Cracker Barrel of Bullcrap

Editor's note: as you may have already heard, I am having an incredibly long week and that's why this essay about a story from early Friday morning is only coming to you now. Hopefully life is out of curve balls to throw at me this month, but I've learned to not to promise anything in these situations.

Last Thursday night, the 2019 NBA Finals came to a bizarre if fitting conclusion with the Toronto Raptors' nail-biting 114-110 win over the then-defending champion Golden State Warriors in Oakland, California. It was a majestically theatrical moment for basketball; the fall of a dynasty, the crowning of a new best player in the NBA and the close out contest for one of the high-churches of basketball in Oracle Arena. Triumph and tragedy were on full display as the Warriors finally succumbed to a brutal run of league-altering injuries, the Raptors role-players helped Toronto finally learn to stop shooting itself in the foot and the National Basketball League finally went truly global - Toronto, now the favored sons of an entire country, is the first team from outside of the United States to win an NBA championship.

Inextricably joined to both the rise of the Toronto Raptors and the league's realization of its global ambitions stood team president Masai Ujiri - the Nigerian born world-famous NBA executive, global basketball philanthropist and superstar Camp Director of the league's Basketball Without Borders operation in Johannesburg, South Africa. A close personal friend of former U.S. President Barack Obama and widely considered among the five smartest men in the NBA, Ujiri was watching his team on screen in the tunnels under the Oracle Arena stands when the final seconds ticked down and six excruciating years of high-stakes gambles finally paid off for the Raptors team president and his long-suffering franchise. After hugging a bystander, Ujiri shouted in jubilation before striding triumphantly towards the court and the Raptors victory celebration.  

It was in short, a beautiful and emotional moment shared by millions of people around the globe - that is until some fascist cracker pigs from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office decided to shit all over it:

U.S. authorities push ahead with battery charge on Raptors president Masai Ujiri following Game 6

Well, this whole story is almost certainly some happy horsesh*t but let's try to unpack it anyway. According to Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly, literally moments after watching his team win the NBA title, Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri assaulted a police officer working security at Oracle Arena who had merely stopped Ujiri because he didn't recognize him and needed to see the Raptors President's on court NBA Finals credentials - credentials which Kelly initially claimed, Ujiri did not have on him (keep this in mind, it will be important in a moment.)

"A spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriff's Office said Ujiri was making his way to the court when he was stopped by a sheriff's deputy and asked for his credentials.

"This deputy had no idea who [Ujiri] was," Sgt. Ray Kelly said in a phone interview.

Ujiri didn't have the credentials on him, Kelly said, adding that the former NBA executive of the year then allegedly pushed the deputy out of the way in an effort to get on the court.

"Our deputy pushed the man back and told him he couldn't go onto the court," Kelly alleged. "At that point, the gentleman pushed our deputy again, and during that push his arm struck our deputy in the jaw."

Before we go any further here, let's start with something sharp-eyed observers who looked at the header image of this article are undoubtedly already aware of; namely that the Alameda County Sheriff's Office is openly lying about at least one aspect of this story already. As you can see, Ujiri is quite clearly holding his on court credentials in his hand during recordings made both before and immediately after the alleged "battery" incident. Undeterred by mere photographic evidence, police apologists in sports media have since altered the accusation to suggest that Ujiri merely refused to show his credentials (more on this later) or simply lacked the proper credential for the post-championship celebration - specifically an NBA-mandated gold arm band; a detail the ACSO spokesman was quick to emphasize in our lead story above:

"Asked about the appearance of a well-known executive being held back from celebrating a historic win with the team he built, Kelly said optics were of no concern.

"There is a credentialling policy that the NBA has in place. Everybody from the top executives all the way down ... know that you must wear credentials to get on the court," he said. "We would expect more from a team president."

Kelly told CBC News they get a "tremendous amount" of celebrities and VIPs who go to Warriors games and it would "almost impossible" to know every team executive."

Woah boy, this is starting to smell like five day old cod.

