President Biden and Vice President Harris commemorated the 1 year anniversary of the January 6 attack on our democracy with morning speeches and a day of remembrance inside the Capitol rotunda with Representatives and Senators giving a number of moving speeches in their respective chambers. The tone on TV news and blue check Twitter was somber and reflective. The President referred to the violent events of Jan 6, 2021 as a terrorist attack on our democracy, and said that the threat was not yet over — that the perpetrators of that event still hold a “dagger at the throat of America.”
Only two Republicans were present in chambers when the moment of silence was held for the nation’s traumatic experience one year ago — Representative Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, the former VP and evil villain of the George W. Bush years. That this man — a cartoonish devil from my formative years as a young activist — was, along with his steel-spined force of nature daughter, one half of the lone pair that remained of the pathetic tatters of the once great party of Lincoln.
What do you do if you’re in a 2-party system and one of the parties is just sitting on the sidelines, heckling (and worse!?)? How do you restore confidence in a system that so many people love to hate, to the point of obsession? Will we be able to re-establish a sense of fair play, as Biden called on us to do today in his speech?
The Big Lie is about rewriting history
We don’t need to spend a ton of time peering deeply into discerning motive with seditionists — we can instead understand that for all of them, serving the Big Lie serves a function for them in their lives. It binds them to their tribe, it signals a piece of their “identity,” and it signals loyalty within a tight hierarchy that rewards it — all while managing to serve their highest goal of all: to annoy and intimidate liberals. Like all bullies, their primary animating drive is a self-righteous conviction that “I am RIGHT!” at all times and about all things, and that disagreement is largely punishable by death or, in lieu of that, dark twisted fantasies of death passed off lamely and pathetically as “just joking, coworker!”
Research has shown that emotional repression causes authoritarianism (Altemeyer, Adorno, Stenner et al). Fundamentalist religious groups favor the most repression, culturally — ergo, fundamentalist groups are at the highest risk for nurturing authoritarian traits.
Emotional repression is the keystone of fundamentalist parenting. The strict application of “Biblical law” as cherry-picked by extremists is inherently contradictory & hypocritical, stunting emotional and psychological growth through corporal punishment and capricious applications of anger for sometimes opaque reasons.
When trusted caregivers apply physical violence to a developing mind, seeds of deep distrust and paranoia are planted. Children learn to “obey” by repressing negative parts of themselves so deeply they fall out of conscious awareness altogether & rule the personality “from below.”
Never being given the required emotional support to transcend the paradoxical human project of reconciling the positive & negative aspects inherent in all people, they become “arrested” at a moment of obsession with punishment as the only solution to every problem. They see the world in very black and white terms — the classic “you’re either with us or against us” zero-sum worldview in which everybody who doesn’t agree with you must be delegitimized and eradicated completely.
Mythology has it that “reckless Democratic spending” is to blame for the ballooning of the national debt — though the historical record shows otherwise.
In fact, the conservatives‘ beloved demi-god Ronald Reagan was the first President to skyrocket the debt, thanks to some bunk ideas from an old cocktail napkin that linger to this day — the Republican monetary theory in a nutshell is (I shit you not) that we should take all our pooled tax money and give it to… billionaires. Because, you know, they’re clearly the most qualified people to make decisions affecting the 99% poor people. Supposedly they’re the smartest folks to entrust with our money.
Trickle down, debt up
Except it’s not true, as year after year and study after study shows. Nor for all their finger-waggling at Democrats over the national debt has the GOP turned in a balanced budget since Nixon. Republicans are the most gigantic hypocrites on economics writ large, but particularly so for the national debt — with Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump all turning in record debt increases, primarily through tax cuts for the wealthy and the Gulf and Afghanistan wars.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton balanced the budget, created a surplus, and reduced the debt during his 8 years in office, and Obama inherited the deepest recession since the 1929 Great Depression.
The financial crisis of 2008-09, itself caused by the reckless Republican zeal for deregulation — this time of financial derivatives — was a wholly GOP-owned debacle that the next president paid for politically. Nevertheless, President Obama had the debt again on a reduction path as a percentage of GDP — but then Donald “I bankrupted a series of casinos!” Trump oozed his way into the highest office in the land.
It’s weird how “reckless Democratic spending” always happens under Republican administrations!
During the Trump administration, Republicans patted themselves on the back for giving a $2.7 trillion tax cut to billionaires for no reason, while the economy was relatively hot already (after being rescued by Obama). Not only was no progress made on diminishing the debt, but the national debt actually increased (both nominally and as a percentage of GDP) under Trump’s first term even before the sudden arrival of a novel coronavirus caused it to leap into the stratosphere like a 21st century American tech oligarch.
Only when President Biden arrived on the scene and took the helm of fiscal and monetary policy did the national debt begin cooling off once again — all while dramatically and quickly scaling up covid-19 vaccine production and distribution and passing over $3 trillion in Keynesian legislation meant to get the dregs of the middle class reoriented to a place on the map vis-a-vis the 1% once again.
Republican national debt bullshit
I am hereby calling bullshit on Republicans’ crocodile tears over the national debt, which they suddenly remember only when a Democrat is in town and summarily ignore while their guy is in the hot seat burning through cash like it’s going out of style.
We need to have a better collective narrative for Democratic success on the economy. The Republicans are no longer the kings of the economic world — if they ever were. It feels more like smoke and mirrors each passing day, with climate change denial, the Inflationary Boogeyman, and other GOP Greatest Hits playing ad nauseum on the AM social media waves.
