“The Children of MAGA”

Cambridge Dictionary online defines the meaning of the phrase “pearl clutching” as follows: “a shocked reaction in which you show more shock than you really feel in order to show that you think something is morally wrong.”

Why do I bring this up?

Bear with me, I’ll get to that in the next section below.

If you ae a political news junkie, you may know that POLITICO recently published a leaked tranche of online Telegram chats in which leaders of Young Republican groups, including a number of government employees and Republican staffers, said a whole bunch of racist, sexist, and fascist things. Here’s part of POLITCO’s write-up:

‘They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery…William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.” Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.’

Chat participants joked about the Third Reich’s gas chambers: ‘ “I’m ready to watch people burn now”… ‘We gotta pretend that we like them. Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax. Boom – they’re dead”…“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”… “I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Annie Kaykaty, New York’s national committee member, said.’

Another chat participant said, “I love Hitler.”

As the anti-Trump traditional Republican Steve Schmidt said on his podcast, The Warning, three days ago:

“There are no words to describe the sickness revealed by these young people’s texts…These young people who venerate Trump and Hitler, and who celebrate the gas chamber, the murder of millions of people, these sick MAGA young men and women who denounced Jews, who denounced their fellow Americans, who want to put millions of Americans up against the wall, or to walk them into the gas and then to toss them into the ovens…They have been marinated in the stew of a sick society…They are the creations of a broken media and of even more broken politics. They are the fruit of COVID, and the school closings, and the social isolation. These are rotten, spoiled, degenerate, broken young Americans who hate with the deepest passion, and they’d be happy, joyous, even, maybe even sexually excited, to watch up close the violence that they cheer on in these texts….They are the children of MAGA, They love Trump and they love Adolf Hitler. These are the text messages. These are the words they use. The language is vile, it’s racist, it’s antisemitic, it is cruel, and it’s depraved.”

Yes. This is the kind of horrific discourse that the Republi-fascist Party has been cultivating among its young staffers for a long time and at an accelerated pace since the deranged and debased fascist Donald Trump rose to power.

The former leader of a putsch attempt, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump campaigned for his second term on his Mein Kampf-like claim that brown skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth is a neofascist Christian white nationalist appointed for his readiness to deploy US military troops domestically against “the” very disproportionately Black, brown, and urban “enemy within.”

Trump complained to one of chiefs of staff during his first term that his generals didn’t properly obey him “like Hitler’s generals.”

Trump’s top and fascist political director Stephen ”Camp of the Saints” Miller recently told Trump’s “radical left” enemies that MAGA is “the Storm” who will crush them with righteous force, openly channeling Joseph Goebbels’ 1932 speech honoring the martyred Nazi brown shirt Horst Wessel.

JD Vance: Pearl Clutching Poster Boy

Asked about the horrible comments leaked by POLITICO, Trump’s noxious sociopath of a Vice President JD Vance dismissed them as harmless “college chat” twaddle, adding that “kids do stupid things. Especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke is cause to ruin their lives.”

Vance said that he “refuse[s] to join the pearl clutching” over the Young Republicans’ comments.

Beyond the dark absurdity of writing off the adult Republican staffers’ racist, sexist, and fascistic comments as harmless childish clowning, Vance’s response is a good example of the pot calling the kettle black. In 2016, Vance wrote a New York Times Op Ed in which he said that Trump was “unfit for the nation’s highest office” and told a former roommate that Trump was a threat to become an “American Hitler.” He said, “I can’t stomach Trump.”

It’s unlikely that his horror over Trump was sincere. In 2021, following a horrific first fascist Trump presidency that ended with an attempted Trump coup (January 6) – a presidency that validated Vance’s warning to say the least (see my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America) – Vance said that he’d changed his mind and that monstrous tyrant Trump had turned out to be a “great president.”

Why the switch? Vance was running for the US Senate and wanted the top fascist’s endorsement. And now Vance would himself like to be a future “American Hitler,” as is indicated by his creepy downplaying of the Young Republicans’ sick rhetoric, by his campaigning for the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany earlier this year, and by his spreading of the vicious racist and animalizing lie that (legal) Black Haitian immigrants were “eating the dogs and cats” of their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio last year.