First, let's set aside the fact that I have no idea why a Sheriff's Deputy is checking the credentials of court-side visitors while half a dozen members of arena security (who would normally handle this task) are standing within a seven foot radius. Then, let's ignore the reality that it's a little hard to believe the pig in question had no idea who Ujiri is; Kelly's excuse that the ACSO deals with too many important people to remember them all doesn't hold much water given that there were literally only two NBA team Presidents in this Finals and Masai Ujiri had already been inside Oracle Arena with the Raptors during games three and four of this very series. As Sports Illustrated's Michael McCann notes:

"It’s not clear why the deputy didn’t recognize Ujiri, who stands 6’4", was wearing a full suit and was probably being called by players, coaches and staff to join them on the court. At least in NBA circles, Ujiri is a highly-recognizable figure. He has also gained significant media attention during the finals. The deputy works in Oakland and might not be an NBA fan or at least not one who is familiar with the Raptors. Still, it stands to reason that security at games would familiarize themselves with the appearances of high-ranking persons from each team in order to avoid these kinds of situations."

The real problem here however is that a cursory examination of the film reveals that there are an awful lot of people wandering around the court during that post-game celebration, who are absolutely not wearing gold armbands or ribbons - only the media appears to be complying with this "rule." This brings up the fairly obvious question, why was Ujiri targeted for carding in the first place? We'll get back to that in a moment, let's keep moving forward with our original story.

Although it's not mentioned in the above article, it has further been reported that the deputy who attempted to stop Ujiri was taken to a local hospital for evaluation after complaining of a "sore jaw" before being released. Of course, one might be inclined to question why the Deputy did so after reading the testimony of sixty-one year old Warriors season ticket holder Greg Wiener - from Olga Rodriguez and Rob Gillies of the Associated Press, emphasis mine:

"Greg Wiener, a 61-year-old Warriors’ season ticket holder, said Friday he was standing next to the deputy during the encounter and didn’t see Ujiri strike him in the face.

Wiener said the encounter began when the deputy put his hand on Ujiri’s chest and pushed him. Ujiri shoved him back before bystanders intervened, Wiener said.

“The thing about the cops saying the policeman asked for his credentials, that didn’t happen. There was no conversation at all,” Wiener said. “This part about striking him in the face, yeah that didn’t happen.”

Wiener said he hadn’t been interviewed by authorities.

“This looks like somebody trying to embellish what happened to protect what they did, what the policeman did,” Wiener said."

On several fundamental levels Weiner's testimony directly contradicts the story provided by Alameda County Sheriff's Office spokesman Kelly; obviously someone here is lying and from where I'm sitting, it's hard to see how that someone is Greg Wiener. After all, the ACSO is the one with an obvious motive here given the high profile nature of the incident, we've already caught the Sheriff's Office lying about this encounter and while the video evidence remains inconclusive, the aftermath of the incident sure does fit Weiner's description of events more closely than it fits Kelly's - clearly, the Deputy is the one who has to be restrained while Ujiri looks like he's in absolute shock at what has just occurred.

Additionally there are other reasons besides simple self preservation to question the motives of the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and by extension, the Sheriff's Deputy. Keeping in mind that Masai Ujiri is black, an internationally famous U.S. migrant, a known friend of former President Barack Obama and has quite publicly repudiated President Trump's racist comments about "sh*thole countries" - would it surprise you to learn that lead by Sheriff Gregory Ahern, the ACSO has a long history of racial profiling, expressing sympathy with white supremacists and supporting hard line anti-immigration policies? Let's dive a little further down that rabbit hole for a moment:

Was Masai Ujiri Falsely Accused? Alameda Cops Have A History Of Racism

Nothing to see here right? Just a fine example of typical police activities like working to promote armed reactionary anti-government militias, harassing Public Defenders for the crime of "driving while black" and following the exploits of known white nationalists on Twitter. Not openly fascist enough for you yet? Then check out the bottom of the article for a brief glimpse of the ACSO's shockingly familiar (and statistically unsupportable) bias in its approach to countering "terrorism":

"And while that might seem like a long time ago, just last year the department was accused of using an anti-terrorism grant from the Trump administration to “focus on Black, Muslim inmates returning to society,” according to the East Bay Express. Specifically, the wording of the proposed use for the grant came into question.

