I do not pretend to understand the ins and outs of Robinhood.com and how online investor-activists worked this scheme to damage the “internal cartel of elites,” that is Wall Street short-selling. But it is incredible to “watch these people lose their minds,” Krystal Ball observes, at this rare, “actual transfer of wealth from Wall Street to Main Street.” Saagar Enjeti is enjoying Wall Street’s pain.
If QAnon is a “game that plays people,” a group of small investors on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets forum decided to “play” Wall Street gamblers and take them for, if not all, much of what they are worth:
Short sellers have been called a lot of things. Bloodsuckers. Parasites. Other words not fit to print. Now in the vortex engulfing GameStop Corp., they have a new name: the establishment.
It’s a role cast for them with relish by their chat-room usurpers, the tens of thousands of average Joe day-traders whose fervor for a left-for-dead retailer has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in its 245% rally this year. GameStop has become a money geyser for the options-obsessed crowd that gathers in Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum. For those wagering on a decline, it’s been a catastrophe.
By small online traders agreeing to snap up fading GameStop shares to screw over Wall Street, they’ve driven the price so high that hedge funds that bet on it losing value are themselves losing billions. The small fry both made money and screwed the big kids doing it.
In a matter of weeks, two hedge-fund legends — Steve Cohen and Dan Sundheim — have suffered bruising losses as amateur traders banded together to take on some of the world’s most sophisticated investors. In Cohen’s case, he and Ken Griffin ended up rushing to the aid of a third, Gabe Plotkin, whose firm was getting beaten down.
Driven by the frenzied trading in GameStop Corp. and other stocks that hedge funds have bet against, the losses suffered over the past few days would rank among the worst in some of these money managers’ storied careers. Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management has declined 10% to 15% so far this month, while Sundheim’s D1 Capital Partners, one of last year’s top-performing funds, is down about 20%. Melvin Capital, Plotkin’s firm, had lost 30% through Friday.
Now that regular people are making money betting against them, entitled free-traders are being hurt. Wall Street billionaires are screaming for regulation.
“Most are playing with little skin in the game, making a political statement with money they can afford to lose,” Hullabaloo alum David Atkins observes of wallstreetbets investors. Billionaire stock gamblers’ comeuppance is overdue.
If a company like Gamestop is a failing dinosaur, then just let it fail! If people love it, let them invest to prop it up.
There is no reason to protect billionaires making "smart" bets on its failure. Those guys can take it in the nuts if people decide to mess with them. Good.
I think leftists have to get beyond 19th and 20th century notions of what "real" organizing or socialism looks like. 21st century problems will require 21st century actions. It won't necessarily be pure in a Marxist sense.
For those who really want to understand how this all works, Aaron D. has a long explanatory thread. For those who would rather enjoy the follies, actress Avalon Penrose offers a less-technical analysis.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) convinced voters in Georgia’s northwest corner to send her to Washington, D.C. to expose the “Democrat” cannibal-pedophile ring plotting to overthrow the reign of god-king Donald Trump. (Greene may not have put that in campaign ads.) With Trump tweets no longer dominating headlines, reporters have more bandwidth for examining Greene’s backstory. It is not pretty.
“As if it weren’t enough to amplify conspiracy theories that the September 11attacks were an inside job and the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was staged, a string of recent media reports has now confirmed that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had previously supported social media posts calling for political violence against the Speaker of the House, members of Congress, and former President Barack Obama,” said Congressman Gomez. “Such advocacy for extremism and sedition not only demands her immediate expulsion from Congress, but it also merits strong and clear condemnation from all of her Republican colleagues, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Her very presence in office represents a direct threat against the elected officials and staff who serve our government, and it is with their safety in mind, as well as the security of institutions and public servants across our country, that I call on my House colleagues to support my resolution to immediately remove Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from this legislative body.”
Five are dead and nearly 140 Capitol Police officers were injured in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that terrorized members of Congress and threatened their lives. Police union spokesman, Gus Papathanasiou, chairman of the Capitol Police Labor Committee, said in a Wednesday statement that some officers sustained brain injuries. Another “cracked two ribs and smashed two spinal discs, one will likely lose an eye, and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake,” NBC News reports.
Memories are fresh and repairs to the Capitol ongoing. So the numerous reports Gomez referenced stung, including this one Tuesday from CNN:
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress, a CNN KFile review of hundreds of posts and comments from Greene’s Facebook page shows.
Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, frequently posted far-right extremist and debunked conspiracy theories on her page, including the baseless QAnon conspiracy which casts former President Donald Trump in an imagined battle against a sinister cabal of Democrats and celebrities who abuse children.
In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the “deep state” working against Trump.
No- I’d much rather be able to be a college student but I & others can’t & you know why?
Bc corrupt politicians like you have made it so it’s on the survivors of Gun violence to end gun violence bc you can’t do your damn job https://t.co/XvAwR9Jjrw
AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis assembled a lengthy thread chronicling Greene’s loopy beliefs. He has more at CyberDisobedience.
It is not illegal to write for a conspiracy website. Nor is it a disqualification for serving in public office. Nor is it illegal to be mentally unstable or to hold offbeat, racist or insane views. Sixty-three million Americans voted for a Republican presidential candidate holding them in 2016, and 74 million voted (and failed) to reelect Trump in 2020.
Terrifying. So many people radicalized by Trump —> Napa man arrested with explosives may have been targeting Newsom, authorities say https://t.co/BhEg2Dethe
And on Tuesday, federal authorities arrested another California man, Robert Lemke, 35, accusing him of making texted threats against Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and his family over his support for Joe Biden. “Stop telling lies; Biden did not win, he will not be president,” read one message.
A Nazi loving 25 year old who can’t spell his name; a woman in a domestic terrorist cult that believes Trump was anointed to take down satanic democratic pedophiles; & a gun-toting lunatic who worked with the terrorists to have @SpeakerPelosi killed are all still in Congress. pic.twitter.com/YLMGcvvIee
— Andrew—Author of America Rises On Substack—Wortman (@AmoneyResists) January 27, 2021
Being cosy with the sort of people prone to political violence could prove unhealthy for Greene’s political future, and not in a violent way.
Today, I made clear that if Democrats ever attack the key Senate rules, it would drain the consent and comity out of the institution. A scorched-earth Senate would hardly be able to function. It wouldn’t be a progressive’s dream. It would be a nightmare.
“You lost all credibility when you stole a Supreme Court seat,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) wrote, in response to McConnell’s tweet.
“The filibuster is a Jim Crow relic. It represents everything wrong with Washington.
“Abolish it.”
Zac Petkanas, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Hillary Clinton, referred to past actions by McConnell as he questioned the minority leader’s comments.
“Will you…refuse to hold a vote on a Supreme Court justice nominated by a Dem president?
“Or jam through a replacement to RBG days before an election?
“Or spend a week blocking Dems from taking control of the senate?
“Trembling about your threat of FUTURE scorched earth tactics,” Petkanas tweeted.
Joyce Vance, a professor of the practice of law at the University of Alabama and former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, branded McConnell’s comments hypocritical.
Vance responded to his remarks on Twitter, writing: “Merrick Garland. Amy Coney Barrett. Stop being a hypocrite.”
Scott Dworkin, co-founder of campaign group the Democratic Coalition, suggested the situation could not be made worse than when McConnell was in charge of the Senate as majority leader.
“Dude our nightmare was every day you’ve run the Senate. Nothing could be worse than that. I guarantee it,” Dworkin tweeted.
In further comments to Newsweek, Dworkin added: “McConnell’s empty and frivolous threats about ‘scorched earth’ don’t scare us, especially since he has almost no power now. We’ve already been under McConnell’s tyrannical rule while Trump was in the White House, and nothing could be worse than that.”
Newsweek has contacted McConnell’s office for a response to these comments.
McConnell welcomed the Democratic support over the filibuster as a victory, though a representative for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) framed it more as a capitulation after he had asked for assurances it would be kept.
“We’re glad Sen. McConnell threw in the towel and gave up on his ridiculous demand,” Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Schumer, said in a previous statement.
In contrast, McConnell has said: “With these assurances, I look forward to moving ahead with a power-sharing agreement modeled on that precedent.
He added in a tweet: “With this win, we can move forward with a 50-50 power-sharing agreement built on the 2001 precedent.”
I feel like a broken record on this, but Biden's call for unity in his inaugural didn't mean he wasn't going to do what he campaigned on. It was about tempering the political discourse and rejecting white supremacy
Well, we knew they would twist it for their own purposes just as they always do. The come in, spend like drunken sailors on tax cuts and the military, start a war at home or abroad, tear the country apart and when the Democrats come along to clean up their messes, promising to be decent human beings and not do any of those things, Republicans immediately insist that they aren’t living up to their promises because they won’t treat Republicans as if they won the election and agree to do whatever they want.