Here are at least a few things to remember about the national debt, that Republicans generally get wrong:
wars are very expensive
booms in social services are expensive too; but not as expensive as wars
there is not any perceivable truth in the old GOP party line that Democrats always overspend and Republicans are always thrifty
Reagan and both Bushes presided over two of the biggest spikes in public debt in recorded history, outside of FDR who had both the Great Depression and WWII to contend with
Clinton, Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, and Truman all decreased the debt
be wary of graphs that don’t “normalize” to GNP — it’s an attempt to “lie with statistics” by obfuscating the roles of inflation and the growth of the economy itself
there is more than one way to look at and evaluate the level of public debt
But you don’t have to take our word for it — just ask the Vice President of the Confederacy what his reasons were in the infamous Cornerstone Speech of 1861, just a few weeks before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter:
“The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution . . . The prevailing ideas entertained by . . . most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. . . Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of . . . the equality of races. This was an error . . .
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
— Alexander H. Stephens, March 21, 1861, reported in the Savannah Republican, emphasis in the original
More ways we know the Civil War was about slavery
The state secession declaration documents mention the words “slave”, “slavery“, and “slave-holding” over 150 times, along with a number of related words including abolition, abolitionist, race, African, white race, and negro among yet others.
The Constitution of the Confederate States of America is almost identical to the US Constitution; in most of the several places that had been modified, the subject of the change regarded slavery and the claimed rights of Southern white men to own black human beings as a captive labor force.
Contemporaneous speeches given by Southern leaders at the time leading up to the war and during the war uniformly named the question of slavery as the core animus for their fight.
The Confederates rejected the idea floated internally of enlisting Blacks to replace the much-drained manpower of the South even though the final year of the war — despite ample evidence of the capabilities of black fighting forces as evidenced by their use by the Union to rout Southern Armies in bloody battle after bloody battle.
The secessionists even hampered their own ability to get diplomatic recognition, by refusing to clarify any sort of end date for slavery or apologia for the moral failings of the peculiar institution to a Britain and France who saw the practice as barbaric by that time. In other words, they chose slavery over independence when push really literally came to shove.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were almost entirely about slavery and the question of whether it should be extended further into new US territories of the West, halted, or ended altogether. Lincoln was on the side of halting slavery, and when he was elected President in 1860 the Southern states began seceding from the Union.
I’ll be continuing to work on this as information comes out of the various investigations and inquiries into the attempted coup to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, from the January 6 Committee to Merrick’s DOJ, the GA district attorney, NY district attorney, various civil suits, and probably more we don’t even know about yet. You can navigate the full mind map as it grows here:
Head onward into “Continue Reading” to see the same mind map through a geographic perspective:
Or capital vs. labor, oligarchs vs. plebes, plutocrats vs. proles, rich vs. poor — however you want to narrate it, the property vs. people struggle continues on in new and old ways, each and ere day.
Here in America, the plutocrats have devised many clever methods of hiding the class struggle behind a race war smokescreen, that is both real and manufactured — instigated, exacerbated, agitated by the likes of schlubby wife abusers like Sloppy Steve Bannon, wrinkly old Palpatines like Rupert Murdoch, and shady kleptocrats like Trump and Putin.
The United States has nursed an underground Confederacy slow burning for centuries, for sociopathic demagogues to tap into and rekindle for cheap and dangerous political power. Like The Terminator, racist and supremacist troglodytes seem always to reconstitute themselves into strange and twisted new forms, from slavery to the Black Codes to sharecropping to convict leasing to Jim Crow to Jim Crow 2.0 — the psychopaths want their homeland.
Ds need to start framing this as an oligarch's game in which a global class war is repeatedly laundered and diverted into a provincial race war. https://t.co/9a0KikBuGo
The political left loves people, and our extremists for the most part destroy capital or property that insurance companies will pay to make shiny and new again — unlike the right wing extremists who bomb federal buildings, killing hundreds of people and costing taxpayers’ money to replace.
Meanwhile, the right wing claims to be the righteous party for its extreme fixation on life before birth, yet its regulation-allergic capitalists destroy people and the natural world more broadly, from factory farming to deforestation, the destruction of habitats, strip-mining and other toxic extraction practices, and on into climate change itself. Being in fact the chief architects of manmade atmospheric devastation, they have managed to make themselves invisible from the deed by simply (wink wink!) denying it exists.
WWJD?!
Certainly, not anything the Republican Party is up to. Jesus would be sad.
Inequality is the difference in measures of economic well-being between individuals in a group, among groups in a population, or among countries. Also known as economic inequality; inclusive of both income inequality and wealth inequality.
In the United States, the data broadly shows shared economic growth and prosperity in the post-WWII period until the 1970s, when things begin to take a turn: economic growth slowed and income inequality began to increase. For the past 40-50 years, income growth for lower and middle class Americans has stagnated while income growth at the top of the distribution remained growing strongly. Meanwhile as wages have stagnated, costs have risen dramatically, especially in key universal areas like housing, utilities, health care, and education.
Those at the top of the wealth distribution who benefit financially from the growing inequality find numerous ways to justify the architecture of the system, and retain much of the power and control over its design. Yet an overwhelming majority of the available historical and present-day data indicates that stark income inequality has wide-ranging negative effects on societies as a whole, from exacerbating social ills to deleterious effects on basic human needs.
Related effects
Endangers the basic viability of democracy by concentrating power vs. distributing it broadly
Or: How Milton Friedman destroyed Western civilization, the neolliberalism story.
An economic ideology first theorized in the 40s and 50s by scholars, it was brought to popular attention in the 1970s by the works of economist Milton Friedman and novelist Ayn Rand among others. It grew in popularity and became widely adopted in U.S. economic policy beginning with Ronald Reagan in the 80s.
The essential heart of neoliberalism is the idea of the rich as top performers and job creators, driving the economy forward through their achievements and innovations; and that societies work best with little government regulation and where citizens are shaped to work according to market principles. Its adoption as a major driver of policy effectively undid many of the gains to middle class opportunity created by the New Deal, FDR‘s ambitious public works project that pulled the nation out from the grips of the Great Depression following the 1929 crash on Wall Street.
