History Might Actually Repeat
Perhaps Mark Twain didn't anticipate the commitment of the fringe & Mike Flynn
History might actually repeat, not just rhyme. In fact, the alt-right or new right — whatever fluffy label society puts on fascism — has been parroting near identical grievances and talking points for decades.
As much as I try and stay current on the happenings of our crumbling state of democracy, I also attempt to understand what has paved the way for it to be possible. Because of that curiosity, I subscribe to a number of publications from both the right and the left, along with academic research studies on specific topics. Today, I received a gift in my inbox from one of those publications.
The Alt-Right’s Discourse of “Cultural Marxism”: A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate
by Tanner Mirrlees | Full Article HERE
This article analyzes the history, production, circulation, and political uses of the alt-right's discourse about cultural Marxism in the context of the right-wing populist Trump presidency, the rise of fascist movements in the United States and worldwide, and the politics of intersectional hate.
The author introduces this paper by discussing Anders Behring Breivik, the mass-murderer in Norway whose manifesto “took a page from the American far right’s “culture war” playbook”. Jim and I have written briefly about Breivik’s manifesto and its derived influence of Mike Flynn’s teacher William S Lind.
Additionally, researcher Bruce Wilson wrote in depth about William S Lind and his theory of “4th Generational Warfare”
Full Article HERE
Fast forward to Donald Trump, but more specifically his strategist, Steve Bannon and the cast of characters who subscribe to the parroted historical sentiments about ‘Cultural Marxism’, the Deep State, and the perceived siege by the left on American traditionalism.
14 Jan 2018 | The conservative movement is no longer represented by submissive, bow-tied conserva-nerds. | Full Article HERE
Bannon wanted to win in DC. The shift within Breitbart from a website for the “happy warrior” to a site that viewed itself as a political action committee for the far right was a gradual one. By 2014, Bannon was telling staff that he wanted to destroy the Republican establishment, one wild-card candidate and angry rant at a time.
Next in the journal article is the former director for strategic planning at the US National Security Council (NSC), Rich Higgins. In 2017 Higgins authored a memo entitled “POTUS & Political Warfare” which laid out a conspiratorial plot by “Cultural Marxists” to undermine Trump.
13 Aug 2017 | Internal document shows the ‘alt-right’ Steve Bannon wing of the administration’s fervent belief that America is at risk from ‘the Opposition’ — a cabal of bankers, globalists, the media and even Republican leaders | Full Article HERE
Higgins’ memo described seven groups that he claims are part of a huge conspiracy to bring the president down.
Despite his public removal for his conspiratorial driven memo that essentially called for Trump to wage war on the American “Progressive” Left, Higgins was celebrated among the fringiest characters in politics. Characters which include the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who prior to Trump’s Russian-backed takeover, even wrote about her interview with Higgins in the Daily Caller that contained the topics later seen in the Higgin’s memo.
Ginni Thomas in July 2016 wrote about her interview with Rich Higgins.
Full Article HERE
The video interview is no longer available to watch within the article, but her writing recap of her interview tells the story of an unhinged SCOTUS wife who clearly admires the lunatic rantings of a man poisoned by conspiracy theories.
Ginni writes about how Higgins explained to her that political warfare includes “both non-violent and violent actions working in synthesis”, and how “the left, with enemy-friendly Muslim Brotherhood allies, is able to control the dominant cultural narrative with the media and the government”. The deeply held belief that the 44th President of the United States, Barrack Obama, was a secret Muslim Brotherhood ally not even born in America is the sense I get when reading her synopsis.
After the release of the Higgins memo, Ginni Thomas revisited with her friend and ‘secret cabal’ fighting buddy.
This interview surfaced recently after I read The Breach by Denver Riggleman discussing a request from Phil Waldron for a task force to access raw signals intelligence to search for foreign interference in the 2020 election.
In another report by The Atlantic in August 2017 sources mentioned that Rich Higgins was also “pushing for the declassification of Presidential Study Directive 11, a classified report produced in 2010 by the Obama administration which presaged the Arab Spring, outlining unrest throughout the Middle East. The directive has become a shibboleth of activists such as Frank Gaffney, who see it as evidence of the Obama administration’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.”
Full Article HERE
As I’ve hypothesized for some time now, Frank Gaffney and his multiple #InstitutesofMassDestruction and associates are the major insurgency sources involved in the deconstruction of American democracy.
MCMASTER CLEANED HOUSE — or tried to
McMaster has also sparred with Bannon, who was removed from the NSC principals’ committee at McMaster’s behest shortly after McMaster became national security adviser following the ouster of Michael Flynn after just 24 days on the job. McMaster’s relationship with Trump himself has likewise been difficult.
McMaster has been the frequent subject of speculation about whether his job is safe, fueled by unflattering leaks, such as a recent AP story that detailed his having disagreed with Trump on Russia in conversations with foreign officials. Earlier this year, his attempt to fire Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the NSC’s top intelligence official, was blocked by Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Trump.
For his efforts to rid the Trump Administration of the lunatic fringe, H.R. McMaster found himself the target of political operatives from Project Veritas, trained by former Blackwater contractor and global terrorist, Erik Prince.
The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.
The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.
The campaign shows the obsession that some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy “deep state” trying to blunt his agenda — and the lengths that some were willing to go to try to purge the government of those believed to be disloyal to the president.
One of the participants in the operation against McMaster, Barbara Ledeen, said she was brought on by someone “with access to McMaster’s calendar.” At the time, she was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, then led by Senator Charles Grassley.
Barbara Ledeen, of course, is a long-time political activist and family friend of Mike Flynn. She’s married to Michael Ledeen, who wrote the 2016 book “The Field of Fight” with traitor Mike Flynn.
