three other women and one man

So, in the two weeks leading up to the election, we’ve had a crazed Trump superfan send bombs all over the country to try to kill his idol’s enemies, a raging anti-semite mow down 11 Jews as they worshipped in a synagogue, a racist lunatic shoot down two African Americans in a grocery store while saying “whites don’t kill whites” and now we have a far-right misogynist “incel” shoot up a yoga studio — (or as the Republicans call them “an angry mob.”)

The man who shot dead two women at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, on Friday before killing himself was a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed misogynist who railed against women, black people, and immigrants in a series of online videos and songs.

Scott Beierle, 40, was named by Tallahassee Police as the gunman who opened fire inside the Hot Yoga Tallahassee studio, killing two and injuring four other women and a man.

Those killed were named as Dr. Nancy Van Vessem, 61, who worked at Florida State University’s College of Medicine, and FSU student Maura Binkley, 21.

On a YouTube channel in 2014, Beierle filmed several videos of himself offering extremely racist and misogynistic opinions in which he called women “sluts” and “whores,” and lamented “the collective treachery” of girls he went to high school with.

“There are whores in — not only every city, not only every town, but every village,” he said, referring to women in interracial relationships, who he said had betrayed “their blood.”

Officer Damon Miller of the Tallahassee Police Department said he could not tell BuzzFeed News whether women were specifically targeted in the attack or whether these online posts were the subject of detectives’ inquiries.

“Everything that he has a connection to we’re investigating right now,” Miller said.

Police said they were still investigating a motive, but noted Beierle had previously been investigated for harassing women.

In one video called “Plight of the Adolescent Male,” he named Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 and is often seen as a hero for so-called “incels,” or those who consider themselves “involuntarily celibate.”

“I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males… that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing. This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent,” he said.

This is the second deadly attack this year in which Rodger has been mentioned by the suspected assailant. A man who wrote anti-women references on his Facebook account allegedly killed 10 people in Toronto in April when he drove his van into a crowd. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” Alek Minassian wrote on Facebook prior to the attack in a post that also mentioned “the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Some in the incel community have previously raged against women wearing yoga pants.

Another of Beierle’s 2014 videos was titled “The Rebirth of my Misogynism,” and featured him listing the names of women — from eighth grade until his time in the Army — who he said caused his “rebirth.” (A Pentagon spokesperson told BuzzFeed News Beierle served from 2008-2010).

In the video he said women were capable of “treachery” and “lying.” He spoke aggressively about women giving him their phone number even when they had a boyfriend and how angry it made him. He also mentioned a girl who cancelled dates on him. “I could have ripped her head off,” he said.

Unlike the YouTube videos, his songs on Soundcloud were all uploaded in the last few months. Shortly before Friday’s shooting, Beierle uploaded one song called “Fuck ’Em All,” with the lyrics: “To hell with the boss that won’t get off my back / To hell with the girl I can’t get in the sack.”

Another song, called “Nobody’s Type,” featured him lamenting that women didn’t find him attractive. “I’m no athletic shark. I’m not a physical specimen. I don’t win the trophies and medals. Nobody stands in awe of me,” he sang.

In “American Wigger,” he sang that he would “blow off” the head of a women he referred to using the c-word. The song “Locked in my Basement” featured an extremely disturbing tale of Beierle holding a woman prisoner in his basement using chains so he could rape her.

Representatives for YouTube and Soundcloud didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Beierle’s political affiliations were not immediately clear, but he was highly critical of the Obama administration in his 2014 videos. In one video, he said that he resented having to subsidize as a taxpayer “the casual sex lives of slutty girls” through the Affordable Care Act’s contraception provisions. In the same video he also criticized “the invasion of Central American children” in the US that year and said the migrants seeking asylum should be deported on barges.

The Tallahassee shooting comes after a spate of deadly violence from the far-right in the past two weeks. On Oct. 27, a far-right extremist shouting anti-Semitic phrases opened fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11. That came just three days after a man shot dead two black people in Louisville, Kentucky, in an attack authorities have described as a hate crime.

In a punk song he made called “Don’t Shame,” Beierle sang of walking into a girl’s locker room and going on “ass-grabbing rampage of underage girls.” He also spoke about grabbing women in the song “Handful of Bare Ass.” The Tallahassee Democrat newspaper reported he had been arrested in 2012 and 2016 for grabbing women’s buttocks without their consent. Prosecutors eventually dropped charges in both cases, according to the newspaper.

“I have no shame, but this is to blame. I would do anything. I just don’t care. I have no fear of any consequences,” he sang.

“I am pro-death,” the song continued. “The more that die the merrier.”

There’s nothing to see here folks, nothing at all. The fact that members of the Democratic coalition are being violently threatened and killed by people with motivations that echo the grievances stoked by Trump and his cult is purely coincidence. 

No biggie.