Neoliberalism is the dominant economic orthodoxy in the modern era. It is both a political and a financial ideology, with the following extremist beliefs:
Antigovernment sentiment — Their pitch is that all governments, including democratic ones, threaten individual liberty and must be stopped (or “drowned in the bathtub,” in the words of anti-tax zealots and movement conservatives).
Free markets should conquer governments — They claim, absurdly, that the toppling of self-governance would improve both economies and individual liberties.
The victory of markets is inevitable and there is nothing you can do about it — The fall of the Soviet Union and Cold War Communism was deemed the “end of history” by neoliberals, who believed that laissez-faire free market capitalism would inevitably triumph over all other forms of economic and political systems.
Economies work best when governments don’t intervene — Neoliberals want to prevent the powers of government from interfering with their ability to cut corners, dump industrial waste, pay fair wages, offer benefits, adhere to safety standards, engage in deceptive advertising, commit tax evasion, and so on — while continuing to supply them a steady stream of the public’s money via unpaid for tax cuts that balloon holes in the deficit. They fight against regulation tooth and nail, and try to claim that markets operate “naturally” as if under something akin to laws of physics — while failing to mention that there are no markets without regulation, without standards of fairness, without a justice system to enforce contracts and do its best to ensure a relatively equal business playing field.
The alchemy of neoliberalism will transmute greed into gold for everyone — The neoliberal promise is about spreading wealth, freedom, and democracy around the world — at the barrel of a gun, missile, or drone if necessary. Neoliberals consider greed to be the essence of human nature, and have modeled an entire societal system around this most base of human instincts. They claim, improbably — and surely many are True Believers — that narcissism and the aggressive pursuit of power and wealth will somehow magically create peace, happiness, and riches for everyone.
The insistence that governments and self-rule should be subordinated to the ultra-rich, to the oligarchs — that, to me, is the core essence of why this framework is evil. The staggeringly dissonant conviction about transforming sociopathy into global peace is a very close second.
Since the 1970s and accelerating with Reagan years, wealthy elites in the right wing have been spending gobs of their ill-earned wealth on creating a conservative movement echo chamber of think tanks, talk radio, literature, televangelists, YouTube streamers, and more — it is the vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary Clinton warned us about. It most certainly exists, and it most certainly is aggressively pursuing its political aims to disenfranchise the American people as fully as possible, so as to better walk away with an absurdly unjust share of the mutually created wealth by the wealth of intelligent and diligent labor here in the United States.
Common whites
It appeals to the MAGA crowd because it allows them to vicariously tag along with the rich and powerful right-wing bigots who flaunt and dangle their wealth in front of the plebes by which to entice them to open up their wallets and send in a meagre donation for this or that white victimhood fund that does nothing but enrich the scam artists who run it as a hollow shell. It validates their hardcore white supremacy and casual racism alike, provides the sadistic satisfaction of attacking their enemies (symbolically and/or literally), gives them something to do and believe in, and keeps them entertained while their pockets are being fleeced in broad daylight.
Neoliberalism has succeeded in undermining some of the last shreds of democratic infrastructure and civic goodwill in society at this point in American political history. The defenses brilliantly architected by the Founders to ensure checks and balances would manage the power games in Washington to within workable levels have frayed even further under 4 years of Trump, and the vitriol of the January 6 coup attempt and insurrection that’s fueled further right-wing Big Lie entrenchment and domestic terrorist extremism.
Democracy is in crisis, and neoliberalism the culprit of this hostage story.
At least Joe Biden is correct in his analysis of the solution: we should tax the rich.
It feels like the 1930s all over again — and with good reason. The rise of American fascists and right-wing extremism around the world has been a known trend for decades, and America’s past flirtations with fascism had been largely swept under the rug by the then anti-semites who tried to put a stop to FDR‘s New Deal and prevent the U.S. from getting into World War II.
Those fascists, butthurt over America’s overwhelmingly popular decision to enter the war and stop Hitler from exterminating the Jews, seethed with jealousy at the post-war “liberal consensus” that flourished alongside the booming US economy, propelled first by the war effort and later by the peacetime success of the New Deal‘s long shadow and the burgeoning of the American middle class.
The American fascists turned into the John Birch Society, and the McCarthyites, and the Libertarians, and the Moral Majority, and the Gingrich Revolution, and the Tea Party, and the MAGA / QAnon stew sloshing around mass media. The kooks on the far right — the kind of ilk so cray cray that even William F. Buckley excommunicates you from the Republican Party — have taken over the hen house now. Outrage sells, as Facebook well knows — and as two-bit dictators around the world have bribed Mark Zuckerberg to brainwash the masses using the most inanely illogical propaganda prolefeed, the world tilts dangerously towards authoritarianism and the end of our democracy as we know it. And with it, all hope for truth and light into the future for some time to come — the equivalent of a political meteor hitting the Earth.
The American fascists are still around, and now they have tools of propaganda that Goebbels could never have even wet dreamed of. They’re more powerful and more well-connected — to other sociopaths, malignant narcissists, and other pathological cult-leader types who might be of transactional service to each other from time to time. Many of them cling to ideas of Christian nationalism and Strict Father Morality. We’d be wise to keep an eye on these folks.
Name
Type
Location
Known for
Greg Abbott
Politician
Texas
The 48th governor of Texas since 2015 who has presided over multiple energy grid disasters, a self-induced economic fiasco at the border, and ghoulish vigilante legislation designed to terrorize women seeking abortion services, and a perversion of the child sex trafficking apparatus to instead target and tyrannize trans youth
Roman Abramovich
Foreign agent
Russian oligarch close to both Putin and Trump
ACU Strategic Partners
Foreign agent
A company seeking to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East in partnership with a sanctioned Russia company; Mike Flynn was working for them without having disclosed it to the US government as required.