Ledeen later claimed to have obtained the deleted Clinton emails from the dark web and sought Mr. Prince’s assistance to authenticate them. “Erik Prince provided funding to hire a tech adviser to ascertain the authenticity of the emails. According to Prince, the tech adviser determined that the emails were not authentic,” the special counsel’s report said.
She is part of a network of conservative activists who had particular influence in the Trump White House. She is a member of one group, Groundswell, that pushed to purge the White House and other government agencies of “deep state” enemies of Mr. Trump.
I’ll wrap here and leave you with the publication that inspired me to write this.
Again, that link HERE
The conspiracy theorist might address its audience like this: “Hey white person! Look at all the social changes in America.”
Far from being a subculture, the alt-right is a well-resourced and well-organized new-fascist hate movement that is struggling to win mainstream power in the streets and through the internet.
The alt-right makes many political uses of its discourse of cultural Marxism, and all are actionable to the alt-right’s mobilization of intersectional hate.
This is well proven, even if we simply look at the players involved in this ideological push for a patriarchal and white male dominated society which seek to control anyone who opposes their “Judeo-Christian values”. Or perhaps they cry “REPLACEMENT”.
In the twenty-first century, right-wing politicians and pundits promulgate brazenly anti-Marxist ideology to the public while alt-right hate campaigns against cultural Marxists go viral.
The alt-right’s notion that a cultural Marxist elite is ruling over America is ludicrous, and the idea that America’s big institutions are back by cultural Marxist ideology is absurd.
The author discusses seven political-rhetorical uses of the alt-right’s discourse of cultural Marxism. Focusing in on its use of the “culture wars” to impress upon followers of the alt-right their idea of what the essence of America really is.
FIRST: Construct an American self in its hateful image.
Using the discourse of cultural Marxism, the alt-right constructs America as constituted by selective ethno-racial, sexual, religious, and economic characteristics. America’s ethno-racial composition is “white”, “Anglo-Saxon”, and “European”; America’s gender-sex regime is patriarchal, heteronormative, and centered around the nuclear family; its religious order is Christian; its economic structure is capitalist'; the values of individualism, meritocracy and private property are sacrosanct. For the alt-right this is the essential American, an alt-American imagined community.
SECOND: Construct an anti- or un-American other.
It labels non-conformers to its white, patriarchal, Christian capitalist alt-American ideal—liberals, white social justice activists, non-white people, feminists, LGBTQ people, immigrants, atheists, Muslims, Jews, socialists and so on—as “cultural Marxists”. For the alt-right it would seem that behind every liberal is a cunning Marxists, plotting against them.
THIRD: Construct the people it depicts as “others” to the alt-America as not only un-American, but also, as enemy threats to America.
By depicting people it labels as cultural Marxists and enemy threats to alt-America, they sew fear, suspicion, and paranoia about its opponents and ignites hatred for a wide range of people that are not anti-American, and most often, not even Marxists.
FOURTH: Agitate for violence against the people it constructs as cultural Marxists and enemy threats to alt-America.
The alt-right’s discourse agitates for violence against the people it constructs as cultural Marxists and represents violence as a way to “defend” and “secure” American from this threat.
FIFTH: Construct non-white people and minority groups, as well as their allies, as elitists who use “political correctness” to undermine or oppress virtuous alt-American people.
Discourse on cultural Marxism used as a tool of right-wing populism, as a political strategy that “pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ as depriving people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice”.
It promises to bring its people back to a time when a patriarchal, white, and Christian-supremacist notion of American nationhood had not been unsettled by social justice movements or challenged by economic changes linked to multinational capitalism and the multicultural meritocratic superstructure of “progressive neoliberalism”.
SIXTH: Deny the reality of sexism, racism, and classism in America.
The alt-right’s discourse denies the historical and contemporary social facts of sexism, racism, and classism in the US, it invalidates the lived experience of those people who live with oppression each day and downplays the agency of these people and their allies to challenge and transform oppressive conditions.
SEVENTH: Obscure the essence of the actual elite groups in positions of power.
By channeling alt-America’s anger toward people who supposedly hold cultural Marxist ideas instead of people who actually hold concentrated economic and political power, the alt-right’s discourse masks and distracts people from the corporate elites that exercise real power in the US.
As the author notes while addressing Jordan Peterson, deployment of the term “cultural Marxist” as a way to express grievances with an opposition seen as disgraced, it appeals to the reactionaries of the alt-right across the globe.
Every usage of “cultural Marxism” is not essentially fascist, but this phrase is used by contemporary fascists as an ideological weapon, bringing a conspiracy theory of hate into the mainstream.
The alt-right has constructed the meaning of cultural Marxism in a struggle to organize transnational consent to fascism.
The same people, from the same institutes and agencies have pushed for this consent to fascism for so long that when Donald Trump showed his willingness to accept their doctrine of hate, they couldn’t resist. Over the course of Trump’s administration, the alt-right attempted to implement its worldview by installing loyalists, purging dissenters, and ultimately plotting to remain in power when its transformative takeover failed to materialize in time for the 2020 election.
Americans of all political persuasions must rise in the face of this fascistic and dangerous group who will, if given power again, complete their transformation and we will be forced to live in their image, or else.
And for goodness's sake #ArrestMikeFlynn!
I really miss Keith too. One of my favorites: shortly before my computer and mindhack. They were candidly talking about EPA allowing more toxins. I brought up the EPA and linked to the EPA on Top Kill day a few days later.
Oil Spill -- Markey on Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Congressman Ed Markey appears on Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Monday, May 17 2010 to discuss the BP oil spill.
https://www.markey.senate.gov/view/oil-spill-markey-on-countdown-with-keith-olbermann
They've gotten Ted suspended now, pending appeal... I will see you all Friday in Lolo live.