If you don’t pass the Republican agenda and agree to our terms on everything your will have broken your promise to unite the country and will be a failed president.
They have done this over and over again, going back at least to Carter.
Tim Miller had some words on this phony BS:
I am sure I’m not breaking any news here by stating declaratively that Republicans in Congress have no actual interest in “unity” with Joe Biden.
In the first week of his presidency they have made that abundantly clear, offering less than zero olive branches to the Biden administration while weaponizing his promise to unify the country anytime they find it convenient.
Despite the transparency of this gambit, some in the mainstream and conservative press are allowing Republicans to use this unity cudgel for political advantage. They want to put the onus on Biden to meet Republicans not in the middle exactly, but somewhere on the right just shy of Insurrection Alley. Then, when Biden has defended Trump on impeachment, promised not to nuke the filibuster, sworn to ignore climate change, invited the QAnon shaman to take a dump in the Lincoln Bedroom, and apologized for winning the election so convincingly that it hurt the feelings of 74 million Great American Patriots—then Republicans will give him some credit for trying to unify the country.
Maybe.
But that’s at the macro level. To really appreciate how pathetic this ploy is, you have to look at the micro. So let’s talk about John Cornyn.
On Monday the senior senator from Texas sent two tweets on the subject of unity.
The first was premised on the idea that in the future Republicans might have the votes to impeach Barack Obama for . . . well, Cornyn didn’t say what, exactly. Maybe birth certificate fraud. Who can say.
This wasn’t even “just asking questions.” Cornyn was literally framing the hypothetical as a threat: Nice former first-black president you got there. Hate to have to impeach him in 2032.
This is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll start here:
Discriminating against vulnerable groups isn’t how you unify people you fucking asshole.
How warped do you have to be as a human to think that the “unifying” political position is banning patriotic Americans from volunteering to serve their country? Are you serious?
All these transgender soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines wanted to do was live as themselves and fight to protect all Americans—even tough-guy keyboard warriors who never served a day in their life. Like John Cornyn. But then, in 2019, these service members were forced to choose between their gender identity and their job because one afternoon their draft-dodging president decided to pause the TiVo and fire off a few tweets changing government policy during the commercial break for Outnumbered.
Now that we have a commander-in-chief who doesn’t think our troops are losers and suckers and thieves, he’s bringing back the policy that lets them serve openly and honorably. And that is an affront to John Cornyn’s sense of unity?
Pound sand, John.
He goes on to show how popular this actually is, which makes Cornyn’s small-minded attack even worse.
As Brian Beutler wrote in his opus on bad-faith GOP arguments, “Republicans and professional conservatives revel in double standards because by embracing double standards they claim power over their opponents.”
On the issue of “unifying” the country this power ought to be taken away from them.
Joe Biden seems to genuinely want to unify this country. At times he will fail, and he should be called out for not living up to his promise when he does.
But Biden’s call for unity does not mean that political arguments go away or that 71 percent of the public will magically sign on with every item on his agenda. It does not mean that Republicans have to become Democrats or vice versa.
It simply means that Biden should strive to be a president for all Americans, even the ones who dislike some of his policy proposals, and the rest of the politicians in Washington should stop purposefully sharpening divisions through performative grandstanding in which they roll out bad-faith argument after bad-faith argument for rage clicks.
What “unity” means is that if John Cornyn has a substantive argument against the repeal of the transgender military ban, then he should make it—rather than concern-trolling Biden about meta issues. And if he agrees with the policy, he should just say so! Crazy, right?
But the reality is that we have no reason to expect that kind of behavior from people like John Cornyn who enabled and abetted Donald Trump’s regime of cruelty that targeted trans Americans, immigrants, children, Muslims, Hispanics, the disabled, the media, and even, in the end, police officers. People who won’t be happy until that grotesque regime is restored.
John Cornyn doesn’t care one whit about unity. He and his confederates only care about it as a way to punish Joe Biden and deny the 82 million Americans who voted for him the policy outcomes they are lawfully pursuing.
The time for unity is here, for those who earn it.
The time for taking asshats like John Cornyn seriously while they pretend to care about unity as a lib-owning troll is long past.