Sheldon Adelson
Businessperson
Las Vegas, NV
CEO billionaire of the Sands Corp casino empire (died, 2021)
AggregateIQ
Corporation
Canadian data firm connected to Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL Group that played a role in spreading Brexit propaganda
Roger Ailes
Media personality
Deceased
Primogenitor of Fox News whose downfall came over dozens of women testified to his decades of sexual assault and blackmail behaviors
Todd Akin
Politician
Missouri
Politician who lost his Senate race to Clairse McCaskill in 2012 when he made the comment on TV about women having a way to "shut the whole thing down" to avoid becoming pregnant if raped.
Nelson W. Aldrich
Ali Alexander
Extremist
One of the primary organizers of the Stop the Steal rally on January 6 that turned into and/or attempted to mask a coup attempt
Samuel Alito
Judge
Washington, DC
Supreme Court Justice who penned a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, riddled with Christian nationalist tropes and arbitrary Originalist interpretations
American Energy Alliance
Non-profit
A tax-exempt nonprofit that advocated for corporate-friendly energy policies. Koch's Freedom Partners donated $1.5 million in 2012.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
Non-profit
Corporate-funded nonprofit that writes legislation for Republican legislatures, including spearheading the efforts to wrest partisan control over election results in 49 states.
Americans for Prosperity
PAC
The Koch Brothers' Libertarian political advocacy arm
Philip Anschutz
Businessperson
Colorado
CO oil and entertainment billionaire and founder of Qwest Communications
Michael Anton
Lee Atwater
Political Operative
Infamously brutal Republican strategist for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush who promoted the "abstraction" of racism via Southern Strategy and ran the infamous Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Michele Bachman
Politician
MN
Minnosota Republican politician who was the first woman in her state to be elected to the House of Representatives, she is known for her extremist Dominionist views
Steve Bannon
Media personality
Houseboats
Former Breitbart provocateur who joined the Trump administration as a key advisor and dark propagandist for Trump intent on sowing chaos
Ross Barnett
William Barr
Public Sector
Donald Trump's Attorney General who shielded him from public awareness of his crimes, corruptions, and compromises during the 45th presidency.
Maurice Barres
Author
France
French nationalist author in the early 20th century who introduced Great Replacement theory
Louis Beam
White Supremacist
Roy Beck
White Supremacist
Executive Director of NumbersUSA, member of the white supremacist Tanton Network
Andy Biggs
Politician
AZ
House Republican subpoena'd by the January 6 Commission for his role in the attempted coup
Black Legion
Extremist
Michigan
Secret society of black-hooded terrorists working in MI against labor unions and labor organizers in the 1930s. Legionnaires talked of staging a coup to oust FDR and imposing a fascist regime in the United States
David Bogatin
Oligarch
NYC
A top figure in the Russian mafia who bought 5 luxury condos in Trump Tower to launder money, he admitted in 1987.
Jacob Bogatin
Oligarch
David Bogatin's brother, and a partner of notorious Russian mob moss Semion Mogilevich
John Wilkes Booth
Criminal
Deceased
Stage actor and Confederate sympathizer who shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head in April 1865, a few months after his re-election in 1864.
L. Brent Bozell
Extremist
BFF of William F. Buckley and author of Conscience of a Conservative to support Barry Goldwater's candidacy in 1960.
Harry and Lynde Bradley
Kochtopus
Midwesterners who built their wealth on defense contracts
Andrew Breitbart
Media personality
Founded both Brietbart and the Huffington Post
Anders Breivik
Extremist
Oslo, Norway
Mass murderer who killed 77 people in Oslo, Norway as inspired by the white supremacist ideology of Great Replacement theory
Mo Brooks
Politician
Huntsville, AL
House Republican from Alabama subpoena'd by the January 6 Committee for his role in the attempted coup
Brother's Circle
Criminal
Organized crime gang pursued by then-FBI head Robert Mueller circa 2011
Michael Brown
Ferguson, MO
Unarmed black man killed by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking a series of riots in the city.
Pat Buchanan
Politician
Washington, DC
Politician and paleoconservative who worked for presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan before running against incumbent George H.W. Bush in 1992; widely considered a bigot, racist, and antisemite.
William F. Buckley Jr
Media personality
Doug Burley
Political Operative
Founding and leading both The Family and the National Prayer Breakfast of right-wing power brokers
Cambridge Analytica
Corporation
London, UK
Data firm implicated in the propaganda campaigns of both Brexit in 2015 and Donald Trump in 2016 that stole hundreds of millions of Facebook profiles and mined the treasure trove of information for weaknesses to manipulate in attempts to persuade
Renaud Camus
Author
France
French writer and critic who created the recent 2011 formulation of the Great Replacement Theory
Tucker Carlson
Media personality
NYC
Fox News evening opinion anchor and fish stick heir who promotes the Great Replacement conspiracy theory to his primetime audience of older white men.
Doug Casey
Businessperson
Ayn Rand devotee and "anarcho-capitalist" who specializes in how to profit from turmoil
Michael Catanzaro
Lobbyist
Partner at the CGCN Group lobbying firm who headed "energy independence" for the Trump transition team.
Cato Institute
Think Tank
Madison Cawthorn
Politician
NC
Center to Protect Patient Rights
Kochtopus
Dark money group funded by the Kochs to attack the ACA with fearmongering and vitriol
Mike Cernovich
Media personality
CGCN Group
Lobbyist
Lobbyist for the Koch brothers
James Chaney
Activist
Neshoba County, MS
One of 3 civil rights activists murdered by local white supremacists when engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, along with Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
Jeremy Joseph Christian
Extremist
Portland, OR
stabbed 3 people who tried to intervene while he was hurling anti-Muslim slurs at 2 young women in Portland, OR
Chris Christie
Politician
Former governor of NJ and former Trump supporter and transition team lead who became a Trump critic
Michael Cohen
Businessperson
NYC
Donald Trump's personal lawyer, sentenced to 3 years in federal prison for felony crimes, including campaign finance crimes
Steven A. Cohen
Businessperson
Finance (SAC Capital Advisors)
Roy Cohn
Political Operative
Deceased
Lawyer who represented Senator Joseph McCarthy in the infamous televised 1954 hearings, and later went on to become a mafia-connected fixer in NYC and mentor to budding real estate developer Donald Trump
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Think Tank
Washington, DC
A Washington think tank that had been bankrolled by fossil fuel industries, particularly the Kochs.
