Who owns America?
Real Americans™. I’ve used the trademark for years to mock the insistence some on the right they and only they represent the true American faith. The more loudly they proclaim it, the they less they embody it. It is a largely white claim, but not exclusively so. It is also claimed sometimes by the last wave of immigrants. Having endured the discriminatory hazing from Americans already established that immigrants from [fill in the blank] don’t share American values or speak good English, the last wave gears up to do to the next what was done to them.
Watching the debate Mehdi Hasan had with 20 extremist conservatives, one thing that stood out was that same underlying sense among the young extremists that theirs is the true America faith and all others are blasphemers. As an immigrant from England born there to Indian parents, Hasan is not in their eyes not a member of their exclusive Real Americans™ club. Perhaps that is why Donald Trump gets so much traction with this crowd. He runs exclusive clubs. He’s modeling their vision for the country.
It was more heat than light. There were blood-and-soil nationalist and great replacement references. What’s stunning was how aggressively they attacked the Constitution and American political traditions while (presumably) believing they embody Americanism (except for fascist boy). It was more heat than light.
I suck at judging ages, but it looked like these 20 were either in college to late 20s. So some brought the full-of-themselves attitude of campus wannabe intellectuals armed with arguments intended to dominate libruls and show them up as weak (thinkers).
Then there was the budding sociopath who admitted, smiling and referencing Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, to being a fascist.
But there were those who when they couldn’t dominate Hasan grew visibly agitated and/or hostile. Those are the ones (Joseph, pink shirt, and Richie, green shirt) who worry me most. They are the sort who might under the right circumstances go to guns. Joseph invited Hasan to get the hell out of the country.
Hasan was taken aback by just how extreme this group was. So was I.
“I’m amazed that Jubilee found some of you guys. How do they find you?” Hasan asked.
It wasn’t thathard:
Zeteo adds:
Each of the far-right conservatives took turns attempting to challenge a set of claims made by Mehdi, and one after another, they simply refused to engage in the logic of his arguments. Instead, they responded to facts about Trump’s extremism with extremism of their own, including calling for Mehdi to “get the hell out” of the US and telling him he’s “not an American.”
Throughout this episode, you will hear conservatives say that white people in the US are the real ‘Native Americans,’ that Nazis may not have been that bad, and that ‘white genocide’ is real. One of them even tried to defend and justify Israel’s deliberate killing of children in Gaza.
The last was an Iranian-American dressed “like a villain from a mexican telenovela.”
God help us.
Update: Fascist Catholic gets the boot (h/t MW)
The self-proclaimed Catholic fascist who recently appeared on an episode of Surrounded by the popular YouTube channel Jubilee has lost his job following the programme’s release. The debate, which first aired on Sunday, featured 20 “Far-Right Conservatives” in discussion with British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan.
Connor, who uses the online name “Pinesap”, explained that he would prefer an autocratic state aligned with Catholic teaching over democracy. He went on to reference Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher who collaborated with the Nazis, after which Hasan challenged Connor on whether he was a Nazi. Connor appeared to avoid denouncing Nazi totalitarianism and, when asked whether he was a fascist, replied: “Yeah, I am,” to scattered applause around the studio. He also defended Franco as a political figure who fought for the Church and denied that Franco was involved in the murder of women or children.
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