People won’t be happy until that grotesque regime is restored …
Joe Biden has an agenda as opposed to screaming about culture war issues and bleating about how the world is laughing at us and throwing down tariffs willy nilly. And guess what? Biden’s policies are almost all broadly popular:
There are even a few Republicans on board with most of them. Of course, our politics aren’t driven solely by policy, particularly once they are mischaracterized by propagandists on the right. Still, these are all good policies and it’s good to see most Americans in favor. (I do have to laugh at the fact that the one issue Republicans are totally against is stopping the building of that stupid wall and adding noncitizens in the census. They are so sadly brainwashed…)
The popularity of these policies is notable for a few reasons. First, Biden’s emphasis on trying to unify the country in his inaugural address has created a debate in political circles about exactly what constitutes “unity.” These early executive orders meet one definition — adopting policies that a clear majority of Americans support, which necessitates that at least some Republicans back them…
Secondly, the popularity of these orders with the public is another illustration of what public opinion has long suggested: Americans are divided into two roughly equal-sized camps in terms of electoral power — in part because structures such as the Senate and the Electoral College have skewed the vote toward Republicans, at least in recent years — but that divide does not always show up in terms of policy issues. For example, protecting undocumented people brought to the U.S. as children from deporation (the DACA program) has long had a fair amount of support from people who vote for and identify with the Republican Party, which tried to wind down DACA in the Trump era.
You might be skeptical of polling that seems favorable to Democrats after many polls in 2016 and 2020 underestimated GOP strength. But there are a number of recent examples of liberal policies being supported by voterswho also back Republican candidates. This happened last fall in Florida, where a proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour got 61 percent support, but the presidential candidate in favor of that idea, Biden, received only 48 percent. So I tend to think these numbers are reliable and that a bloc of Trump voters agrees with many of Biden’s new policies.
Thirdly, the popularity of these orders suggests that Biden will govern differently than his predecessor. In the case of many of these orders, Trump implemented a policy that polls clearly showed was unpopular and Biden is simply reversing it. Biden positioned himself during the Democratic primary as a candidate who would eschew controversial ideas to appeal to more centrist voters. And we are only a week into his presidency, but it looks like Biden is trying to follow through on his campaign approach.
Interesting to see these policies defined as “centrist.” This is actually a good thing. It means that ideas that were considered left wing very recently have now become mainstream. Progressives worked hard to make that happen and after some years of keeping their eye on the ball, fighting off the right and pushing for good ideas, many items on their agenda have now become “the center.” That’s a good thing and it’s how progress is usually made.
President Donald Trump is greeted by Matt Schlapp, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, as the president arrives to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2020, at National Harbor, in Oxon Hill, Md., Saturday Feb. 29, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
One of the premier MAGA gatherings in the nation is struggling to recreate the magic this year.
For decades, the Conservative Political Action Conference has been a staple of Republican politics. In recent years, the conservative confab has been the go-to stop for rising GOP stars, grassroots organizers and luminaries in the Trump movement.
But President Donald Trump’s election loss has created hurdles around programming and guest booking. Stringent coronavirus guidelines in Maryland have pushed the conference outside of the Washington area for the first time in nearly 50 years. Previous sponsors aren’t yet committed or have decided to forgo sponsorship entirely because of changes to the event’s format or disappointment in the return on their investment last year. And the president that attendees adored so much may not show up to the event at all.
Senior Trump adviser Jason Miller said Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago abode is less than 2.5 hours away from the Orlando hotel where this year’s conference will occur on Feb. 25-28, is not currently scheduled to make an appearance. Meanwhile, a senior American Conservative Union official would not answer whether Mike Pence, who drew MAGA world’s ire for certifying Joe Biden’s election, had been invited to speak. A spokesperson for the former vice president did not respond to a request in time for publication.
ACU Chair Matt Schlapp said he is convinced this year’s conference will be no different from past years. “CPAC is going great,” he told POLITICO on Tuesday, before then saying that his quote needed to be attributed without his name. Schlapp did not address questions about why some sponsors were not continuing their CPAC sponsorship. But after those questions were posed and additional questions were sent to CPAC sponsors — including whether the Jan. 6 Capitol riot impacted their thinking about sponsoring again this year — ACU general counsel David Safavian accused POLITICO of “tortious interference with business relationships” and attempting “to ‘cancel’ both CPAC and the American Conservative Union itself.” The group then tweeted a copy of a letter from Safavian that included a litigation threat.
“We fully intend to explore our legal rights to hold Politico fully accountable for what we see as tortious conduct,” the letter stated.
