2021 American Political Scene

[TopHatter]

As for Tlaib, she has retweeted calls for the destruction of Israel and defended others who called for the destruction of Israel. She has an extensive history of antisemitic comments most recently her comment back in August about a secret cabal controlling the world.

Your original claim was that she said the Holocaust gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling.

[TopHatter]

Conspiracies about a 'catastrophic takeover' by Jews have long been an American problem

“Jews will not replace us,” demonstrators chanted at the “Unite the Right” rally organized by armed white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, to stop the removal of a statue dedicated to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Heather D. Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal from Charlottesville was killed, and 35 others were wounded, when a 20-year-old neo-Nazi, James Alex Fields, intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during the rally.

Now a federal trial in Charlottesville aims to extract damages from those who organized and led the deadly rally. Lead plaintiff Elizabeth Sines, a law student at the University of Virginia at the time of the rally, believes that the lawsuit carries an important message. In an interview with The New York Times, she said, “If you plan and execute violence – toward Jewish people, people of color, diverse communities like Charlottesville – you will be held responsible for your actions.”

At first glance, it might not be clear what the demonstrators meant in chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Only about 2,000 Jews live in Charlottesville, out of a total local population of 47,000. Nationally Jews number no more than 7.6 million, meaning that just over 2% of Americans are Jewish. Indeed, recent studies suggest that America’s Jewish birthrate has fallen, and Jews are barely replacing themselves, let alone the white population as a whole.

What, then, could explain Charlottesville demonstrators’ fears?

White nationalists’ fears
Scholar of Jewish history Deborah Lipstadt, who has been nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, argued in an expert report presented to the court concerning the history, ideology, symbolism and rhetoric of antisemitism – subsequently summarized in her personal testimony – that the Charlottesville chant carried several meanings.

“In its simplest and most straightforward interpretation,” she explained, “that chant can be understood to say Jews will not replace ‘us,’ i.e., white Christians in our job or our dominant place in society. We as whites will remain the dominant and supreme force in society.”

She also pointed to a “subtler but deeply ideological meaning to this chant,” rooted in the fear referred to by white nationalists as the “great replacement” or “white genocide.” The Charlottesville chant is expressing centuries-old fears that Jews, in league with peoples of color, are engaged in a nefarious plot to destroy the white Christian civilization.

David Lane, a white supremacist convicted, among other crimes, of conspiring in the 1984 machine-gun assassination of the Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg in Denver, did much to publicize this idea. “The Western nations,” he wrote, “were ruled by a Zionist conspiracy … [that] above all things wants to exterminate the White Aryan race.” His 14-word goal, today a central plank of white nationalist ideology, declares that “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Alex Linder, a neo-Nazi who operates the racist website the Vanguard News Network, has written that Jews merely pretend to be white “in order to shame, discredit, blame, mock, harass and otherwise discomfit and discredit white people and the white race.”

The chant “Jews will not replace us,” Lipstadt explained to the court, serves as the white nationalist response to these fears. To avoid “catastrophic takeover,” it calls upon white people to “band together, arm themselves and go on the offensive,” she noted.

Lipstadt dates this antisemitic theory back to early 20th-century tsarist Russia, where a notorious forgery, now known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” purported to “prove” that Jews were engaged in a vast conspiratorial plot to subvert Christian society and culture. According to the protocols, Jews aimed at nothing less than world domination.

Today’s antisemites likewise believe in a vast Jewish-led conspiracy that seeks to undermine all that they hold dear. The cry “Jews will not replace us” reflects this fear and, according to Lipstadt, served as “one of the motivating underpinnings of the Unite the Right rally.”

Antisemitic cartoons
Lipstadt’s evidence is persuasive, but, as a scholar of American Jewish history, I know that the fear of “replacement” dates back even earlier.

In 1882, with thousands of Jews pouring into New York in the wake of Russian pogroms and anti-Jewish legislation known as the May Laws, similar fears surfaced, even though Jews at that time made up far less than 1% of the U.S. population.

The well-known American-born cartoonist James Albert Wales, who died in 1886, stoked fears about how Jewish immigrants would change the city’s character, in depictions in the satirical weekly The Judge.

