Tag: authoritarian

California Congresswoman Wants a Truth Commission—Like a Good Little Leftist Authoritarian

Jacobs compared what happened at the Capitol on January 6 to genocides in Rwanda and Burma and said believes white supremacy is a huge problem. For groups with this explicit ideology, there are 124 in the entire country tracked by the SPLC. Being that it is the SPLC, this is likely an overestimate and indicates a few thousand closely followed members. There are also no explicit links between that ideology and the rioters at the Capitol, other than in the Democrats’ heads. President Trump expanded his minority vote in 2020, so the link to “Trumpism” is also pretty off base.

By contrast, the Anti-Defamation League tracked over 2,100 crimes related to anti-Semitism in the United States last year, the highest since they began tracking in 1979. The Anti-Semite of the Year for 2019, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee with Jacobs. The president from her party is snubbing Israel. The entire party has an anti-Semitism problem. Maybe she ought to clean her own house first.

But Jacobs is as determined as Stelter to remove far-right-wing media from the airwaves. Jacobs praised him for stating that the “Big Lie,” a genuinely offensive term to explain the perception some had of voter fraud, was fed by it. I would encourage her to read the recent expose in Time, not because it excuses what happened. Instead, it explains why so many Americans felt something was wrong with the election. Even the author said President Trump was correct, in a way, because there was “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.”

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Nikole Hannah-Jones Calls For ‘Consequences,’ ‘Deprogramming’ For Republicans

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is best known for her flagship essay in the New York Times’ ahistorical 1619 Project, believes that 74 million Americans deserve to be “punished” as part of deprogramming them for voting for Donald Trump in 2020.

The 1619 Project creator spoke to Eugene Robinson on MSNBC, where he asked her about how the media and social elites can best “deprogram” the “millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans” who voted for Trump, as they are clearly part of a “cult.”

Hannah-Jones responded with a vague call to look toward an undefined “history,” declaring that “there has to be consequences” based on how you vote. She then decried the push towards a quick “reconciliation” between the left and right. The so-called journalist painted Trump supporters with a broad brush, lumping the Capitol rioters in with average Republicans who voted based on policy.

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The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.

A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.

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