How well CPACgoes this year will provide one of the first public indications about the health of the MAGA movement with Trump out of office and with the Republican Party divided over just how loyal to the former president it should be.
One year ago, CPAC was in a far different place. The 2020 gathering was, for a brief moment, a crowning achievement for the conference’s organizer, Schlapp. Delivering a 90-minute, chest-beating victory speech, Trump showed up to hype his survival of his first impeachment. Pence came as well. More than 30 Trump aides and officials in all spoke at the conference, ranging from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to senior White House advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
But within days, the appearances were overshadowed by news that an attendee who’d been in direct contact with Schlapp had tested positive for Covid-19. Organizers were forced to warn nearly 100 conference-goers of potential exposure and the president’s chief of staff went into self-quarantine, though only one case ended up being traced to the event.
The pandemic is even more of a complicating issue this year, compelling Schlapp to move the event to Florida because there are fewer restrictions on such gatherings in that state. Whether guest speakers will follow him will determine much of the conference’s success.
A full agenda and list of speakers will be posted two to three weeks before the conference begins, according to the CPAC website, but several past speakers contacted by POLITICO said they were still deciding whether to attend given the added distance and the possibility that Congress could be in the middle of negotiating another coronavirus relief package in late February. An aide to Donald Trump Jr. said he would “probably” attend, as he has done in past years, but that it was not currently on his schedule.
CPAC organizers did announce three speakers after POLITICO began inquiring about the lineup. In separate tweets on Tuesday from the @CPAC2021 Twitter account, it was revealed that former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a possible 2024 hopeful, would all deliver remarks at the conference next month. No other speakers have been announced as of the time this article was published.
For those planning this year’s CPAC, the main questions are not just whether Trump will be there, but how much his presidency and future should dominate the proceedings. Members of the planning committee began meeting virtually in November, after the 2020 election, and were expected to convene at least five times before the conference begins.
“Do we pull the Nancy Pelosi option and try to expunge Trump from public life or do we try to build on the movement he created and make it tenable? It’s messy,” said a person involved in the CPAC planning process.
CPAC trained hundreds, if not thousands, of GOP activists to be nasty pieces of work long before Donald Trump came along to mainstream the puerile insult brand of right wing political behavior and release the rabid MAGA animals on the American body politic.
They might as well run with Trump. He is them and they are him.
For some reason, this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, seems to have gotten more attention than usual. That’s saying something, since for the last 15 years or so it’s gotten much more attention than it deserves. CPAC is like a 10-car pile-up — frightening and horrible, but you can’t look away.
Salon’s Jeremy Binckes and Matthew Sheffield have each weighed in on this year’s event — with Binckes making the case that it shows that the GOP is now thoroughly Trumpified while Sheffield argues that it’s now Trump who’s been absorbed by the Republican Party. I think CPAC shows that the Trump strain has always been slithering around under the rock of conservative movement politics, and 2016 just turned it over and let it run amok.
The first CPAC was organized to bring young conservatives and political activists together for a conference to map out movement and electoral strategy. It took place in 1974 in the midst of the Watergate scandal, which divided the conference between those who thought Richard Nixon was toast and those who wanted him to fight on. It was, by all accounts, a very lively disagreement. They turned to the man they all agreed was the Great Conservative Hope, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, who was the keynote speaker and gave one of his most important speeches, heralding his strong primary run against Gerald Ford in 1976 and his winning campaign in 1980.
Reagan introduced three former U.S. military prisoners of war in that speech, one of whom was John McCain, to reverent, thunderous applause. This year the longtime Arizona senator, who has a brain tumor and may well be near the end of his life, was insulted by the president of the United States from the CPAC podium. That shouldn’t have come as any surprise. The CPAC podium, for at least the last couple of decades, is where decency and humanity go to die.
I won’t go into the horrors of the 1990s. The party under former House speaker Newt Gingrich was as aggressively obnoxious as it is today: That was the height of the “vast right wing conspiracy’s” power. Let’s just say that in 1994 CPAC was where Paula Jones made her debut and leave it at that.
It was during the glory years of the George W. Bush administration that the media started paying close attention to what was really going on there. Michelle Goldberg wrote for Salon in 2003 that there were “t-shirts with the words ‘Islam: Religion of Peace’ surrounding a photo of a bomb with the word ‘Allah’ on its timer,” among dozens of other hideous anti-Muslim items for sale that were flying off the shelves. Remember, this was during the time Bush was telling his followers that Islam was a religion of peace.
