The Republican National Committee, in perhaps the most stunningly stupid self-own in the history of modern politics certainly in my lifetime, finally said the quietest part out loud: that in their official pronouncement, the events at the Capitol on January 6 constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were censured by the RNC in the statement as well, for their role on the January 6 Committee and their investigation into these “legitimate” events involving a murderous attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman had this to say about the RNC statement:
The RNC statement about “legitimate political discourse” is a line in the sand.
Democracy vs. Authoritarianism is on the ballot in 2022
If there’s any upside to the dark situation we’re in, it’s these gifts Republicans keep on giving — further debasing themselves each time you think they can’t possibly stoop any morally lower — that we can use to our advantage to turn out our base in record numbers in these upcoming midterms. We did it in 2018, and there’s no reason to believe we can’t do it now. Trump’s support is waning, not growing — and the fractures within the GOP are widening, not tightening. Plus, we’ll have 8 million new 18-year-old eligible voters we can potentially reach — the vast majority of whom statistically speaking, are going to be progressive Democrats.
None of the other policy questions or culture wars will matter if we cannot solve the most fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: do we still believe in the ideals of the Constitution, the rule of law, and the vision of a self-governing people shared by the Founders? Or do we want to hand over the keys to the nation to the erstwhile billionaires, old money heirs, and trust fund playboys who want to drag us back to some perverted nostalgic fantasyland that’s part Leave It To Beaver, part wild west, and part Silence of the Lambs?
Meanwhile Bob has made The Authoritarians available free of charge here, and I absolutely encourage you to read it — it’s fascinating stuff and he’s an entertaining as well as informative writer. In this post I’ll do my best to summarize the main points of the book, because I know people are busy and not everyone has time to read a whole book much less scrape together hours to volunteer and do activist work.
Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians
Dr. Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as “something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves.” Followers submit blindly to the leaders and give them too much free rein to do anti-democratic, brutal, and tyrannical things. Power corrupts absolutely, and power seems to corrupt authoritarians most of all.
He classifies the authoritarians into three primary groups:
Authoritarian followers — typically this group follows the established authorities in their society, including government officials, clergy and traditional religious leaders, business leaders, and self-appointed gurus of all stripes. They tend to have a “Daddy and Mommy know best” approach to the government, believing that authorities are above the law. Psychologically, authoritarian followers exhibit a high degree of submission to authorities they accept as legitimate, high levels of aggression in the name of those authorities (if so called upon), and a high degree of conventionalism and conformity. They tend to be bigots, with prejudices against many types of groups.
Authoritarian leaders — tend to be Social Dominators, who long to control people and affect others’ lives. They are overall highly prejudiced and bigoted, do not believe in the American value of equality, and feel justified in wielding great power over society with little qualification and even less self-reflection. They believe the world is divided into wolves and sheep, and they have no qualms fooling the sheep into opening the pasture gate so they can eat. “Might makes right” is their personal motto.
Double Highs — about 10% of any given sample score highly on both the social dominance test and the right-wing authoritarian scale, which is odd given the social dominator’s otherwise reluctance to be submissive. They exhibit extra prejudice and extra hostility — beyond either the social dominators or the RWAs. They tend to be the “religious” social dominators, who had a fundamentalist upbringing, or had a conversion experience as an adult (George W. Bush, e.g.) and now tend to believe in some form of Strict Father Morality.
More traits of authoritarian followers
They tend to feel more endangered in potentially threatening situations that most people do (think: Dick Cheney‘s descent into bunker mentality after 9/11)
More afraid than most people; they tend to have overactive amygdalas
Were raised by their parents to be afraid of others — both parents and children have told researchers so
More likely to issue threats than low authoritarians
Most orthodox — were raised fundamentalist and are highly repressed
Most hardline
Believe “whatever I want is right”
Paradoxically, want to “be normal” very badly — they tend to get tugged by the people around them
Authoritarian aggression
Authoritarians prefer not to have fair fights out in the open — they tend to aggress when they believe their hostility is welcomed by established authority, or supports established authority. They also often aggress when they have an obvious physical advantage over the target — making women, children, and others unable to defend themselves as ideal targets. These cowards have the gall to feel morally superior to the innocent victims they assault in an ongoing asymmetrical warfare between supremacists and marginalized groups.
To make matters worse, authoritarians do their dirty deeds in the shadows and scream bloody murder at anyone who dares try and expose their dark secrets to the light. Their theatrical and performative self-righteousness is just an act to avoid accountability and responsibility for what they do — even unto themselves.