“The Express found that the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘violent’ appeared 31 times each in the sheriff’s proposal; ‘extremism’ appeared 26 times; and ‘radicalization,’ 12 times,” the local news outlet wrote in October. “‘White supremacists,’ by contrast, is mentioned only once. The application does not mention civil liberties.”

At this point I think we can safely say that the Alameda County Sheriff's Office is a haven for racists and liars, but they're still cops and that means they respect the rule of law, doesn't it? Not so fast my friend:

Opinion: Audit actions of Alameda County Sheriff’s Office

So now on top of the fascist sympathizing, open racism and delusional Isamophobia we can also add excessive use of force, routine violation of civil liberties and objectively inhumane, at times even deadly neglect of prisoners. Disturbingly, none of this really appears to be any sort of secret:

"Since 2015, 41 lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office have cost $15.5 million for civil rights violations that include a string of in-custody deaths and abuse of prisoners.

There have been 33 in-custody deaths since 2013, and in June two prisoners died at the Santa Rita Jail in three days. That includes the death of Dujuan Armstrong, whose family still has not received an explanation from the Sheriff’s Office.

Moreover, recent reports have detailed how county prisoners are malnourished and provided inadequate healthcare. In one 2010 case, a man arrested for jaywalking and a prior warrant for DUI died in Santa Rita while suffering from alcohol withdrawal.
Sheriff Ahern has also been complicit in the Trump administration’s draconian and racist anti-immigrant policies, facilitating ICE detentions by publishing the release dates of undocumented prisoners and allowing ICE access to non-public areas of county jails."

Naturally, all of this might make a reasonable observer question why much of the mainstream media initially chose to treat a cyrpto-fascist nutjob racist Sheriff's Office's outrageously out of character claims about Masai Ujiri's as objectively true in a vacuum; especially since none of this is happening in said vacuum. We are after all talking about an NBA Finals series that just featured a wealthy white team owner literally laying his hands on African American Raptors guard Kyle Lowry while shouting belligerent obscenities; I don't recall the Alameda County Sheriff's Office recommending any charges after that incident, do you?

Stepping backward to look at the larger league context doesn't improve the picture either. Lead primarily by the players and in the wake of an ugly racist taunting incident in Utah, this past year has represented a watershed moment for the National Basketball League and conversations about targeted racism. Indeed, these very same topics of police racial profiling, white privilege and the inherently racist assumption that those brutalized by the police must have done something wrong formed the central core of a widely acclaimed and deeply moving April 2019 piece by NBA veteran Kyle Korver in the Players Tribune. I guess it only took "professionally white" America and the corporate media a couple of months to forget all those "important lessons" they'd learned from Korver?

Taken together, these stories and other high-profile reports of celebrity civil injustice highlight a growing climate of hostility, contempt and gleefully racist abuse of petty authority by bigoted, militarized American law enforcement agencies who routinely use lethal force without cause, are functionally above the law, and undoubtedly remain fully aware of that fact. How else can you explain the behavior of a Sheriff's Office that will transparently lie about harassing a black celebrity in front of 19,000 people, only to then crassly declare their attempts to criminalize Ujiri for the offense represent an act of magnanimous international diplomacy? From Patrick Redford at Deadspin, emphasis is again mine:

"Spokesperson Ray Kelly said they did not detain Ujiri on the court because they didn’t want to make a spectacle on national TV:

“We decided to take the high road in light of their victory but will submit a report for complaint,” Kelly said. “We’ve got two countries involved in this. It’s not something we wanted to have happen. It didn’t have to go this route.”

Look, let's cut the crap here for a second; I'm just one lone woman with a word professor and a black belt in "search engine-fu" - if I can punch holes you can drive a truck through in the line of bullshit the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office is selling, there is simply no excuse when mainstream media outlets fail to report everything I just told you alongside critical analysis of spokesman Kelly's clearly fraudulent accusations.