But it didn’t matter. CPAC attendees may have hated Muslims but they loved Bush. In fact, they loved him almost as much as the sainted Ronald Reagan, whom they continued to worship like a god. The Iraq war got their blood pumping wildly and this was how they wanted to see their president:A
One of the biggest attractions at the conference for many years was the odious Ann Coulter, who packed the room with rapturous fans screaming with delight at her indecent commentary. Back in 2003, she made one of her most famous shocking statements, which has since been taken up by none other than her hero Donald Trump: “Why shouldn’t we go to war for oil. We need oil.” In 2006 she got into her groove with, “I think our motto should be, post-9/11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’” In response to a question about her biggest ethical dilemma, Coulter said, “There was one time I had a shot at [Bill] Clinton. I thought ‘Ann, that’s not going to help your career.’“
She really hit her comedic stride in 2007, however, when she dropped this bomb:
I was going to talk about the other Democratic candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot.”
She got a huge ovation for that one, but it seemed to upset some of the old guard and Coulter was disinvited the next year. Organizers replaced her with an even bigger draw in 2009, Rush Limbaugh, who gave a memorable, rambling speech bucking up the crowd to oppose anything the new President Barack Obama wanted to do. Down in the bowels of the conference where the merchandise was being flogged they were selling racist pictures of Obama dressed as a witch doctor.
In 2011, when Donald Trump made his first appearance and started the original buzz about his potential candidacy, he said in his speech, “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further. The people that went to school with him never saw him; they don’t know who he is. Crazy.” He went on Bill O’Reilly’s show that night and said he had investigators in Hawaii looking for Obama’s birth certificate. The rest is history.
It’s been getting a little stranger than usual lately, even by the racist, far-right standards of CPAC. In 2016, the event was overrun with neo-fascists who booted them to the margins. In 2017, the thrill of Trump’s unexpected victory was still fresh, and the “alt-right,” in the form of Steve Bannon, who was the big draw. This year the global far right got its turn in the CPAC spotlight, with Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of France and Nigel Farage of Britain as big draws.
And the CPAC tribes love Donald Trump with the same passion they felt for Bush and Reagan. These people really aren’t that choosy.
CPAC used to pretend that it was a conference about “ideas” and the “conservative agenda.” But as NeverTrump conservative Ben Howe said on MSNBC on Friday, it’s really just about making liberals cry. Frequent CPAC star Dinesh D’Souza put it this way, in his 2002 book “Letters to a Young Conservative”:
One way to be effective as a conservative is to figure out what annoys and disturbs liberals the most, and then keep doing it.
Nothing could disturb and annoy liberals more than Donald Trump.
It sounds innocuous enough. Maybe liberals should just stop crying and these people would stop being so obnoxious, right? But there’s something more sinister about this than at first seems obvious. That attitude lies at the heart of something ugly and dark that’s grown up in our culture and around the world.
There was one young white supremacist marching in Charlottesville last year who, when things got scary, stripped off his white polo shirt uniform and tried to blend in with the crowd. When he was asked by a journalist why he was doing what he’d been doing, he said:
It’s kind of a fun idea. Just being able to say, like, “Hey man, white power!” You know? To be quite honest, I love to be offensive. It’s fun.
One of his cohorts thought it might be fun to mow down a bunch of people with his car that day and ended up killing someone. That desire to be “offensive” isn’t a joke, and neither is the offensiveness of CPAC. Look where it’s gotten us.
I believe all the reports that say Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., loathes former president Donald Trump with every fiber of his being. Apparently, he hasn’t spoken to him since the election and has made it clear to everyone who knows him that he would love to see Trump just retire to Mar-a-Lago never to be heard from again. He’s anything but a Trump true believer.
But Mitch McConnell believes in power. As he cast about trying to get a sense of where Republicans are in the wake of Trump’s disastrous performance since the election and the incitement of a violent insurrection on January 6th, he floated trial balloons about supporting impeachment and made some critical speeches. But he never had any intention of allowing Donald Trump to be convicted in a Senate trial, even if it were possible. How do we know this? As The Atlantic’s James Fallows tweeted:
-On January 13, when House voted for impeachment, McConnell said Senate could not consider it *until* Trump had left office. -From Jan 20 onward, McConnell has said Senate should not consider it *because* Trump has left office.