Moreover, authoritarians are extra punitive against lawbreakers they don’t like (though exceedingly permissive for lawbreakers they *do* like, which is infuriatingly hypocritical), because they believe fervently in the value of punishment. Many advocate child corporal punishment — spanking and worse — for children as young as 1 year old. Authoritarian followers tended to report feelings of “secret pleasure” when hearing of the misfortunes of high school classmates who had misbehaved, believing they got what they deserved in life.
It would be accurate to think of authoritarians as “little volcanoes of hostility,” almost heat-seeking their way into authority-approved ways to erupt and release their pent-up anger. Many of them do not, and will not ever realize that their fundamentalist upbringing has sadly left their brains underdeveloped, and ill-equipped to navigate the modern world with its rapid changes, accelerating inequality, advancing climate change, and political instability.
Lethal Union
When a social dominator becomes an authoritarian leader, and leads his authoritarian followers down malevolent roads from informing to threatening to vigilanteism, researchers refer to this state of affairs as a “lethal union.” It’s a highly dangerous and volatile time for a democracy, one warranting caution and vigilance from concerned citizens.
Throughout history, these are the situations that tend to devolve further into aggression, political violence, civil war, genocide, and worse. We need to be very damn careful about who we elect as our leaders — we cannot allow our government to be captured by special interests and the narrow, quixotic delusions of old billionaires outshining daddy and staving off death.
More books about authoritarians
If you’ve already read Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians, or you’re just looking for more resources on authoritarianism — here’s a list to get started:
It is going to become increasingly more difficult to discern from fact from fiction, here in this world that seemingly quickly flipped from a world of The Enlightenment to a world of dark disinformation. From artificial intelligence to vast propaganda machines, from deep fakes to fake lives — it’s going to require more from us to be able to detect what’s real.
Already we can’t rely on old cues, signposts, and tropes anymore. We’re less credulous about credentials, and trust isn’t automatic based on caste, title, or familiar status markers.
Go slow and look for mimics
Here’s one key to more accurate reality detection: take more time to spot the fake. Don’t judge too quickly, because it can take time to weed out the fakesters and the hucksters — some are decent mimics and can fool people who are in a hurry, not paying much attention, or attracted to some irrelevant other quality about the ersatz knockoff and thus forms an affinity with them based on something else entirely. Some drink the Kool-Aid for various reasons.
Clues of fraud
Those who cling absurdly to abstract symbols are often fakes. And in general, any folks who feel like they are just trying a little bit too hard might be fake. Then, of course, there are the full-on zealots and religious nutbags. These theocrats are definitely faux compassionate Jesus-lovers. What better cloak than the robes of a religious man (or, less frequently, woman)? It’s the perfect disguise.
No wonder so many child abusers hide out in churches of all kinds, from famously the Catholic to the more recently-outed (though not surprising) Evangelical Southern Baptist Church. No one will ever suspect them, or want to confront them if they do. Plus, they have Democrats to absurdly try and pin the blame on repeatedly, despite a lack of a shred of evidence.
We need to know what our opponents are up to. There is much to learn.
Much more to come — stay tuned!
Behavior
Type
Definition
ad baculum
rhetorical
Appeal to violence
ad hominem
rhetorical
Attack the person instead of their ideas.
aggression
tactical
Issue threats and/or violate boundaries.
argumentum ad passiones
emotional
"I feel it (or I feel *strongly* about it), therefore it must be true."
assault
tactical
Assert the opposite of reality
rhetorical
Simply state the opposite of what is true
banning books
legislative
Book banning is a form of censorship in which government officials or organizations remove books from libraries, school reading lists, or bookstore shelves because of objections to content, ideas, or themes.
Believes oneself to be superior and requiring of association with high-status people
pathological
Related to supremacy and collective narcissism, this worldview is one of extreme entitlement and expected deference.
Black & white thinking
cognitive
A pattern of thought characterized by polar extremes, sometimes flip-flopping very rapidly from one extreme view to its opposite. A symptom of many personality disorders.
Blame Democrats
rhetorical
"I'm not responsible for my bad behaviors: DEMOCRATS ARE!"
bullying
emotional
Intimidating, harming, or coercing -- usually of someone who is perceived as vulnerable.
charisma
emotional
Cloying, often superficial or fake charm
charm
emotional
Compelling attractiveness that fascinates, allures, or delights
closed mind
cognitive
not open to an argument from facts
Cognitive dissonance
cognitive
Having an incongruent value system, or believing mutually exclusive things -- as well as behaving without consistent ethical principles; a sense of randomness to one's approach to life.
cognitive distortion
Communicate by emotional contagion
behavior
Communication is difficult or impossible
behavior
confusion
Consistent inconsistency
conspiracy theories
contempt
counterattack
Creating unnecessary chaos
emotional
Create conflict to get attention and get a chance to get what you want.