Continental Resources
Corporation
Oklahoma
OK-based shale oil company with a large and profitable fracking operation
Coors brewing family
Koch Investor
Colorado
The Coors gave money to Oliver North to fund the Iran-Contra operation
Council of Conservative Citizens (CoC)
Ted Cruz
Politician
Texas
Jefferson Davis
Kim Davis
Public Sector
Kentucky
Former county clerk of Rowan County, KY who defied a US federal court order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in 2015
Devos family
Koch Investor
Founders of the Amway marketing empire; Betsy DuVos was the Secretary of Education under Trump
Amadou Diallo
New York
a West African immigrant mowed down by 41 shots from police when leaving his apartment on February 4, 1999.
James Dobson
Media personality
conservative talk-show host and fundamentalist Christian who strongly advocated spanking and corporal punishment be applied liberally to children
Chester Doles
Former KKK leader who runs the white supremacist American Patriots USA. Nearly beat a Black man to death in 1993. Marched in 2017 in Charlottesville.
Rod Dreher
Extremist
Benedict Option author and traditionalist
Dinesh D'Souza
Media personality
Conservative gadly who alleged that Obama was "African" in outlook rather than American, absorbing his "radical" views from his Kenyan father
Doug Ducey
Politician
AZ
Governor of Arizona
Aleksandr Dugin
Extremist
Russia
Russia's primary fascist political philosopher and originator of Eurasianism conspiracy theory
David Duke
White Supremacist
John Eastman
Political Operative
Ran against Kamala Harris in 2010 for California AG, then showed back up in 2020 to write an outrageous op-ed that Newsweek for some reason actually published, that claimed that she was "secretly" not a US resident and therefore not eligible to be the VP! Now the Kamala Harris birther
Myron Ebell
Political Operative
Outspoken climate change skeptic, who headed the Trump transition team for the EPA
Election Integrity Project California
Extremist
Election fraud group working with Leonard Leo
Larry Ellison
Businessperson
Gave $5 million to Marco Rubio
Cassandra Fairbanks
Jerry Falwell, Jr
Televangelist
The Family
Lobbyist
Shadowy DC group with tremendous sway in Congress and around the world, following a distorted "strongman Jesus" version of Christianity.
The Federalist Society
Extremist
Scott Fitzgerald
Politician
WI
House Republican
Michael Flynn
Cult Leader
For America
PAC
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Fox News
Corporation
Free Congress Foundation
Freedom Caucus
Politician
Freedom Partners
Kochtopus
The Koch Brothers' secretive donor club.
FreedomWorks
Extremist
Matt Gaetz
Politician
Kevin Gentry
Kochtopus
VP of Special Projects and VP of the Koch Foundation
Greg Gianforte
Politician
body-slamming Guardian reported Ben Jacobs while running for a GOP House seat in Montana
Newt Gingrich
Media personality
Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet
White Supremacist
Rudy Giuliani
Politician
NYC
GiveSendGo
"Christian" donation platform
Barry Goldwater
Politician
AZ
Seb Gorka
Political Operative
Billy Graham
Madison Grant
Political Operative
Close personal friend of Herbert Hoover who helped draft the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924 -- the Stephen Miller of his day. His "Passing of the Great Race" was beloved by Hitler as "his bible."
Chuck Grassley
Politician
Senator
The Great Awakening
Marjorie Taylor Greene
QAnon
GA
Eric Greitens
Politician
MO
Harold Hamm
Kochtopus
Billionaire founder of Continental Resources, an OK-based shale company with large fracking business & one of the charter members of the Kochs' donor circle.
James Henry Hammond
Extremist
Warren G. Harding
Politician
Enthusiastically supported the white-supremacist work of Lothrop Stoddard et al
Billy James Hargis
Extremist
Orrin Hatch
Politician
Sen. Orrin Hatch raised concerns about funding certain entitlement programs. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything,” he said.
Josh Hawley
Politician
MO
Missouri Senator funded by Peter Thiel who gave the January 6 mob a fist bump on his way in to object to certifying the electoral count
Matthew Heimbach
Extremist
White nationalist and one of the founders of the Traditionalist Workers Party
Jesse Helms
Politician
Leona Helmsley
Diane Hendricks
WI
The wealthiest woman in Wisconsin at $3.6 billion
Heritage Foundation
Think Tank
Washington, DC
Honest Elections Project
Extremist
A conservative legal organization connected to Leonard Leo that files legal briefs to SCOTUS opposing mail-in ballots and other voting reforms that help more people to vote,
Herbert Hoover
Politician
Washington, DC
White supremacist and wealth supremacist, he was adamant about doing nothing to help people during the Great Depression.
Mike Huckabee
Politician
Laura Ingraham
Media personality
Fox News host
Andrew Jackson
Politician
Deceased
US President
John Birch Society
Extremist
Andrew Johnson
Politician
Deceased
US President
Chuck Johnson
Media personality
Alt-right super troll
Ron Johnson
Politician
Wisconsin Republican Senator who supported Donald Trump, promoted ivermectin for covid, and said he wasn't afraid of the January 6 mob because they were white people
Alex Jones
Media personality
Host of InfoWars, the 9/11 conspiracy show that put the genre on the map
Jim Jordan
Politician
OH
A long-time Tea Party hyena, the Congressman known as Gym once helped his buddy cover up decades of sexual abuse of young wrestlers in their care.