Wales portrayed New York as becoming, by 1900, the “New Jerusalem,” where Canal Street would be renamed “Levi Street,” Jewish-owned businesses would replace Christian ones and a Jewish feather merchant would serve as the city’s mayor. He portrayed long-nosed Jewish soldiers as a militia of pawnbrokers parading down Broadway. They were seen to be supplanting the so-called bluebloods of the famed 7th Regiment of the New York Militia, the city’s prestigious national guard founded in 1806 and mustered into federal service during the Civil War.

Published on July 22, 1882, as a colorful two-page chromolithograph, a colored picture printed by lithography, the cartoon was one of a series in The Judge that warned readers to beware of Jews, who supposedly looked to replace them.

Another of Wales’ black-and-white cartoons, titled “The Dream of the Jews Realized,” which likewise appeared in The Judge in 1882, depicted an imaginary Jewish celebration marking the removal of the city’s last store sign with a characteristically white Christian name, “John Smith,” an enterprise purportedly established back in 1820.

Replacing it was a sign bearing the Jewish name “Moses Eichstein.” In the background of the cartoon, a banner illumined by upraised thumbs, considered to be a typical Jewish hand gesture, gave voice to the nativist fears that The Judge sought calculatingly to inflame: “We own the Town,” it announced.

The 2017 Charlottesville chant, “Jews will not replace us,” reflects those same kinds of fears.

As the trial in Charlottesville now moves toward its conclusion, it bears recalling that the fantasy that Jews seek to recreate America in their own image, to the disadvantage of white natives, is as old as mass Jewish immigration to America’s shores.
___________

Conservatives end up with a few wingnuts

"A few"? Only if one is divorced from reality and desperate to spread the blame around. Violent antisemitism, historically speaking, is largely a right-wing disease.

These aren't "Leftists" holding those torches, chanting that Jews will not replace them, pledging their allegiance to an authoritarian racist and attempting to overthrow American democracy.

"HAIL TRUMP! HAIL OUR PEOPLE! HAIL VICTORY!"

"6 Million Wasn't Enough"

[GVChamp]

They may not have been winning presidential elections (I know...I was alive and voting in those days) but they were winning state legislatures, governships and Congressional delegations. The tilt started to be felt in the early 1990s.

And as for your comments on Chicago...remnants of the old machine politics which were and are inherently racist in origin. They arose as a result of the Black Migration from the Depression and World War 2 worker migration to get jobs...and to escape the worst of the Jim Crow policies in the South. Being excluded from some forms of economic & social advancement beat the hell of the being lynched. And as for Illinois...there is a reason the 5 southern counties were nicknamed Egypt.

Right, the 1990s. That's a full generation after anything that can be considered a Southern Strategy in 1968. You have entirely different electorates at that point.

To take a more recent example, California of the early 1990s is substantially different from the early 2010s or the early 1970s. These are big electorate changes. These are not the same states or the same populations. Wallace is out of politics by 87 and spends the 90s and old, deaf man.

Good ol' David Duke decided to switch parties and won a House election, once, and has since been drummed extensively.

I personally think "The Southern Strategy" as it specifically relates to "racism" is wayyyyyy overstated and just "cope" as the young'uns put it. The parties flipped and the Democrats lost the South on the basis of their ideas, in the same way they gained Left Coast and New England. The South's extremely racist post-war experience has the South disproportionately going (D) or occasionally going entirely nuts and voting for Wallace or Goldwater. That's just not directly comparable to 2020 Alabama, let alone 1990s Alabama when Alabama finally starts becoming a solid Red State.

I don't know how you look at a map like this and think "Southern Strategy" as opposed to "McGovern sucks"
1972 United States presidential election - Wikipedia
I also don't know how you look at this map and think "Southern Strategy" when the South being different looks like the same as 1948, a full 20 years before any supposed Southern Strategy

1968 United States presidential election - Wikipedia
1948 United States presidential election - Wikipedia


Re: Chicago, I don't know what you mean by "old remnants." This looks like excusing the actions of current individuals. Blaming IL policies of the 1990s on stuff from the 1940s sounds an awful lot like trying to wash your hands of responsibility (generic "you"). Someone, a LOT of someones, need to continue policies. Those someones mostly have (D) besides their name in Northern Cities.

[TopHatter]

When does speech become dangerous? Rep. Gosar’s ties to white nationalists added to concerns about his video

Weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Rep. Pramila Jayapal fired off three letters asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether three of her colleagues helped instigate and aid the insurrection.

Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, told the committee that her colleague Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., “urged supporters to take action against election certification, repeatedly insisting that the election had been stolen and participating in rallies alleging voter fraud.”