Crocodile tears
emotional
DARVO
tactical
Deception
demagoguery
emotional
Seeks support through an appeal to desires and prejudices of voters instead of rational arguments.
Demand mirroring of their emotions
behavior
Denying plain facts
Diverting attention
Do not perform emotional work
behavior
emotional abuse
Emotional manipulation
emotional
Envious of others and believes others are envious
pathological
Exaggerating one's achievements and talents
pathological
Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
pathological
extortion
fears change
weakness
fears difference
weakness
flying monkeys
fraud
frivolous lawsuits
Gaslighting
Cause you to question your own sanity -- very dangerous to do this to people. The effects are long-lasting and difficult to do; it can take many years to heal from this kind of insidious abuse.
Grandiose sense of self-importance
pathological
grandiosity
grooming
Hard to give to; reject efforts to give help
behavior
high need for closure
Prefers to resolve situations quickly and reduce uncertainty as immediately as possible
hypocrisy
Consistently fail to live up to their own stated ideals, and the things they demand of others.
idealize, devalue, discard
The narcissistic abuse cycle
Interpsonally exploitative; takes advantage of others
pathological
irrational anger
Lacks empathy; unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
pathological
lawsuits
Love to play victim and hero
emotional
They want your emotions oscillating all over the place, because it gives them more opportunities to swoop in and capture you at a vulnerable moment and earn your trust -- so they can violate it.
Lying
Malignant envy
Masters of deceptive and misleading stories
rhetorical
Mind games
emotional
Motivated Reasoning
cognitive
They start with the premise they want and work from there -- they are bad scientists, but good lawyers.
Moving the goalposts
tactical
narcissistic rage
narcissistic supply
One-way street
Expect loyalty from you while offering none in return
oppression
panem et circuses
Paranoia
emotional
Nurturing and maintaining enemies
Passive-aggression
emotional
Perjury
legal
Lying under oath, in court or in a deposition
Phobic
emotional
Their main aspect is fear, from bouts of phobia indoctrination
Play the victim
emotional
Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success
pathological
Projection
cognitive
Accusing your opponent of doing the thing that you yourself are doing.
Provoking anger
behavior
repression
Requires excessive admiration
pathological
Resist repairing relationships
behavior
retconning
rewriting history
rigidity
sadism
emotional
scapegoating
tactical
Just blame Democrats, no matter how absurd
secrecy
Covert actions; lack of transparency
See roles as sacred and inviolable
behavior
Seek enmeshment, not emotional intimacy
behavior
Selective Exposure
self-aggrandizement
emotional
Sense of entitlement; expects others to make unreasonable sacrifices
pathological
shame
emotional
Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors and attitudes
pathological
Splitting
cognitive
See the world as with them or against them (splitting)
stonewalling
stubbornness
supremacy
emotional
Take a thing and turn it into its moral opposite
Label a good thing bad so you can smear it, or a bad thing good so you can support it
Motivated reasoning is a common daily phenomenon for all of us, assuming we’re human and/or interact with other humans. It’s a cognitive science term that refers to a type of emotional bias in which we have a tendency to prefer decisions or justifications based on their personal desirability vs. an unbiased examination of the facts.
Thinking and feeling aren’t anywhere near as “separate” in the brain as is commonly believed — they are very intertwined, and it’s also incredibly difficult for us to understand or detect from moment to moment which parts of our stream of consciousness are “thinking” and which are “feeling.”
What’s worse, we have other biases that exacerbate the motivated reasoning bias — like the “Lake Wobegon Effect” wherein we tend to overestimate our own abilities vs. others. So, we’re overconfident — at the same that we are less rational than we think we are. That can be a volatile combination — especially when found in individuals who hold a lot of power, and make decisions that affect people’s lives.
For we know not what we do
It can be infuriating to deal with people who are using motivated reasoning to make decisions instead of critical thinking: they tend to work backwards from the conclusion they wish to reach, and ignore evidence that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. The way they deal with the cognitive dissonance of conflicting information is simply to toss the new information out, instead of evaluating it. Generally, though, they are unaware that their brain is in the habit of making that easier choice, and tend to get angry when this is pointed out.