Judicial Education Project
Extremist
A legal group tied to Leonard Leo, working to advance conservative takeover of the judiciary.
Islam Karimov
Oligarch
Uzbekistan
Former Communist official who became the first president of Uzbekistan in 1991, and remained the country's dictator until his death in 2016.
Alex Kaschuta
Media personality
Right-wing podcaster
Brett Kavanaugh
Judge
DC
Dr. D. James Kennedy
creating a Dominionist "conversion" playbook
John F. Kennedy
Politician
Deceased
Robert F. Kennedy
Politician
Deceased
Anna Khachiyan
Martin Luther King
Activist
Deceased
Civil Rights leader in the 1960s, and enemy of Southern politicians
Charlie Kirk
Media personality
Walter Kirn
Author
MT
Up in the Air author and disaffected former member of the American intellectual class
KKK
White Supremacist
Bill Koch
Businessperson
Charles Koch
Kochtopus
Kansas
industries: pipelines, oil refineries, lumber and paper, coal, chemicals, commodity futures, etc.
David Koch
Kochtopus
Deceased
industries: pipelines, oil refineries, lumber and paper, coal, chemicals, commodity futures, etc. (now deceased)
Fred Koch
Kochtopus
Kansas
Father of Charles and David, Fred Koch was an early and fervent acolyte in the ultra-conservative John Birch Society
Frederick Koch
Businessperson
New York
David Koresh
Cult Leader
Waco, TX
Ku Klux Klan (see KKK)
White Supremacist
Kylie Jane Kremer
David Lane
White Supremacist
Member of the white supremacist group The Order who coined the 14-word slogan popular with Great Replacement adherents: "We must secure the exisatence of our people and a future for white children"
Ken Langone
Businessperson
Founder of Home Depot
Lyndon LaRouche
Cult Leader
Robert LeFevre
Kochtopus
Charles Koch's mentor, a quasi-anarchist, who said, "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure"
Leonard Leo
Extremist
Chairman of the Federalist Society, a legal organization working to pack the courts with conservative judges.
Marine Le Pen
Politician
France
Honor Levy
Liberty Counsel
Christian special rights group
The Liminal Order
William S. Lind
Political Operative
Kelly Loeffler
Politician
Georgia
Insider trading immediately upon arriving at her unelected Senate seat when her husband, President of the NYSE, found a way to have some money arrive at Brian Kemp, the Governor, who appointed her.
Dana Loesch
Media personality
NRA spokeswoman
Sen. Huey Long
Politician
Deceased
Thomas Mair
Extremist
Assassin of British MP Jo Cox, who was outspoken against the UK's Brexit campaign
Paul Manafort
Lobbyist
Clarence Manion
Blake Masters
Politician
AZ
John McAfee
Businessperson
Deceased
Sen. Joseph McCarthy
Politician
Deceased
Senator best known for his demagoguery against alleged Communist agents in the US government during the Cold War in the early 1950s
Kevin McCarthy
Politician
CA
Michael McKenna
Kochtopus
Lobbyist and President of MWR Strategies lobbying firm, who have the Koch brothers as clients
Timothy McVeigh
Extremist
Oklahoma City, OK
White supremacist McVeigh was a disgruntled former military guy who took up with the white power movement and executed the Oklahoma City bombing -- as inspired, he said, by enacting "revenge" for Waco.
Andrew Mellon
Businessperson
Rebekah Mercer
Oligarch
Daughter of NY hedge fund manager Robert Mercer; she helped guide the Trump transition team following the 2016 election, and funded right-wing social network Parler
Robert Mercer
Oligarch
Father of Rebekah Mercer and longtime right-wing donor
MicroChip
Pro-Trump bot-king
Stephen Miller
Extremist
Michael Milken
Cleta Mitchell
Extremist
OK
Lawyer who represented various right-wing entities including the NRA, and was considered the "fringe of the fringe" -- at age 70 she "represented" Trump during his telephone call to Brad Raffensperger asking him to find ~11,000 votes
Semion Mogilevich
Criminal
Notorious Russian mob boss
Stefan Molyneux
Media personality
Alt-right troll
Sun Myung Moon
Cult Leader
Leader of the Moonie cult and self-proclaimed deity, Mr Moon served time in federal prison for tax fraud, among other charges.
Roy Moore
Politician
AL
Trump-backed politician and pedophile who narrowly lost the Alabama Senate race to Doug Jones in 2018.
JP Morgan
Businessperson
Rupert Murdoch
Oligarch
Fox News owner famous for his amoral media
Jack Murphy
Benito Mussolini
MWR Strategies
Kochtopus
Lobbying firm for the Koch brothers
Dasha Nekrasova
neo-Nazis
Extremist
Terry Nichols
Extremist
Blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building with Timothy McVeigh
Richard Nixon
Politician
Ralph Norman
Politician
House Republican who skirted the metal detectors to enter the House floor after the January 6 insurrection
NRA
Extremist
National Rifle Association
NYPD
Public Sector
New York Police Department
Barack Obama
Politician
Chicago, DC, Los Angeles
The 44th President of the United States, and the first black person to hold the job. He was widely loathed by the Right despite his positive record.
John M. Olin
Kochtopus
Chemical and munitions company titan
Viktor Orban
Politician
Radical right president of Hungary and Putin supporter
The Order
White supremacist group
Candace Owens
Extremist
Matt Parrott
Extremist
Co-founder with Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Workers Party
Laszlo Pasztor
Norman Vincent Peale
Businessperson
Christianity as a business man's religion
Mike Pence
Media personality
Donald Trump's VP
Rick Perry
Politician
Scott Perry
Politician
House Republican who skirted the metal detectors to enter the House floor after the January 6 insurrection
Jordan B Peterson
Academic
A sort of hero figure to the incel crowd
William Pierce
Pioneer Fund
A white supremacist group set up for "race betterment" in 1997 at a private club.