Gosar insisted he had done nothing outside the realm of normal political discourse. “Know this: I have never instigated violence,” he wrote in a 30-page response . “I have no criminal record of any type. I have never aided or abetted violence. I have not urged or supported violence.”

Democrats and Republicans have disagreed for the better part of the year over when speech becomes dangerous. On Wednesday, House Democrats said Gosar had gone too far with his latest move: an anime video depicting him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and attacking President Joe Biden with swords.

“Depictions of violence can foment actual violence and jeopardize the safety of elected officials, as witnessed in this chamber on January 6, 2021,” Democrats wrote in their censure.

The House passed the motion 223-207, with the vote falling largely along party lines. Two Republicans joined Democrats in supporting it.

Gosar was defiant, as he had been earlier this year over his actions leading up to Jan. 6. Referring to the anti-immigration theme of the anime video, the congressman said there was "no threat" in it other than "the threat that immigration poses to our country."

But Democrats vehemently disagreed.

“There is a full line between what the rhetoric leaders use in violently attacking us and the ways in which those who follow them and listen to them threaten our lives,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. She told USA TODAY in an interview that death threats against her over the past two years have been traced back to rhetoric that politicians like former President Donald Trump have used on television.

Gosar won his seat in 2010 with Tea Party support and has drifted further right since then. The former dentist, 62, is one of Trump's staunchest allies in Congress. He aligns himself with some of the House’s farthest-right members: Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.

The congressman's hard-line immigration views include a proposal in July to ban all immigrants from entering the country for 10 years. He has been criticized in recent years for associating with white nationalist figures and dabbling in conspiracy theories.

Kurt Braddock, a professor at American University specializing in far-right communication, said Gosar is a classic example of someone who uses images that normalize violence and even glorify it without meeting a legal definition of inciting violence.

“What a lot of these individuals do,” he said, “they say statements that they can maintain plausible deniability, and they can say: ‘Well, I never told them to do something. They just took up and (did) it.’ To me, that doesn’t much matter.”

Ties to white nationalists, embrace of conspiracy theories
While Gosar described the video as merely a commentary on his immigration views, Rep. Sean Maloney, D-N.Y., said the lawmaker’s past interactions with white nationalists “absolutely” added credibility to the threats against Ocasio-Cortez and Biden.

Gosar ran for Congress in 2010 on the slogans of "secure our border" and "no amnesty." His top endorsements came from sheriffs known for hard-line immigration views: Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio, a major supporter of S.B. 1070, which encouraged local authorities to check drivers' immigration status at vehicle stops; and Pinal County’s Paul Babeu.

Gosar’s brother, Dave, one of six siblings who are estranged from the congressman over his political stances, said in an interview with USA TODAY that during the 2010 campaign, he confronted Gosar over his support for the widely debunked conspiracy theory that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

In 2014, Gosar paid a visit to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who allied with the anti-government extremist Oath Keepers in an armed a standoff with the federal government. The rancher has made racist comments about Black people and Mexican Americans.

The Oath Keepers organize people with police and military training into a private militia. Armed members attended protests over the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and called themselves security. The group's leader has threatened civil war.

In his 2018 reelection bid, Gosar campaigned at a meeting of the Chino Valley Oath Keepers and praised the group as “America’s true patriots." He added: “We discussed the rule of law and judges. They said, ‘Our main concern is to return you to Congress as our warrior.’”

In 2019, when the Oath Keepers asked for people to serve as armed security at Trump’s campaign rallies, Gosar tweeted: “If local police weren’t ordered to stand down by leftist mayors @Oathkeepers wouldn’t have to step in.”

Without evidence, Gosar told Vice in an interview that the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally that attracted neo-Nazis to Charlottesville may have been created by the left. He then repeated a version of an antisemitic conspiracy theory peddled by Alex Jones of InfoWars: “George Soros is one of those people who actually helps back these individuals. Who is he? I think he’s from Hungary. I think he was Jewish, and I think he turned in his own people to the Nazis.”

In June 2018, Gosar spoke on the House floor in support of an anti-Muslim activist whose name has become a far-right rallying cry: “His real crime is his refusal to agree to the government’s efforts to cover up crimes by Muslim gangs who are raping British girls, almost with impunity, and with little apparent regard by the British government.”

