“It’s a fake pandemic created to destroy the United States of America,” a man at a Michigan Donald Trump rally this week told CNN’s Jim Acosta. He refused to wear a mask in the crowd against a phony virus. He dismissed the acting president’s taped admission to Bob Woodward that the virus is deadly.
“That’s his opinion,” the man scoffed.
Years of propagandizing, racist dog whistles, xenopohobia, and vilification of the media by Republicans and their media allies created Trump. Now Trump (and the alternate reality he inhabits) is out of their control. And now Trump’s followers are out of his.
A series of posts this week leads to concerns that can no longer be dismissed out of hand. At the Washington Post, Colbert I. King hears echoes of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace in the acting president’s speeches and tweets.
“I want to say that anarchists — and I am talking about newsmen sometimes — I want to say — I want to make that announcement to you because we regard that the people of this country are sick and tired of, and they are gonna get rid of you — anarchists,” Wallace told a crowd in Toledo, Ohio in 1968.
That is eliminationist rhetoric. David Neiwert (Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, 2009) posted a lengthy tweet storm on the topic two years ago.
King cites more parallels between Wallace and Trump and concludes:
See Wallace, making his stand for segregation in a schoolhouse door. See Trump, standing outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, holding up a Bible and pretending to be a protector of the faith — even as he left America unprotected against the coronavirus.
Purveyors of lies and a mean-spirited “us-against-them” virus for which, sadly, there is no vaccine.
And it is spreading. Time magazine this week reported on how conspiracy theories are shaping the 2020 electorate. A hairdresser in Kenosha, Wisconsin says she is not a QAnon supporter while regurgitating its memes.
“I went down the rabbit hole. I started doing a lot of research,” she says.
Asked what she means by research, she continues cautiously, “This is where I don’t know what I can say, because what’s integrated into our system, it stems deep. And it has to do with really corrupt, evil, dark things that have been hidden from the public. Child sex trafficking is one of them.”
It is the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s all over again. Pizzagate (2016) was a leading indicator of its return. It is back with a vengeance.
Time’s Charlotte Alter has more:
On a cigarette break outside their small business in Ozaukee County, Tina Arthur and Marcella Frank told me they plan to vote for Trump again because they are deeply alarmed by “the cabal.” They’ve heard “numerous reports” that the COVID-19 tents set up in New York and California were actually for children who had been rescued from underground sex-trafficking tunnels.
Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon. Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking, while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-owned search engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’s found: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can “extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on the black market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins, the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”
A staff writer from the Daily Banter this week commented on the phenomenon:
This is a tiny peek inside the growing movement that is Qanon. Qanon literally, not figuratively, LITERALLY thinks the left is controlled by an international (read as: “Jews”) cabal of pedophiles who also, and I fucking kid you not, drink the blood of children.
This is a repackaging of the “blood libel”, a centuries old piece of propaganda invented to demonize Jews.
The blood libel exists for one purpose and one purpose only: To allow the persecution and mass murder of Jews with no guilt. To give the imprimatur of morality as they slaughtered us; first by the hundreds. Then the thousands. Then the millions.
Now the right is applying the blood libel to all of us on the left.
Why?
To justify the coming terrorism and fascism. They know they’re going to lose the election and they have every intention of violently seizing control.
In order to do this, they will murder men, women, and children with a smile on their face and a song in their heart. Because they “know”, deep in their heart, that they are fighting “evil.”
And that is the point of Qanon’s blood libel. If you are fighting blood-drinking pedophiles, there is absolutely nothing off limits. There are no lines you cannot cross. Your moral authority is absolute because the evil you are fighting is absolute.
The right is laying the groundwork for atrocities and afterwards, they’ll find all the “proof” they’ll need. History is written by the victors.
If you do not understand yet how depraved and dangerous the right has become, you need to wake the fuck up before they’re burning you at the stake as a pedophile.
Too much?
Gabriel Trumbly, a 29-year-old Army veteran and Portland videographer, set out in his car this week with his partner Jennifer Paulson to get images of the fires spreading across the state. He soon saw descriptions of his vehicle on Twitter and Facebook. Rumors had spread that they were Antifa terrorists and setting the fires overtaking local towns.
A vague Facebook message by the Molalla Police Department posted Wednesday evening fed suspicion among the rumor- and fire-stricken residents.
“To those of you still in and around town, please report any suspicious activity (strange people walking around/looking into cars and houses/vehicles driving through neighborhoods that don’t belong there) to 911 immediately,” the MPD post read.
“Make them dig a grave then shoot them,” read one of the posts calling for them to be shot.
Trumbly called the Molalla Police Department who issued a clarification: “There has been NO antifa in town as of this posting at 02:00 am. Please, folks, stay calm and use common sense. Stay inside or leave the area.”
The more stressed people get and the more worried the Right becomes at the prospect of losing power in November, the more dangerous this situation will become.
John Stoehr at Religion Dispatches considered the hysteria problem this week, seeing it as a phenomenon of the rural-urban divide, one elite reporters from the national press are not equipped to grasp:
Fact is, when rural Arizonans talk about “law enforcement” over a plate of eggs and bacon, what they mean is punishing the weak. When they talk about their “liberty,” what they mean is their dominance. When they talk about their “traditional values,” what they mean is their control. A Times reporter can’t possibly know any of that. The problem is made worse when sources give voice to this or that conspiracy theory. She can’t know her sources aren’t delusional. She can’t know they aren’t crazy. She can’t know that conspiracy theories are central to their authoritarian view of the world. So she doesn’t report how dangerous their politics are.
She ends up reporting that some Americans believe, for instance, that a “secret cabal” of Democrats and other “radical leftists” in the “deep state” is, in addition to sexually molesting innocent children and perhaps eating them, too, trying to bring down Donald Trump. (This is the QAnon conspiracy you’ve read about lately.) What she should be reporting is that some Americans are willing to say anything to justify any action—violence, insurrection, even treason—to defeat their perceived enemies. Elite reporters, and some non-elite reporters who are following suit, keep talking about conspiracy theories as if they were a “collective delusion.” They are no such thing. The authoritarians who espouse them don’t care if QAnon is true. They don’t care that it’s false. Conspiracy theories are a convenience, a means of rationalizing what they already want to do, which is precisely what elite reporters can’t know and do not report.
For Stoehr, it is not necessary that people in these stories literally believe what they are saying. These tales reinforce their authoritarian world view. That is sufficient. Reporters are being played. Or are they?
That the truth no longer matters has been in evidence since before Stephen Colbert coined “truthiness” in 2005. The right-wing chain emails I collected before Facebook and Twitter took off demonstrated that. “Nice” white people joined propaganda campaigns aimed at getting people angry and keeping them angry about imaginary slights committed against them by liberal neighbors:
Easily debunked on Google in the time it takes to attach your email list and forward to all your friends. They are lies and, deep down, right wingers know it. Yet they pass them along dutifully, almost gleefully. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.
But they became addicted to the daily outrage right-wing talk radio had been feeding them since the early 1990s. By the aughts, it was emails filled with altered photos, misleading statistics, or incidents twisted or misinterpreted like rock lyrics and debunked by Snopes. Now armed vigilantes are in the streets hunting Black Lives protesters, news photographers, imaginary Antifa arsonists, and (soon) imaginary cannibal pedophiles.
Two are dead and one maimed in Kenosha. This is dangerous shit.
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