Vance is one of history’s great poster boys for pearl-clutching inauthenticity.

Ruling by Fear

Speaking of fascism…at some point this year I saw an interview in which the former Russian dissident and current New York Times columnist Masha Gessen smartly said that you know you are living under an authoritarian state when the fear of retribution and punishment from those in state power makes people seriously afraid to speak, write, and otherwise act in accord with their beliefs. Gessen was talking about the Putin and Trump regimes.

Here it might be useful to distinguish between different levels of retributory threat. Moving from lowest to highest, they include exclusion from participation in decision-making roles, private criticism, public criticism and shaming, cancelling, loss of employment (job or promotion) opportunities, demotion, firing, de-funding, surveillance, prosecution, incarceration, and actual and even murderous physical violence against oneself and/or one’s family members.

All of these and other threats are constantly in play to some degree in any society based like ours (a capitalist social order) on class, race, gender, national, and imperial oppression and exploitation. (I’ll never forget a fellow history professor sheepishly telling me in the fall of 2005 that he occasionally dared to tell his students that he personally opposed the mass murderous and monumentally criminal US invasion of Iraq.) In what Gessen calls an authoritarian state, the threats are dramatically elevated and often include very real threats of violence against people thought to present obstacles to the reigning regime’s authority. One among many examples of this is the significant number of journalists Trump’s “good friend” Vladimir Putin has liquidated with impunity on the path to making formerly/briefly independent Russian media into an authoritarianism-normalizing organ of Russian state power.

That such menace and fear is part of life under the deranged fascist lunatic and racist kidnapping champion Trump47 should be clear as day. I do not have time now or space here to list all the different examples of the menace and retribution the orange fugitive slave-catcher-in-chief is inflicting across US government and society, including our educational institutions, political parties, and media. But I do want to highlight six parts of the “authoritarian” Trump “story” that I think deserve special mention.

First, it’s not for nothing that Trump pardoned 1500-plus January 6 criminals and commuted the sentences of the nation’s top two paramilitary fascist leaders on his very first day in office. This was a clear message that he intends to prominently include the threat of violence from the “worst of the worst” parts of the MAGA Amerikaner base in his toolbox of rule.

No doubt many of his January 6 putschists are being purposefully accepted into the expanding terrorist wing of government known as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – Trump’s 21^st Century Gestapo along with its junior partner Border Patrol.

Second, Trump and his fellow top Republifascist allies’ reckless and incendiary rhetoric about next Saturday’s No Kings Day II protests, calling them “insurrectionist,” “terrorist,” “Marxist” (I wish), and about “hating America,” is an endorsement and provocation of violence – state and/or extra-state violence– against mainstream bourgeois constitutional rights of free speech and public assembly.

Third, it’s not just Democrats, liberals, progressives, and leftists (“radical” and not-so radical) that the Trump regime seeks to intimidate. The targets include elected Republicans and other right-wingers who might dare to voice any opposition to anything Dear Leader Trump does or says. It is by now routine to hear Washington insiders remark that Trump’s lockstep control over nearly every Republican in Congress and state government reflects those legislators’ fear not just of “getting primaried” (losing primary races to more fully Trumpified candidates) but also of literal physical violence against themselves and their families. It is not far-fetched to think that Republican members of the judiciary (including Supreme Court justices) have reason to fear the same. Fascists tolerate no dissent first and foremost in their own party (Google up “the Night of the Long Knives” for some historical context from the Third Reich).

Fourth, Trump may now sit back in power a second time thanks in large measure to this fear. If Mitt Romney and others high in the Republican (now Republi-fascist) Party are to be believed (and I do), the US Senate would have convicted Trump after the US House impeached him for January 6, bringing the upper Congressional chamber’s vote to the two-thirds supermajority required for conviction but for Republican Senators’ fear of violence from Trump’s MAGA enforcers. Conviction would have prevented the deranged fascist sociopath Trump47 from running again in 2024.

