May 29, 2018: Why Do Bigots like Roseanne Barr Gravitate toward Trump?

 

5/29/18: It’s a sad day for the president. His favorite TV show has been canceled after Roseanne Barr goes on a Twitter rampage every bit as unhinged as any of his own. 

Barr’s meltdown begins when she responds to a comment about Valerie Jarrett, who worked for President Obama. Barr describes Jarrett’s looks: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby = vj.” That’s the first nail in Barr’s coffin, a racist twofer, combining a spritz of anti-Muslim hate with 1870s-style denigration of African Americans. 

 

We all make mistakes – but not anti-Semitic mistakes. 

Suddenly aware that her “joke” might have been poorly received, Barr apologizes. Still, apologizing can be hard if you have sawdust for brains. Barr decides the best way to fight fire is to pour gasoline on it and hold her Twitter fingers in the flames. The second nail in her career coffin is an anti-Semitic tweet. First, Barr labels Chelsea Clinton as “Chelsea Soros Clinton.” Then she claims she is married to a nephew of George Soros, a liberal Jewish financier. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: See 11/3/19 and 8/20/20, for examples of QAnon anti-Semitism infecting the party of Trump.

 

Ms. Clinton gets wind and politely points out, via Twitter, that while the nephews of Mr. Soros may be fine individuals she cannot say. She is not married to any of them or all of them. 

Barr picks up a third nail and tries to hammer it home. Before she can stop herself Barr’s nimble fingers are tapping away again. “Sorry to have tweeted incorrect info about you! Please forgive me!” she faux apologizes. “By the way, George Soros is a nazi who turned in his fellow Jews 2 be murdered in German concentration camps & stole their wealth-were you aware of that? But, we all make mistakes, right Chelsea?” 

That is true. We all make mistakes. We just don’t all make anti-Semitic mistakes. I once ran into the back of a car driven by one of my former students. It was the only wreck I’ve caused in fifty years. It was a mistake. 

It was not an anti-Semitic mistake.

 

A large part of Barr’s problem boils down to the same kind of profound ignorance we see in the president. A bare minimum of fact-checking shows Soros was born in Hungary on August 12, 1930. This would make him eight years old when World War II began, fourteen when Germany surrendered. 

In other words, Ms. Barr was falling for and spreading the kind of misinformation that circulates regularly on the internet. In November 2016, for example, Snopes, the fact-checking site, debunked a rumor that Soros had once been an officer in the dreaded SS, the military arm of the Nazi regime. 

That would have been quite a trick for a boy of fourteen.

Nope: Not George Soros.

 

Oskar Groening worked at Auschwitz but was not found out for seventy years.

Suppose Barr wanted to look under a few rocks and find some actual Nazis to tweet-worry about? She need look no further than Richard B. Spencer, a really big fan of President Trump. (See also: 5/31/18.) 

Or she might consider the stirring words of Rocky Suhayda, leader of the American Nazi Party. That would be an obvious place to start. Back in 2016, he had this to say: 

Now, if Trump does win, OK, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that. You know how you have the black political caucus and whatnot in Congress, and, everything, to start building on something like that, OK.

 

It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate.

 

What Suhayda was saying was this: “We are bigots. We all know that. We’re members of the American Nazi Party! But if we’re smart about how we act we can make it hard for people who aren’t bigots to prove that we are. Are we? Sure. And Trump is our kind of guy.”

For some reason American Nazis gravitate toward Trump.

September 23, 2018: Even Rep. Paul Gosar's Siblings Think He's a Racist

 

9/23/18: Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) wakes up in a foul mood. His reelection bid has taken a hit after six siblings come out and urge voters to pull the lever for David Brill, his Democratic opponent. 

“It would be difficult to see my brother as anything but a racist [emphasis added],” sister Grace Gosar says in an ad for Brill. 

Gosar’s mother, Bernadette, 85 (in other words: a member of the target demographic of the current GOP), backs her son, saying she’s shocked her own children would attack their brother. 

In case you don’t remember, Gosar has claimed that George Soros, who is Jewish, secretly organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. 

According to Gosar, Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim.

October 5, 2018: The Federal Deficit Balloons with Trump in the White House

 

10/5/18: Remember when Republicans promised they could cut taxes and the deficit would shrink? Before you could say, “Boy, Republicans really seem to have a soft spot for men who molest young women,” the deficit would disappear. Americans could live happily ever after – without affordable health care, true – but able to shout, “Merry Christmas,” willy-nilly. 

First, you had the Bush tax cuts. We know how those worked. During Fiscal Years 1998-2001, President Bill Clinton ran four consecutive surpluses and cut $559 billion from the national debt. 

(And, yes, he did have sex with that woman.)

 

Republicans took over in 2001 and jacked the deficit by putting two wars on the federal credit card and cutting taxes! Estimated cost of those wars since, according to the Wall Street Journal: $5.6 trillion. 

For Fiscal Year 2008 the federal deficit had increased to $459 billion, the worst year on record, topping another George W. Bush year, FY 2004: $413 billion. But FY 2009, when GOP policies were locked in place before President Obama sat down in the White House, was terrible. 

The economy tanked and the deficit ballooned to $1.4 trillion.

