August 25, 2020: Right-Wingers Play "Racist Bingo"

 

8/25/20: It didn’t take a genius to see this coming, and it won’t take a genius to tell you President Trump won’t take the blame. Tuesday night, a 17-year-old from Illinois, armed with an AR-15, shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and wounded a third.

Kyle Rittenhouse, 17.

 

According to sources, Kyle Rittenhouse, the alleged shooter, was “obsessed” with the Blue Lives Matter movement. What better way to show support for “law and order” than to join like-minded vigilantes, travel to another state, and gun down protesters? According to one report, Rittenhouse was one of a group of heavily-armed men who described themselves as “armed citizens [come] to protect our lives and property.”  

Look, we of the liberal persuasion get it. People burning down stores are a species of idiot; but unleashing people like Rittenhouse, is not the solution. 

(There’s also no evidence the people he shot were burning down anything.) 

The young man has been charged with fleeing across state lines as well as murder. Look for President Trump to take one of two courses. First, he ignores the story. More likely, he offers “calming words” and attacks “Democratic mayors” for letting criminals run amok in city streets.

 

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AT LEAST Donald J. Trump’s businesses are doing better. Federal Election Commission filings show $2.3 million in donations to the president’s reelection campaign have been transferred to companies he owns, to pay for rent, food, and lodging. Since taking office, for example, Orange Leader has accepted $1.5 million in rent from his own campaign on just one property in New York City, his skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. The Republican National Committee has paid $225,000. The Trump campaign has also paid the Trump Organization $281,000.

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IN OTHER NEWS, the Republican National Convention has had a few snags. For example, there are only so many Trump family members available to speak. And we know his older sister is out (see: 8/23/20). So, the lineup of guests can seem thin. You can’t get former GOP nominees for president, successful or otherwise, to talk, because with one exception (Bob Dole) those still living (Bush 43 and Romney), and at least two deceased (Bush 41 and John McCain), considered Trump a cancer. 

That meant you had Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend filling a speaker’s slot, shouting into an empty arena, as if she were talking to an audience of the deaf, and believed volume would cure their impairment. Kimberly Guilfoyle – who probably caused deafness in a few listeners with good ears in the process – whose parents were born in Puerto Rico, yelled about how her parents immigrated to this country, and how if Joe Biden won in November, America would no longer be the haven of freedom it has always been for people like her mother and father. 

Critics were quick to point out that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. That means Guilfoyle’s mom and dad were citizens the moment they were born, which somehow, she didn’t realize.

 

Another speaker was Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist. That’s fine. People of good conscience can disagree about that topic. 

More of a surprise are her views on voting. It turns out, back in May, she tweeted support for “head of household voting.” She explained that “in a Godly household, the husband would get the final say.” 

That would mean, if she and her husband disagreed, her husband would vote for the candidate he liked. Mrs. Johnson could stay home and make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich upon his return. 

This must be the Republican Party’s idea of making it up to women for running a Pussy Grabber for president. 

 

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The same sympathy is due to any family who loses a son or daughter in the line of duty, as an officer of the law or otherwise.

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You can and should sympathize with anyone who loses a loved one, or who sees a loved one badly injured. For example, the family of Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Or the families of two men allegedly killed by Kyle Rittenhouse. The same sympathy is due to any family who loses a son or daughter in the line of duty, as an officer of the law, or otherwise. 

When the RNC invited Mary Ann Mendoza, an “Angel Mom,” to speak about her son’s death in 2014, you could understand she might have something important to say. Her son, a Mesa, Arizona police officer, was killed in a head-on collision in 2014, involving a drunk driver. That driver was in this country illegally.

 

No one story proves a point involving millions of human beings, but you can surely feel the mother’s overarching, unending pain. The same for the other 30 families, on average, who lose loved ones to drunk drivers every day, and the 10,500 stories that could be told in the United States every year. 

Then again if you are Team Trump, and you are trying to stir hatred and fear against illegal immigrants, yeah. Pick this one example. 

Mendoza would still get a pass in my liberal book because pain is pain. But her speaking slot was revoked when it was revealed she had posted a link on her Twitter feed, and suggested her 40,000 followers read a story rife with anti-Semitic tropes and horrible comments. Included in the story were selections from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic “classic” and a favorite of Adolf Hitler. 

Fans of QAnon jumped in on the thread, with comments like these, suggesting that “malevolent Jewish forces in the banking industry are out to enslave non-Jews and promote world wars.” It was said the Titanic had been sunk to protect the Federal Reserve, and that every president between John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump “was a ‘slave president’ in the thrall of a global cabal.” 

My sympathy for Mrs. Mendoza, in regards to her loss, remains. I would think, however, that a mother who knew great pain might not be trafficking in the same kind of hate that led to the death of 6,000,000 Jews.

 

Not that it matters much, but Mendoza also lost points in my book when I learned she was listed as a consultant on the “We Build the Wall” project. 

That is the project, we now know, which allegedly involved a significant degree of self-dealing and fraud. 

(Not by her.) 

A check of Wikipedia reveals her son, Brandon, was 32 at the time of his death. He was driving home from a shift in his own car, when the drunk driver, a man with a lengthy criminal history, and without a driver’s license, crossed the center line. Both men were killed. The drunk had a blood alcohol level of 0.24%, three times the legal limit. R.I.P. Officer Mendoza. 