Jeanine Pirro
Media personality
Fox News host known for having a bit of a drinking problem and a brash on-air personality
Mike Pompeo
Public Sector
Sec of State after the firing of Rex Tillerson; former CIA Director; former Republican congressman from KS and largest recipient of Koch campaign funds in all of Congress
Jack Posobiec
Media personality
Lewis Powell
Businessperson
Wrote a 1971 memo that rallied the largely white and male business community around a plan to dismantle the New Deal and the liberal consensus
Sydney Powell
Political Operative
Also Associates with UFO believers and anti-vaxxers
Proud Boys
Extremist
Militia group involved in the January 6 coup attempt
Thomas Pyle
Businessperson
president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and the Kochs
QAnon
QAnon
Conspiracy theory about Democratic pedophiles that recycles Nazi ideology
Jean Raspail
Author
France
French author of the 1973 Camp of the Saints novel about migrants organizing to take over France; the racist fiction inspired the white power movement of the 1980s, Steve Bannon, and a host of other fascist movements in Europe, America, and around the world
Nancy Reagan
Media personality
Deceased
Ronald Reagan
Politician
Deceased
Actor and Republican who became the 40th President from 1981 through 1989
Kyle Rittenhouse
Pat Robertson
Televangelist
Dylann Roof
George Romney
Mitt Romney
Politician
UT
Murray Rothbard
Extremist
Dave Rubin
Richard Mellon Scaife
Koch Investor
Heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes, and Koch donor
David Schnare
Political Operative
"Free-market environmentalist" who accused the EPA of having blood on its hands, who joined climate change denier Myron Ebell on the Trump transition team for the EPA
Stephen Schwarzman
Finance
Rick Scott
Politician
Jeff Sessions
Politician
AL
Marc Short
Political Operative
Ran the Koch Brothers' secretive donor club, Freedom Partners, before becoming Mike Pence's senior advisor during the 2016 presidential transition
A racist publishing company, part of the Tanton Network, that published the white nationalist novel Camp of the Saints
Richard Spencer
White Supremacist
Balaji Srinivasan
Businessperson
State Policy Network
Kochtopus
Funded in part by the Kochs
Dan Stein
White Supremacist
President of Tanton Network organization FAIR
Lothrop Stoddard
White Supremacist
Author of the 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
Roger Stone
Lobbyist
Richard Strong
Businessperson
Strong Capital Management Mutual Fund
Sen. Robert Taft
Politician
John H. Tanton
White Supremacist
Michigan
White nationalist who organized The Tanton Network of 13 anti-immigrant organizations
Tea Party
PAC
Intensely antitax group
Peter Thiel
Businessperson
Los Angeles, CA
Eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire and pocketbook for the New Right project
Clarence Thomas
Judge
Washington, DC
Ginni Thomas
Political Operative
Washington, DC
Three Percenters
Extremist
Militia group who had a heavy presence at the January 6 attempted coup
Traditionalist Workers Party
Extremist
Turning Point USA
Extremist
Charlie Kirk's right-wing PR organization
Unabomber
Criminal
Unification Church
Cult Leader
Unite the Right
Activist
Charlottesville, NC
Charlottesville, NC event in 2018 where white supremecist groups marched with tiki torches, and activist Heather Hyer was killed by a right-wing extremist who drove his car through the crowd.
University of Texas at Austin
Academic
Austin, TX
JD Vance
Politician
OH
Venture capitalist and Peter Thiel acolyte running for Senate in Ohio
Ricky Vaughn
Ruben Verastigui
Criminal
DC
Former RNC and other GOP offices staffer who made social media ads for the Trump campaign and was later arrested with child porn on his phone after a DHS sting.
John Vinson
Extremist
Head of the Tanton Network-backed anti-immigrant hate group American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF)
George Wallace
Politician
Alabama
Joe Walsh
Media personality
Kelli Ward
Politician
AZ
GOP Chair
Ron Watkins
Extremist
Identified as the most likely suspect to be Q of QAnon
Randy Weaver
White Supremacist
Naples, ID
Vicki Weaver
White Supremacist
Naples, ID
Weev
White Supremacist
Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer
Paul Weyrich
White Supremacist
Arch-deacon of the New Right ultraconservative movement and hugely influential figure who founded the Heritage Foundation, Council for National Policy, and ALEC.
White Citizens Councils
White Supremacist
Geert Wilders
Darren Wilson
Public Sector
Police officer who brutally killed a Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, MO in 2014.
It’s been said that the devilish ways of pedophiliac liberal Democrats are killing Christianity in America, but the numbers tell a different story. Following the 2016 Armistice in the War on Christmas, Donald Trump yet managed to drive 1 in 7 Evangelicals from the fold, according to data from Pew and PRRI.
Far from the surge in True Believers prophesied by the right wing, the religious right’s deal with the proverbial and/or literal devil seems to have driven members away. Trump is losing Evangelicals, and really — should we be so shocked? If it doesn’t matter (to some) whether our leaders are serial philanderers and lifelong business cheats, or earnestly striving public servants spreading compassion — what use is their moral code, then? None. It is bankrupt.
Shrödinger’s Moral Leadership
The religious right can’t have it both ways — either moral leadership is important, or it isn’t. It can’t selectively be important *only* when a Democrat is in power. Evangelicals also need to make a choice between God and Caesar. Prosperity gospel is the latter and not the former, but many pretend otherwise or are fooled — after all, fool’s gold can still fool.