On Tuesday, when Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky, called for a vote on the question of whether impeaching a president after he was out of office was constitutional, Mitch McConnell and with 44 other Republicans signaled that they believe it is not. That’s why he delayed the trial. A year ago, Republicans argued against Trump’s first impeachment because the country was too close to an election.
Similarly, McConnell’s lugubrious paean to Senatorial comity as he held the Senate hostage demanding that Democrats agree not to eliminate the filibuster is a monument to shameless hypocrisy, as Fallows also demonstrates:
McConnell himself eliminated the filibuster for judicial confirmations (except to the Supreme Court) and had no problem with it for regular legislation because they didn’t really legislate during Trump’s term. Republicans rammed through their massive corporate tax giveaway and a failed Obamacare repeal through the Senate’s budget reconciliation process because budget bills can’t be filibustered. So all McConnell did was kill legislation that passed the House and confirm federal judges on an assembly line. Republicans don’t really have a legislative agenda anymore. They are a purely obstructionist congressional party that depends entirely on judicial power to roll back existing programs and executive power to enact policy.
In any case, it’s clear that we don’t have to hold our breath wondering if the newly enlightened Mitch McConnell will join hands with the sane people to save the country from Trump’s radical mob. The idea was always laughable. What’s happening instead is a concerted effort on the part of the entire GOP establishment to cleanse Donald Trump of any responsibility for what he did so that he might emerge once again as the hero they’ve all been waiting for. They simply cannot quit him.
Take for instance Rand Paul’s speech on Tuesday, a tour de force of brazen bad faith.
“Impeachment is for removal from office, and the accused here has already left office — a trial would drag our great country down into the gutter of rancor and vitriol, the likes of which has never been seen in our nation’s history,” the Kentucky Republican thundered.
I’m pretty sure we saw the likes of that on January 6th when the greatest sore loser in history provoked an angry mob into storming the Capitol, chanting “hang Mike Pence” and “Nancy Pelosi, we’re coming for you!” Frankly, this country was dragged into the gutter of rancor and vitriol the day Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has apparently taken a bet from someone that he can be even more sycophantic toward Trump than South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, characterized holding Trump accountable for siccing an angry mob on Congress to stop the certification of the electoral college as simply a “show” trial:
Waste of time impeachment isn’t about accountability
It’s about demands from vengeance from the radical left
And a new “show” for the “Political Entertainment Industry”
Again, if you’re talking about shows and vengeance, it’s pretty rich to try to misdirect people into believing it’s the impeachment rather than the events of January 6th in which Donald Trump staged a huge rally in D.C. on the day Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden’s win and told them he was going to lead them to the Capitol to stop the count.
Ted Cruz, one of the insurrectionist senators who backed Trump’s baseless claims of election irregularities in swing states Trump lost, unctuously declared that we now need to move on:
Ted Cruz helped coordinate an effort to steal a fairly decided election from the American people only 20 DAYS ago. His campaign was soliciting campaign donations under the “Stop the Steal” banner while the insurrectionists were breaking into the Capitol only 20 DAYS ago. https://t.co/H0CHV1rZmC
This from the man who flogged the Benghazi pseudo-scandal for years.
And then we have former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley making an earnest appeal to leave poor Trump alone:
“The actions of the president post-Election Day were not great. What happened on January 6 was not great. Does he deserve to be impeached, absolutely not … I don’t even think there’s a basis for impeachment. Now they’re going to turn around and bring about impeachment yet they say they’re for unity. I mean at some point give the man a break. I mean move on…
This is deja vu all over again. Every time Trump did something outrageously beyond the pale, there would be a flurry of hand wringing and pearl-clutching by Republicans followed almost immediately by excuses and deflecting blame once they got some blowback from the right-wing media and Trump’s supporters. The pattern was set back in the 2016 campaign when news of the Access Hollywood tape was published and half the GOP declared it was the last straw, claiming they could never look their children in the eye again if they supported such a crude, indecent man. Some said he should step aside for Mike Pence or even declared their intention to vote for Hillary Clinton. Mitch McConnell said that he strongly believed “Trump needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere, and take full responsibility for the utter lack of respect for women shown in his comments on that tape.”
He did not. And before long, the GOP response was more along the lines of Dr. Ben Carson’s, who claimed the Democrats had probably had the tapes for some time and had dropped them to distract attention from Wikileaks emails that supposedly said Hillary Clinton wanted “open borders.” (Those Wikileaks emails were actually released immediately after the Access Hollywood tape came out.)