Think about that: the debased tyrant and his vicious fascist coordinators (Stephen “the Storm” Miller and Herr Vought among other neo-Nazis) would not be back in the saddle inflicting a second and far worse Trumpocalypse except for right-wing Senators’ fear of MAGA bloodshed in January of 2021.

Fifth, the fear extends into the upper ranks of the US bourgeoisie, many of whose members’ grotesque capitulation to the “madness of King Don” reflects fear perhaps not so much of violence as of punishment through various executive branch agencies (the FTC, the FCC, the IRS, Treasury, the Commerce Department, defense/war contracts, etc.) and presidential shaming.

Sixth, something strangely underestimated and too poorly remembered (despite its recency and great significance) contributes to Trump’s freedom to use intimidation, including physical intimidation, to keep people in line under his widely hated regime. I am referring to the Christian fascist Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024 decision in the aptly named Trump v. The Unted States ruling. This epic dark judgement gave Trump blanket forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he has committed or commits past, present, and future for as long as that crime bears the imprimatur of “official presidential duties.” This was and is a blank check for authoritarian impunity, basically “a Reichstag Fire ruling.” And while it is true that the decision did not immunize federal agents who carry out criminal orders at Mein Trumpf’s command, the orange-sprayed wannabe strongman for life possesses the constitutional pardon power he used on day one of his second presidency to release more than 1500 January 6 thugs from jail and prison.

Never forget liberal justice Sonya Sotomayor’s ringing dissent in Trump v. the US. It included the following chilling passage:

‘The long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding.

The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.

Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.

Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune.

Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.’

The “nightmare scenarios” are in motion, with direction and momentum. Only a determined and sustained mass resistance movement can alter the terrible trajectory fascist consolidation as we await a 2026 Supreme Court decision on Congressional that will likely keep the US House in Republifascist hands and we face the specter of future elections where urban voters will vast their ballots in the shadow of federal troops.

(I have a bone to pick with Gessen: The Trump regime is more and worse than merely authoritarian. I am serious when I describe it as fascist, as has thankfully become common among sentient and politically and historically informed humans. The Trump regime and movement seek a new dictatorial form of governance beyond previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law not just for the sake of power in and of itself but in order to impose virulent white supremacism, toxic misogynist patriarchy, and xenophobic and palingenetic ultra-nationalism, all in the name of “traditional values.”)

“A Harbinger of Elections to Come”

This just in vis dispatch from the brilliant Refuse Fascism activist C Clark Kissinger, reminding us that the Republifascist Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat the specially elected Congressperson-in-limbo Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) to the lower body of Congress is about a more than the Epstein Files:

‘Twenty-three days ago, Adelita Grijalva was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat by the voters of her district and her election has been certified by the secretary of state for Arizona. Yet Rep. Grijalva is locked out of her office, she cannot take her seat on the floor of Congress, nor can she vote on legislation. Why? Because the Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson has refused to swear her in.

Trying to put less ominous spin on this story, some pundits have asserted that this is all because the Republicans are afraid of adding another vote in the House to compel the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

If only the reason were that mundane! The real reason is that the MAGA Republicans are fascists who do not believe that any Democrat can or should legitimately hold public office. To this end, voting districts are being redrawn, voting rights laws are being gutted, Republicans who win by-elections are being promptly sworn in, and political power is step-by-step being concentrated in the hands of the executive branch and its military.

Those who are pegging their hopes on some future election to take power away from the MAGA fascists need to come to grips with reality. The Christian fascists of the MAGA movement believe that they are on a mission from God to “take back the country.” They have no intention of being bound by future elections that do not come out the way they want.

What is required now is a massive, nonviolence political earthquake from below with the central demand that TRUMP MUST GO NOW! Nothing less is commensurate with the threat we face. All out for No Kings Day, October 18. Then on to the national convergence on Washington DC, November 5.’

+ For a semi-comprehensive running record – with special recent on-the-ground emphasis on what’s happening in Chicago – of the Trump regime’s endless assault on democracy, decency, truth, social justice, the rule of law, environmental sanity, international law, immigrants, Black people, education, science and more, please see The Paul Street Report.

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