Cognitive dissonance upon dissonance continues to fall in the totally unraked forest of right-wing values. I’m aiming to continue pulling on a few threads connecting the religious right, and Evangelicals in particular, to the rise of political extremism in the Republican Party:
The pitch that winning the culture war is more important than God’s law is thin at best
Donald Trump is not a Christian
The “imperfect vessel” fails as moral justification
Jesus didn’t care about tax cuts
Christian leaders’ claims that politics is amoral ground beyond the reach of God’s teachings is self-evident nonsense
Christians are leaving their own moral house unguarded. No one is showing the living proof of Jesus’ teachings anymore — and it’s not the fault of the people on the left who weren’t doing it before.
Data literacy is the newest frontier. The world of information has a pale twin universe of disinformation, deep fakes, fake news, and true believers — keeping track of reality will become more and more important and valuable into the future.
RussiaGate: Russian hacking of the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 US elections
Bestiary: Principal actors in Russian interference with US democracy
It’s not just here at home in the US that fascism seems to have taken root in the population. There are many burgeoning nationalist movements resurrecting right-wing populism around the world, and as per many experts’ warnings, right-wing authoritarianism is on the rise around the globe.
Many of the right-wing populist thatches that have sprung up are at least in part, seeds planted by Vladimir Putin in his quest for Russian revanchism against the West following the end (or so we thought…) of the Cold War. Rumoured to be the richest man in the world by far, the former KGB agent was working in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, and has been pursuing his Lost Cause grievance ever since.
As such, it would be foolish not to see what’s happening here in America as part of a broader wave of right-wing populism and authoritarian fever that is very dangerous. We need to find out a lot more information about how all these puzzle pieces fit together, and get to the bottom of the real conspiracy clearly going on — if we can find it through all these smokescreen conspiracy theories clogging the propaganda waves.
Here’s a list of some of the extreme right-wing parties on the rise around the globe:
Country
Flag
Party
Abbreviation
Austria
🇦🇹
Freedom Party
FPO
Belgium
🇧🇪
Flemish Block
VB
Britain
🇬🇧
UK Independence Party
UKIP
Britain First
National Front
Czech Republic
Freedom and Direct Democracy
SPD
Denmark
🇩🇰
Danish People's Party
DPP
Finland
🇫🇮
True Finns
France
🇫🇷
National Front
FN
Germany
🇩🇪
Alternative for Germany
AfD
Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West
On May 31, 1921, a mob of murderous whites descended on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma dubbed Black Wall Street, and razed it to the ground. They dropped homemade bombs in the first ever domestic aerial attack on American soil, during the Tulsa Race Massacre following the end of World War I.
Over three hundred Blacks were murdered and hastily buried or burned. Police and other state officials were complicit; no one was ever charged for the crimes and insurance companies refused to honor Black business owner’s claims from the destruction of their livelihood and senseless slaughter of their friends, families, and community. A generation of wealth was wiped out overnight, with deep economic repercussions passing down to ensuing descendants.
Whitewashing, literally
The Confederates managed to memory hole the Tulsa Race Massacre event clean out of history for the most part, until the 100-year anniversary of the event — arriving at a time of perhaps maximum racial polarization and most extreme partisanship in this country since the civil rights era. Nor is it the only example of mass murder and destruction of Black property and assets — there are plenty others we’ve never heard about in school. That’s why it’s so important to bear witness, and to remember, and to tell and retell the stories of our past — even the painful ones. Especially the painful ones.
This image refutes any and all sneering references to bootstraps, in perpetuity throughout the universe. This image is, among many other things, economic terrorism. pic.twitter.com/lE6FIQlVJA
The whitewashing of the Civil War to assuage white Southern guilt, Lost Cause refers to the historical gaslighting of the former Confederates. New mythology reinvented our nation’s greatest internal conflict as if it had been more of a technocratic war over states’ rights and the limits of federal power, instead of the truth — which is that the seditionists first seceded, then started a war against the northern states, to preserve their right to own human beings as slaves.
When they lost the war, they never accepted defeat, or put down their conviction that white people (conveniently, them) ought to “naturally” rule over the dark people (conveniently, not them) because, you know, God said so. It is known. Many people are saying.
The Ghost Confederacy
Nevertheless, the South did have to put up with the ignomy of federal occupation for several years before they were able to expel the godless globalists and return to their safe, secure, sadistic ways of slavering. It sent the Confederates’ sense of wounded pride soaring when they could finally recreate slavery under other names, after the short-lived era of Reconstruction gave way to the terrifying age of southern “Redemption.”
Peonage, convict leasing, sharecropping, and other forms of neoslavery persisted all the way through at least 1954, when the Sumter slavery case was one of the last judicial prosecutions of involuntary servitude in the United States.
1954.
The Confederacy, and with it the idea of Black servitude, stayed alive in the hearts and minds of the former Confederates — many of whom were pardoned and later went on to sit in Congress making decisions about the direction of the “union,” all the while harboring seditious views, biding their time, and awaiting the next opportunity to viciously strike. This sort of “fantasy football” fanfic version of a hallucinatory alternate history where the South won the Civil War is not just alarming, but very very dangerous.
That the Confederates were given only light slaps on the wrist before being allowed to reassume the mantle of legitimate power is bad enough. But worse — they lashed white supremacy to the mast of white southern Christianity in efforts to shore them both up, forever interweaving and corrupting a certain strain of red state Evangelical zealotry into something consciously or unconsciously celebrating white supremacy and harboring fever dreams of a white theocracy in America.
Or, DADA vs. MAGA. Defense Against the Dark Arts was like the women’s self-defense class of Hogwarts — it taught you how to prepare yourself for the evil that was out there lurking and waiting for you out there. This course of DADA will follow suit, aiming to offer ways to detect, defend, and defeat the cultism rising in America and beyond.
It will be a work in progress over time, so please bear with me as I assemble learnings from a number of sources.
The internet, social media, seemingly infinite channels of entertainment and franchises in gaming are but tips of the giant iceberg that now competes for our time and attention. The number of options to choose from has scaled exponentially over the past several decades — but our amount of time to spend has not increased whatsoever. If anything, it’s decreased