As we know, all but a small handful of Republicans fell in lockstep with him shortly thereafter until the next time he did something abhorrent. A few apostates rebelled and ended up being chased out of politics for it but before long, most of them stopped even pretending to have any integrity or morals and the few that still felt compelled to say something when he went off the rails usually just made a half-hearted gesture and then went along.
And as usual, it appears this time that for most of the senators, even those who proclaimed their dismay at the violent mob that defiled the Capitol, their vote to fulfill their oath and certify the election took all the energy they could muster to protect our democracy. On Tuesday, only five Republicans managed to reject Rand Paul’s fatuous claim that the impeachment is unconstitutional, the vast majority signaling once again that Donald Trump can do no wrong.
During the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 1/6/21, a man later identified as Robert Keith Packer was photographed wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirt. The front also said “Work brings freedom,” one translation of the infamous “Arbeit macht frei” slogan atop the entrance to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The back of the shirt said “Staff.”
Packer, a resident of Newport News, VA, who apparently has a history of extremism, was arrested, but later released without criminal charges or paying any fines. He was merely ordered to stay away from D.C. unless summoned there. Other insurrectionists also expressed pro-Nazi, pro-Holocaust, anti-Semitic, white supremacist or bigoted views.
Several people, including Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger in a personal and moving statement, directly linked the hatred and violence of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass” of 1938, when German Nazis smashed the windows of Jewish stores and synagogues.
One of the most powerful responses came from Andrew Brandt, who was following the story of Robert “Camp Auschwitz” Packer and posted a thread about a family photo:
I think about this photograph ALL THE TIME these days. Of the 31 people pictured here, two died before the holocaust began and only three escaped. Twenty six people shown in this photograph died in Camp Auschwitz.
The entire thread is worth reading. This is real history; these are human stories. And not only did Brandt never get to meet most of the people in his family photo, even some of their names are lost, because they were murdered by the Nazis.
I wonder if people like Packer and the rest of the Nazi contigent at the U.S. Capitol have more than a childish understanding of the Holocaust. Presumably, they know some basic events, probably from a bigoted source, and they approve of the genocide. But there’s a leering, smug immaturity to many right-wing authoritarians in addition to their seething hatred. They want to provoke, to offend, to transgress tenets of basic respect and dignity. They aggressively deny the humanity of their chosen scapegoats. They willfully blind themselves with rage to broad swaths of the human experience. They could look at Andrew Brandt’s family photo, hear his story, and not see anything, somehow not be moved.
We’ve seen and will continue to see excuses for and downplaying of the insurrection, for the failed attempted coup. And not every right-wing authoritarian, white supremacist or bigot proudly identifies him or herself as a Nazi. But we can’t pretend that right-wing extremism doesn’t exist in the United States and isn’t a dangerous force. Many conservatives who don’t identify as bigots or white nationalists have nonetheless supported their more extreme kindred or even voted them into office. And they continue to be enabled by a group of dogmatic centrists addicted to blaming “both sides” equally. As Rebecca Solnit observed in “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway”:
Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis? . . .
In the past four years too many members of the right have been emboldened to carry out those values as violence. One of the t-shirts at the #millionMAGAmarch this weekend: “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Except stage a coup, torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans, and violate laws and rights. A right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Michigan government and kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer was recently uncovered, racists shot some Black Lives Matter protestors and plowed their cars into a lot of protests this summer. The El Paso anti-immigrant massacre was only a year ago; the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre two years ago, the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally in which Heather Heyer was killed three years ago (and of course there have been innumerable smaller incidents all along). Do we need to bridge the divide between Nazis and non-Nazis? Because part of the problem is that we have an appeasement economy, a system that is supposed to be greased by being nice to the other side.
It’s crucial to call out right-wing authoritarians and to hold them accountable. It’s also important to excoriate any knee-jerk “both siders” who, intentionally or not, work to deny that accountability, or habitually attack honesty and accuracy in the name of politeness and civility. Finally, it’s essential to remember our own humanity and to recognize the same in others fighting against right-wing authoritarianism, and to remember and honor the very human victims of its violence. Andrew Brandt’s family photo and story remind me of a poem I’ve cited before, from Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo:
Marie
Her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters were all gassed on arrival.
Her parents were too old, the children too young.
She says, “She was beautiful, my little sister.
You can’t imagine how beautiful she was.
They mustn’t have looked at her.
If they had, they would never have killed her.
They couldn’t have.”
