They’ve broken out of mothballs or scraped the bottom of the barrel of favorite CTs, only this time it seems the FBI has decided, in their best J. Edgar finery, that tension at the polls needs a boost, or at least to be squeezed by a bustier.
Vince Foster has returned from the grave via an FOIA request that delivers nothing new, except that the FBI allowed itself to be another tension-producing political instrument of the RWNJs.
But more interesting is a recent story about Richard Spencer, that major theoretician of the alt-right frogmen whose blather has helped the fiction of Bubba’s bastard, among other pieces of disinformation in the election run-up.
As with the giant orange pustule, apparently elections exist to promote indy film and media projects in the advancement of a rump conservatism.
Such a conservatism is at best a loose collection of ideas about a naive reactionary folk theory that can rationalize ideology based on skin color or some facile ancestral genealogy. This is okay just as long as one doesn’t look at real DNA details, because then one would actually have to deal with how racial purity standards transcend lookism.
Filmmaker Joel Gilbert, the conspiracy theorist who believes President Obama has a secret Muslim prayer inscribed on his wedding ring, made a splash in 2012 when he said Obama had plastic surgery to conceal that his real father was labor activist Frank Marshall Davis, who raised his son to lead a communist revolution.
…longtime Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone declared: “I will get justice for Danney Williams — stay tuned.” The Trump confidant had decided the original DNA work was wrong, and he teamed up to make that case with conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones, an avid Trump backer who lent his InfoWars news outlet to the cause.
In fact, Danney Williams’s DNA was tested, 17 years ago, when his mother sold it and her story to a tabloid, which compared the boy’s genetic material to Clinton’s DNA markers and concluded Clinton wasn’t his father…
C’mon, Man, C’mon her dress
As the website Right Wing Watch has documented, Jones has boasted that he gives Trump off-air advice, and he took credit for Trump voicing the theory that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He has been pleased to see Trump repeating him “word-for-word” on the campaign trail. Trump, who has hailed Jones’s “amazing” reputation, has parroted claims made by Jones (and often by Stone) that American Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks, that the election is “rigged” against Trump, that Antonin Scalia was murdered, that Hillary Clinton used drugs before a debate and, of course, that Obama’s birth certificate was fake. www.washingtonpost.com/…
The rumor has bounced around since Clinton’s first run for president. In The War Room, a 1993 documentary about Clinton’s campaign team, a scene shows George Stephanopoulos fielding a phone call from Denari, then a Ross Perot campaign official apparently in possession of a fat dossier on Clinton’s supposed love child. With the rumor back in the news, I thought I’d track down Denari to find out how he’d gotten his hands on that dossier, and what he did with it after he hung up with Stephanopoulos…
Steve Denari says he was the Chicago campaign manager for Perot in 1992, doing lots of regional media on behalf of the candidate. The love child dossier had arrived anonymously at the desk of the Illinois state director for the Perot campaign, who passed it along to Denari with the thought that he might mention it on air…
Denari suspected the materials had come from people on the Bush campaign who hoped the Perot team would do their dirty work. He decided he’d call the Clinton campaign to see what they’d say.
4. We have a frenetic, 11th-hour effort by partisan web sites — including Drudge Report, which in 1999 concluded that it had been “debunked and flunked by science” — to peddle the Clinton love child narrative to voters.
If Pepe is the alt-right’s god, then Spencer is its self-styled prophet. A 38-year-old Duke Ph.D. dropout who sometimes resides in a Bavarian-style mansion at the edge of a ski slope, he has for years been quite literally shouting into the wilderness, proclaiming to anyone who will listen that the alt-right, whose name he coined in 2008, is the only political movement that really gives a damn about white Americans. In Spencer’s view, if you aren’t a white American, that’s fine—but you should leave…
What sets him apart is his rock star status among a certain fringe that delights in making racist comments pseudonymously on the internet. They idolize Spencer for embracing life as a public heretic and appearing to lend an air of respectability to white nationalist views. You could call him the alt-right’s outlaw version of William F. Buckley, if Buckley had been down with millennials and into shitlords and dank memes….
Spencer subscribes zealously to the idea that America’s white population is endangered, thanks to multiculturalism and lax immigration policies that have gone unchallenged by mainstream conservatives—or, as Spencer and the alt-righters call them, “cuckservatives.” He envisions a future for the United States along the lines of “a renewed Roman Empire,” a dictatorship where the main criteria for citizenship would be whiteness. “You cannot view another white person as your enemy,” he says…
With his blandly named National Policy Institute, Spencer aspires to the stature of today’s Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute. But his is not the only vision competing for the mantle of the alt-right; he believes the movement is being pulled in a more moderate direction—if you can call it that—by Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon,formerly the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos. Spencer says the Breitbart faction wants to jettison overt racial ideas and instead defend “Western values” and fight “political correctness.” He dubs them “alt-light.”…
By 2009 he’d published essays by Jared Taylor and was regularly using the term “alternative right” in its pages to describe his youthful brand of anti-war, anti-immigration, pro-white conservatism. In December 2009, Spencer left Taki’s to start AlternativeRight.com. The site caught the attention of the conservative publisher William Regnery II, who’d tried to start a whites-only online dating service, and, more recently, funded the white nationalist National Policy Institute. (His grandfather, William Regnery I, had bankrolled the America First Committee’s campaign against fighting Nazi Germany during World War II, and his uncle, Henry, founded the conservative Regnery Publishing, which is known for printing Ann Coulter’s books). With Regnery’s backing, Spencer took over NPI in 2011 and began championing its message…
The anger fueling the alt-right can’t be summarily dismissed; it is the product of a white working class left behind by automation, outsourcing, and the era of rising income inequality. “Mainstream conservatism was never able to rethink itself,” says Spencer, who faults the GOP for clinging to an outdated free-market ideology and ignoring the country’s massive demographic shifts. Despite the reality that blacks and Latinos still lag far behind whites in wealth and income, eight years of GOP-sanctioned demagoguery against America’s first black president has made it easier for some working-class whites to be persuaded that the system is rigged against them. In Spencer’s view, similar resentments have cropped up among younger, college-educated whites for whom “enforced multiculturalism” on college campuses is giving shape to a new kind of white identity politics. “The alt-right would not exist if it weren’t for terrible immigration policies and social justice warriors and liberalism and maybe the Barack Obama presidency,” Spencer says. “They made us.”