The filibuster is an archaic rule that was at first only there by accident, then whittled into a sharp blade of minority rule by Southern plantation owner and virulent white supremacist John C. Calhoun — a man credited with laying the groundwork for the Civil War.
The South Carolina plutocrat strategized on behalf of wealthy aristocratic ambitions in the 1820s and 30s. Dubbed the “Marx of the master class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, Calhoun consumed himself with an obsession over how to establish permanent rule by his 1% brethren. He was an early proponent of property over people — the original “just business” kind of cold calculating supremacist that would come to typify the darker southern shadow culture of America.
Calhoun came to the conclusion that the Founders had made a grave mistake when creating the nation, and had put in too much democracy and too little property protection. He had a conviction that collective governance ought to be rolled back, because it “exploited” the wealthy planter class such as himself. During his time in the Senate he engineered a number of clever devices for the minority to rule over the collective will of the public — dubbed a “set of constitutional gadgets” for restricting the operations of a democratic government by a top political scientist at the time.
Public choice theory and Charles Koch
Slaveholding Senator John C. Calhoun inspired a series of men in the future to take up the torch of minority rule and its apparatus. James McGill Buchanan combined ideas from F. A. Hayek with fascist strains of Calhoun’s ministrations in the Senate to pack a conservative economic punch with public choice theory.
A young Charles Koch was exposed to Buchanan’s re-interpretation of Calhoun’s re-intepretation of the founders’ intentions, and embarked on a lifelong mission to indoctrinate the world in the religion of hyper-libertarian Ayn Randian fiscal austerity.
New lie, same as the old lie. The old lie is that America was never intended to be a democracy — which is doublespeak nonsense. The old lie is that the Declaration of Independence was wrong — that all men are not created equal; that the entire reason we founded a new nation was somehow misguided. But “conservatives” have been fighting fervently for this original Big Lie since time immemorial.
So: Charles Koch is the new John C. Calhoun. He and his vast navel-gazing empire of “think tanks” and other organs of self-regurgitation have managed to brainwash enough people and operate enough bots to make it almost a coin toss whether the average citizen believes the nation was founded as a democratic republic or an authoritarian theocracy.
The filibuster is one of the strongest minority rule tools in their toolbox.
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.
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.
A strong and prevalent cognitive bias that causes a large majority of people to rate themselves more highly and more skilled than statistically possible. Lack of self-awareness can cause us to overestimate our knowledge or ability in a given area, and this phenomenon is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Posited in 1999 by two Cornell psychologists, Professors Dunning and Kruger also found that low-skilled people often have a double bind: they think of themselves as very skilled, but the lack even the basic level of skill that would allow them to detect and learn from their mistakes to get better. It’s very difficult for them to get out of the “trap” of perceiving themselves as superior, thus obviating any need to continue effort at improvements.
They also found that individuals of high skill levels also suffer from a sort of “lensing effect” (now dubbed the Dunning-Kruger Effect accordingly) in terms of their own self-assessment, but in the other direction — they are not generally aware of the rarity of their gifts. They assume most other people have the same kinds of knowledge and critical thinking skills that they do. In other words, careful study of our images of ourselves found us all to be living in a bubble of inaccurate self-perception, on both ends.
How to counteract the Dunning-Kruger Effect:
Ask for feedback from other people, and listen to it honestly.
Keep learning and gather knowledge and improving your skills.
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.
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
Ghost skin is short for ghost skinhead. It refers to a white supremacist who hides his racist beliefs in order to blend into wider society, with the goal of remaining undetected and covertly continuing his Nazi agenda.
Over at least the past 2 decades, white supremacists have been specifically infiltrating law enforcement. Going into the police is an attractive career option to begin with, for someone with controlling tendencies, an interest in power, and often an incentive to use the badge as a shield for one’s own crime schemes.
Ghost skins are rebranded Nazis
White supremacy has a long and brutal history in America. This original stain not only hasn’t been washed clean, but is seeping outwards once again. It’s expanding outward through QAnon and conspiracist fear-mongering on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, the -chans, etc. It’s what resulted in the January 6 deadly siege on the Capitol building where Congress was counting the electoral college votes and certifying Joe Biden’s presidency.
Part of the larger swell of fascism in this country, ghost skins have allowed neo-Nazis and a motley assortment of thugs, violent criminals, and authoritarian personalities to hide out in the fabric of society, waiting to strike when the time is right. When The Storm comes. When it is time, the President tells them, to take their country back.