Blue Lives Matter. 

And so do Jewish lives, Mrs. Mendoza. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: This blogger has a number of excellent Republican and conservative friends. None, as far as he knows, are racists or bigots. They would not be his friends if he knew they were. 

 

“All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” 

Nevertheless, racists and bigots are clearly fond of Mr. Trump. Case in point: Marjorie Taylor Greene, running for a seat in Congress in November, and a big fan of crazy conspiracy theories. 

From the outset, Ms. Greene has had detractors even within the Republican Party. The slogan adopted by Dr. John Cowan, the Republican who lost to her in a primary contest, was, “All of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.” 

“She is not conservative,” he told Politico before the runoff. “She’s crazy.”

 

A check of web archives done by NBC News revealed that Greene, running in a safely Republican district, should win a seat, despite having promoted all manner of dangerous absurdities. She believed the “Pizzagate” tale, which led some other dope to shoot up a Washington D.C. pizza parlor. She posted about a “Clinton Kill List,” which theorized that Mrs. Clinton had ordered a string of assassinations, but the “Deep State” covered for her. In another post she questioned whether or not a plane really crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. 

When violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Ms. Greene did President Trump one better, when he said there were “good people on both sides.” Greene claimed that the white supremacists weren’t involved in the killing of Heather Heyer and the injury to 19 other anti-hate protesters. The attack was an “inside job,” carried out to “further the agenda of the elites.” 

James Fields, who drove the car that killed Heyer and injured the others, was involved in an “accident,” she maintained. 

Greene also suggested recently that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason, noting that the punishment is execution. Previously, she had suggested that a good way to remove Pelosi from power would be – no, not voting her out – but “a bullet to the head.” 

So, one must wonder. Do Greene and poor deluded individuals like Rittenhouse and Fields all drink from the same toxic fountain of neo-fascist hate? 

This blogger would argue that they do. 

 

Greene fills her card for Racist Bingo.  

Candidate Greene came in for fresh criticism after Politico uncovered inflammatory videos she posted online. Not entirely a fan of religious freedom, she suggested in one rant that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in the U.S. government, and that there was an “Islamic invasion” going on. She noted that a Muslim woman elected to Congress wanted to put her hand on the Quran to be sworn in. “No,” Greene said (clearly never having read the Constitution.) Her description of sexual practices in the Muslim world was textbook bigotry. I found myself surprised, as I listened, to a tape she made, that she hadn’t claimed Muslim men had sex with camels. Wait…I am typing and listening to her screed…She just mentioned “goats and sheep.” Greene has suggested in the past that George Soros, a Democratic megadonor, was a Nazi in his youth, even though Soros is a Jew. And if this was Racist Bingo, she filled her card by saying that blacks should be proud to walk past statues of Confederate generals, because those statues show how far we’ve come in overcoming racism. 

A story in The New York Times added depth to what should be Greene’s shame – save for the fact the Trump base clearly loves her. 

A clear indication that Greene was more than a dabbler in QAnon was her 2018 endorsement of “Frazzledrip,” one of the most grotesque tendrils of the movement’s mythology. You “have to go down a number of rabbit holes to get that far,” said Mike Rothschild, whose book about QAnon, The Storm Is Upon Us, comes out later this year.

 

The lurid fantasy of Frazzledrip refers to an imaginary video said to show Hillary Clinton and her former aide, Huma Abedin, assaulting and disfiguring a young girl, and drinking her blood. It holds that several cops saw the video, and Clinton had them killed.

 

When Greene posted a picture of Donald Trump with the mother of the slain N.Y.P.D. officer Miosotis Familia on Facebook, one of her commenters described Frazzledrip and wrote, “This was another Hillary hit.” Greene replied, “Yes Familia,” then continued, “I post things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t. I’m glad to see your comment.”

 

Michelle Goldberg, whose last name alone should send QAnon believers into a tizzy, describes the whole “Q” movement as “a repurposed version of the old anti-Semitic blood libel, which accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children in their rituals, and a cult lusting for mass public executions. According to the F.B.I., it’s a domestic terror threat.” 

Of course, Greene is not the first nutjob on the right to demonize Mrs. Clinton, but more in a “proud” line of nutjob thinkers. 

Goldberg notes: 

An attendee at the 1996 Republican National Convention told the feminist writer Susan Faludi, “It’s well-established that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does.” Running for Congress in 2014, Ryan Zinke, who would later become Trump’s secretary of the interior, described her as “the Antichrist.” (He later said he was joking.) Trump himself called Clinton “the Devil.”

 

In any case, when this blogger tunes in again to listen to Greene’s old tape, he hears her say “the most mistreated group of people in these United States today, are white males…they are blamed for everything…they’re the scapegoats…” 

At that point he can’t take any more. 

Greene insists that her old posts no longer represent her views. You can watch her story here if you have the stomach.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Greene goes on to win a seat in Congress. By February 2021, she has become such an embarrassment, that the U.S. House of Representatives votes, 230-199, to strip her of all committee assignments. That includes one on the Education and Labor Committee. In her own defense, Greene claims she no longer believes in QAnon. She blames her earlier positions – that leading Democrats deserve to die for their role in a diabolic pedophile ring – on her inability to trust the mainstream media. 

“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she says. 

Only 11 Republicans join in the vote against her, which would seem to be an indictment of the GOP, more generally.