Then came the real shot in the arm. “Trump brought us from zero to 1,” Spencer says. “He brought us from a movement that was very interesting but ultimately marginal—ultimately disconnected from reality, you could even say. We were talking to ourselves, talking to our own ideas. Now we are still doing that, but we are connected with a campaign, connected with attacking liberals. We’ve come so far.”
He envisions a beachhead on K Street as part of an evolution toward nothing less than the collapse of the American political system as we know it. “In this weird way that Trump is trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to America, he’s also, like, bringing America to an end in the sense that he is a first step to white identity politics, which will bring about fragmentation,”Spencer says as we walk back through town. “This is where I am kind of a Hegelian. Whenever you see a phenomenon, you see its negative aspect. There is a dark side to something that is happening, and I think that is Trump’s dark side, that he is reviving America and accelerating…”
The National Policy Institute has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a “white supremacist” organization and has been named by the SPLC as one of four key groups playing a leading role in the world of “academic racism”.[11][3]
Republicanism is as a number of historians have asserted, is a premodern myth rooted in reactionary thinking whose sources go to the dark side of Enlightenment thinking, because Nietzsche is always peachy, like the spray tan on combovered pageant lechery.
Obviously 2016 has been an unusual year for Republicans. It may yet prove to be the year in which the Republican Party cracks up, like the Whigs. There is nothing whatsoever in Robin’s model that predicts 2016, in particular, shall be a special year. You could have made money in the prediction markets, betting according to Robin’s model, because you would have snapped up Trump back when he was selling for fractions of pennies. Clearly he was an undervalued property, by Robin’s theoretical lights. But recognizing a long shot as not so long as people think is not the same as it being a lock. So, to repeat: Robin did not predict Trump.
“THE BOOK THAT DIDN’T PREDICT NOT-TRUMP”.
But the Robin point can be reformulated. It’s not that he predicted Trump and, therefore, his hypothesis is confirmed. Rather, nearly everyone else predicted Not-Trump and, therefore, their hypotheses are disconfirmed by Trump. ‘Since conservatism is X, Y and Z, conservatives won’t vote for a -X, – Y and -Z guy like Trump.’ Something like that. (OK, I’m fudging a bit. Point is: Trump tests everyone else, NOT Robin.)
Conservatism, then, is inherently an ideology of reaction
There’s a sort of ideal figure that conservative intellectuals conjure when they want to argue about the essence of their ideology. This figure is a dreamy quietist of peaceable disposition, who savors apolitical friendship, nurses a skeptical outlook, and looks to an anti-theoretical politics of homey tradition and humane, but chastened, sentiment to guide him.
The political scientist Corey Robin argues in his 2012 book, “The Reactionary Mind,” that this ideal is more like a myth.
Conservatism, Robin says, is always inherently a politics of reaction—usually also populist, often also violent. From Robin’s argument, we could predict that a conservative party would be unlikely to nominate the idealized conservative as its standard-bearer, but that it would absolutely yoke itself to a populist nut job like Donald Trump…
Robin establishes the necessary link between conservative and reactionary politics by analyzing the role that the conservative takes in the historical drama of social change, the moment he’s called onto the scene of conflict to defend and vindicate the traditional ways under assault by reformists or revolutionaries. www.newyorker.com/…
I watched Keith Olbermann’s latest rant this morning. I had to go get another cup of Cajun coffee to calm my nerves. I have seen him unload before, but that was EPIC. I linked the video below:
“Idiot fascism”.
I only laugh because it’s true.
It is good to see Keith in touch with his inner-Howard Beale again although his rant does remind me of a certain green fellow.
I have some hot chocolate in addition to my Cajun coffee. However, I also have some fine single malt…..The Macallan, no less. Your choice of 15 y/o or 25 y/o. The only way anyone gets any is to come to the Otteray and sit on my front porch while we watch leaves fall off the trees.
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I watched Keith Olbermann’s latest rant this morning. I had to go get another cup of Cajun coffee to calm my nerves. I have seen him unload before, but that was EPIC. I linked the video below:
“Idiot fascism”.
I only laugh because it’s true.
It is good to see Keith in touch with his inner-Howard Beale again although his rant does remind me of a certain green fellow.
“One lives to be of service.”
I think I need some hot chocolate . . .
I have some hot chocolate in addition to my Cajun coffee. However, I also have some fine single malt…..The Macallan, no less. Your choice of 15 y/o or 25 y/o. The only way anyone gets any is to come to the Otteray and sit on my front porch while we watch leaves fall off the trees.
Not a bad way to spend a fine afternoon. Could I interest you in some of my 6th cousin’s sippin’ bourbon? Only 12y/o, but smooth as silk.