 

* 

YOU COULD tell yourself the GOP cared about fiscal responsibility during Obama’s time in office. The Tea Party crowd had a point, even if they weren’t strictly honest in how they ascribed blame. You can’t run massive deficits endlessly. The math doesn’t work. Three years of trillion-dollar deficits resulted, as the U.S. dug out of the Great Recession. By FY 2015, however, the deficit was a more manageable $438 billion. 

Soon congressmen began itching to spend more, especially on defense. The FY deficits rose again in 2016 and 2017. 

Then the Republicans took charge. They had the House. They had the Senate. They had the White House. 

They quickly cut taxes, especially for the wealthiest Americans, who already had billions. Republicans promised. The economy would boom! 

GOP policies didn’t work the way they said. The budget deficit for FY 2018 was: 

$782 billion!

 

According to the Congressional Budget Office, with the Trump tax cuts in place and the GOP charting the nation’s fiscal course, the estimated deficits are expected to be: 

FY 2019: $984.40 billion! 

FY 2020: $986.95 billion! 

FY 2021: $915.92 billion!

 

The deficits for FY’s 2022 through 2029 are now estimated to be around a trillion dollars annually.

 

*

DONALD J. TRUMP, a.k.a. “Mr. Immaturity,” claimed today (without evidence) that women protesting the nomination of Brad Kavanaugh to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court were paid by…George Soros. 

“The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad. Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers,” he tweeted. 

Trump tweeted that claim because: 

A)    He’s a giant asshole. 

B)     He’s an idiot. 

C)    And he doesn’t care about evidence.

 

Ana Maria Archila, one of two women who had confronted Sen. Jeff Flake earlier, “and a self-identified sexual assault survivor, said in a statement that Trump’s tweet followed a pattern of ‘discrediting individuals who dare to raise our voices and force elected officials to listen to our stories.’” 

“No one can pay for someone’s lived experiences,” she continued. “The pain, the trauma, and the rage that I expressed when I spoke with Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator were my own, and I held it for more than 30 years to protect the people I love from it.” 

Trump’s claim was similar to right-wingers’ claims in 2017, that women who marched in protest against him, and his alleged sexual misconduct, early in his presidency, were paid …by Soros …to do so. 

The president’s claims also echo claims that the students who survived the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and then organized nationwide protests against violence, were paid “crisis actors.” 

David Hogg graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

 

Don Jr. is a nitwit. 

Since we’re talking about nitwits and nitwit conspiracy theories, we should note that Donald Trump Jr. “liked” at least one tweet, which offered up the theory that David Hogg, 17, one of the leaders of the student protests was actually a 28-year-old actor. The idea that Hogg was not really a student was undercut quickly. Hogg was pictured, for example in a 2015 newspaper story, running in a cross-country race for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. For good measure, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, Robert Runcie, told the  Tampa Bay Times about Hogg and other students: “These are absolutely students at Stoneman Douglas. They’ve been there. I can verify that.”

October 28, 2018: Bomber's Lawyer Says Client Saw Trump as a "Father Figure."

 

10/28/18: President Trump comes in for criticism, after commentators noticed striking similarities in the language that he uses to petrify supporters and the language used by recent right-winger attackers. Consider the stickers on the van of the mail bomber, Cesar Sayoc, now under arrest. 

 

Trump a “father figure” to a sick man. 

At rallies, Trump likes to listen as fans chant, “CNN sucks!” Sayoc has a “CNN sucks!” sticker on a window. 

Trump enjoys hearing supporters shout, “Lock her up!” referring to Hillary Clinton. Sayoc has a sticker with a gun sight superimposed on Clinton’s face slapped on his van. 

Trump likes to refer to members of the press as “enemies of the people.” Several recipients of Sayoc’s bombs are members of the media. 

Another image plastered on Sayoc’s van depicts a triumphant Trump standing, George Patton-like, backed by an American flag, holding an assault rifle, and bestriding a red, white and blue tank.

Sayoc's van.

 

The far-right has no choice but to begin claiming Sayoc is a registered Democrat. But this claim is undercut slightly by: 

A)    tapes and pictures of Sayoc at Trump rallies. 

B)     Sayoc’s social media posts. 

C)    His voter registration records.

 

Even Fox News can’t avoid reporting that Sayoc’s lawyer says his client saw Trump as a father figure.

 

Then we have the Pittsburgh killer, Robert Bowers. On a website called Gab, Bowers complained because sinister Jewish forces were supporting the migrant caravan headed toward America. “I have noticed a change in people saying ‘illegals’ that now say ‘invaders’,” he posted six days before his rampage. “I like this.” Five minutes before he began his attack, he posted on Gab again, “can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” 

Who calls the people in the caravans “invaders?” 

Trump does. 

Who says Jews might be paying for the caravan? 

Trump does; or leaves that impression. As he does when asked a question he’d like to lie about, but knows he might be caught. So, he answers cleverly when a reporter wonders who he thinks might be funding the caravan. 

Is it George Soros, Jewish boogie man, hated by the right-wing nuts? 

“I don’t know who, but I wouldn’t be surprised,” Trump responds. “A lot of people say yes.” 

Yes, almost all the neo-Nazis who read The Daily Stormer say yes.

 

For people like Bowers, inclined to hate, primed for violence, that’s as good as a green light to start shooting.

 

So, shoot, he does.