In the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Gosar promoted unfounded theories of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election and appeared at "Stop the Steal" rallies with Ali Alexander, a top organizer of the Jan. 6 protest. On the afternoon of the protest, Gosar tweeted that Biden should concede, adding, “Don’t make me come over there.”

In February, Gosar headlined a conference for anti-immigration livestreamer Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist Holocaust denier who calls for preserving Christian and European values. Gosar used his speech to rail against immigration, and Fuentes followed, saying, "White people are done being bullied."

Gosar later used his power as a congressman to press the federal government on Fuente’s alleged placement on a no-fly list.

Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, said she believes past stances and actions underscored the need to hold Gosar to account over the video.

"I think we should have taken action before, but I'm glad we're taking action now," said Escobar, who added that she believes Gosar should be expelled from Congress.

In a hearing in May on the Jan. 6 attack, Gosar pressed a witness on the death of Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon supporter who was shot when she forced herself through a broken window in the House chamber. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., introduced legislation to censure Gosar, but the measure went nowhere.

Anime video played to a young, male audience
The video Gosar posted Nov. 7 features a blood-spattered screen framing the images of immigrants of color crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, followed by border patrol agents, most of them white, standing tall and proud. A series of words fills up the screen in quick succession: “drugs, crime, poverty, money, murder, gangs, violence, trafficking.”

After some shots of border patrol agents policing in cars and riding horses in the desert, the video cuts to an anime character first covered with Gaetz’s face, followed by Greene’s face, then Boebert’s, then Gosar’s. Gosar’s character then kills a man-eating humanoid wearing Ocasio-Cortez’s face, then attacks with knives a villain who has Biden’s face.

Near the end of the minute-and-a-half video, the state flag of Arizona ripples over the screen with theme music still playing. The video ends with still shots of Trump, Gaetz, and then Gosar sitting in his office smiling with his feet on top of his desk.

It’s a take on the intro to the anime show "Attack on Titan" that airs on Adult Swim, a programming block popular with younger men. The show is about humans – such as the one depicted as Gosar – who are under siege by a race of humanoids – depicted as Ocasio-Cortez – trying to take over their territory.

Braddock said the video promotes “the idea that immigrants pose a moral threat to the American way of life” – similar to a popular white supremacist conspiracy theory – and “adds to the notion that immigrants are inherently violent, and need to be fought.”

In a thread on Reddit, users debated whether the post was funny or derisive to immigrants. Commenters on an anime magazine’s website questioned whether the person who made the meme had watched all seasons of the show.

Elizabeth Ann Yates, a senior researcher specializing in domestic radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said the meme speaks to a decade of young people who grew up with memes and know that the show’s theme music represents a fight between good and bad.

“People are looking for community and a sense of identity and shared ideas and friends,” Yates said. “Having these sort of inside jokes, basically – absolutely – makes people feel comfortable, makes them feel like they belong.”

'Silly' and 'mean-spirited' or a call to violence?
Despite a decade of moving steadily to the fringes of the right, Gosar has won his past five elections with more than two-thirds of the vote and largely escaped discipline in Congress until Wednesday.

Part of Gosar’s success is the district he chooses to run in. For his first race, in 2010, Gosar ran in a moderate district and beat a Democratic incumbent 49.7% to 43.7%. The state Legislature redrew the district in 2012 to be more liberal, prompting the Democrat, Rep. Anne Kirkpatrick, to announce she would run to take back the seat, while Gosar opted to run for a nearby district that is deep red.

Even in 2018, when six of Gosar’s nine siblings appeared in an ad condemning his behavior, he won reelection with 68.2% of the vote.

“Not only do they put up with it, but some of them very fervently support it,” said Gosar’s youngest sister, Jennifer. “That district is a wonder of gerrymandering. I don’t know how Paul could lose it.”

Gosar’s brother Dave added: “If something really bothered you, you would want somebody different to take his place. He says what they want him to say, which is, ‘Kick all of the immigrants out, and don’t let anybody in.’”

Another of Gosar's brothers, Tim, said he lays the blame at the feet of Democratic leadership, who until the anime video did not formally sanction his actions, and Republican leadership, who he said have been either mum or supportive.

“We’ve warned you now for three years plus, and I don’t believe you’ve heeded the warning,” Tim Gosar said. “Jan. 6 should have driven that home. It hasn’t, it doesn’t look like. This is another chapter of those thuggish, bullying-type tactics. And it needs to stop. And you need to do something about it.”

Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., called Gosar's video "dumb," "silly" and "mean-spirited" but rejected the idea that it was a "call to violence." He accused Democrats of not applying the rules of Congress "equally" between the two parties.

But Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., one of two Republicans who voted to censure Gosar, called it a sad day but a necessary step to say that "violence has no place in our political discourse."

"I think that it's very clear that his actions demand censure," she said, "and I don't think this should be an issue about party, about partisan politics."
___________

In 2019, when the Oath Keepers asked for people to serve as armed security at Trump’s campaign rallies, Gosar tweeted: “If local police weren’t ordered to stand down by leftist mayors @Oathkeepers wouldn’t have to step in.”

Praetorian Guard anyone? Revolutions and praetorians both tend to eat their creators as readily as their victims.

[tbm3fan]

[SIZE=18px]

Gosar insisted he had done nothing outside the realm of normal political discourse. “Know this: I have never instigated violence,” he wrote in a 30-page response . “I have no criminal record of any type. I have never aided or abetted violence. I have not urged or supported violence.”

A true load of crap. When it comes to White Supremacists there are your facilitators and your boots. The facilitators talk in couched, oblique, and coded terms so they have plausible deniability when the boots go out and instigate violence. Wink, wink...

[TopHatter]

A true load of crap. When it comes to White Supremacists there are your facilitators and your boots. The facilitators talk in couched, oblique, and coded terms so they have plausible deniability when the boots go out and instigate violence. Wink, wink...

Yep, any Mob boss knows that you don't go out and whack somebody yourself. You use coded language and get some dumb schmuck with the IQ of a turnip to go out and do it for you and let him take the fall.

I also love how Gosar brags about his lack of a criminal record. Apparently that's ironclad proof that you're incapable of committing crimes... Wink, wink...

[Parihaka]

Prosecutions case vs Rittenhouse seems to have imploded. Now it's the Defense's turn. From asking witnesses to change testimony to the Star witness admitting he was pointing a gun at Kyle the case has gone off the rails.

President Biden left ‘angry’ after Rittenhouse is cleared of murder

In a statement, President Biden has now acknowledged the verdict “will leave many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included.” He added that everyone “must acknowledge that the jury has spoken”.

He said that he "ran on a promise to bring Americans together, because I believe that what unites us is far greater than what divides us."

"I believe that what unites us is far greater than what divides us. I know that we’re not going to heal our country’s wounds overnight, but I remain steadfast in my commitment to do everything in my power to ensure that every American is treated equally, with fairness and dignity, under the law," the statement reads.

[zraver]

President Biden left ‘angry’ after Rittenhouse is cleared of murder

He's angry because thanks to Bill Clinton, sitting president's can be sued for injuries they did to others before holding the office. The Biden family fortune they have spent so many years grafting is now at risk of a pissed off jury and a defamation tort.

[DOR]

He's angry because thanks to Bill Clinton, sitting president's can be sued for injuries they did to others before holding the office. The Biden family fortune they have spent so many years grafting is now at risk of a pissed off jury and a defamation tort.

Source, please.
That broken record doesn't seem to contain any real information.

[zraver]

Source, please.
That broken record doesn't seem to contain any real information.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._Jones

[Parihaka]

He's angry because thanks to Bill Clinton, sitting president's can be sued for injuries they did to others before holding the office. The Biden family fortune they have spent so many years grafting is now at risk of a pissed off jury and a defamation tort.

Ah of course.

[tbm3fan]

He's angry because thanks to Bill Clinton, sitting president's can be sued for injuries they did to others before holding the office. The Biden family fortune they have spent so many years grafting is now at risk of a pissed off jury and a defamation tort.

Ah, but wasn't Trump claiming the entire time in office that he was untouchable (Civil) for anything that happened before he was President because he was now President?

[zraver]

Ah, but wasn't Trump claiming the entire time in office that he was untouchable (Civil) for anything that happened before he was President because he was now President?

I think Trump was claiming he was immune to prosecution not civil liability.

[TopHatter]

I think Trump was claiming he was immune to prosecution not civil liability.

No, he was and still is claiming he was immune to even merely being investigated, for anything, civil or criminal, up to and including cold-blooded murder, never mind prosecution, while President or for acts committed during his presidency.

[zraver]

Given the number of lawsuits filed against him while he was in office even you can't believe what you wrote. Regardless presidents can be sued by citizens for injuries done before taking office.