This isn't a question of intelligence, resources or an honest mistake either. As traumatizing video after traumatizing video piles up, it has become virtually impossible for any credible observer to deny the staggering reality of overtly racist police harassment, targeting and brutality any longer; and that certainly includes folks who work in the media. In the age of the smartphone camera, everyone with a a Wi-Fi connection is now constantly inundated with reams of video evidence that fascist pig cops routinely lie under oath with impunity; in such an environment spreading police lies verbatim is not an act of nativity but rather an open embrace of cowardice and complicity.

Today I find myself still among the living nearly five years after Ferguson, four years after the murder of Sandra Bland and a mere two months after the NBA's "Kyle Korver" moment... "and still I see no changes."

We all deserved better than this media minion, cop-sucking clown show; not just the NBA and Masai Ujiri, but every single person who tuned in to get the straight dope and instead left with an ear full of reactionary Gestapo lies the (primarily white) talking heads were too afraid to challenge. For one brief but beautiful moment, the 2019 NBA Finals transcended traditions, borders and all of our wildest expectations; then almost as quickly as it came and amid a cacophony of moronic collaborating stenographers - the cracker fascist establishment snuffed it out with a barrel full of old-fashioned, racist American pigshit.

God damn you Amerikkka. 


- nina illingworth



Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.

Link: Twittering Classes - A Social Media Policy Update

This is without question one of the most annoying posts I've ever had to write and I'm going to have to share it on literally every website I share content with; y'all are going to have to bear with me. I've made some major changes to my social media lineup and posting policy that may affect some readers - find out more by clicking on the link below:

Twittering Classes: A Social Media Policy Update

 

- Nina Illingworth

Active Measures

Editor's Note: unfortunately I've spent the past couple of days laboring under some sort of cold and fever combination that has greatly restricted my ability to get any real work done. As a result I'm going to keep this loose and informal; in the meantime please forgive me if I'm not at my best for the next couple of days. 

A few months ago on my Patreon Blog, I wrote an essay entitled "Lying Without Lying: the Manipulation of Framing, Context & Depth in Corporate Media" that likely would have appeared here on Media Madness instead, if this blog had existed at the time I wrote it.

In that essay I discussed three of the most common techniques used by propagandists in the mainstream, corporate media to sculpt public opinion surrounding ongoing stories, issues or events - the third of which was depth or repetition. At the time I really didn't spend a lot of time covering the media's use of depth to manipulate opinions because the concept in and of itself is simple to the point of obviousness; namely that the public is naturally going to remember and be more cognizant of or more concerned about, the stories the media covers most often and over the longest period of time.

Although there is clearly some nuance involved when it comes to determining depth of coverage, the easiest way to quantify this depth is to measure minutes of discussion on mainstream networks and the number of articles printed in the corporate press - as was famously done in "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Herman. Sometimes however, when the mass media coverage of an issue is so clearly blown out of proportion, no stopwatch is necessary - examples might include endless reactionary prattle about the fight against "political correctness" or thousands of hours worth of coverage promoting the "evidence" that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction" and thus the 2003 US invasion of Iraq was justified. 

This of course calls to mind the mother of all modern "over-saturated" news events, Russiagate; or more specifically the Doctor Strangelove-esque theory that Bolshevik Twitter trolls and Russian Facebook memes of dubious quality somehow altered the results of the 2016 US Election in favor of (now) swine emperor Trump. Please note that I'm not particularly interested in getting bogged down in the minutiae of the Russiagate scandal at this moment (my opinions on the whole situation haven't changed much since I wrote this article in December 2017) - what's important to acknowledge here is simply the sheer volume of media coverage about the supposed threat to American democracy presented by Russian "active measures" that apparently consist of shitposting on Twitter, Facebook memes and possibly publishing/reporting on unaltered emails. I don't think I exaggerating in the slightest when I say that literally thousands upon thousands of hours worth of coverage has been devoted to an event that nobody can prove changed a single vote in either the 2016, or the 2018 US elections.

As you may have gathered, I'm rather skeptical of the threat Russia actually posses to Pig Empire democracy (such as it is) - but even if I weren't, the truly mind-numbing proportions of the mainstream media's endless "Russiagate" coverage would naturally lead me to believe that at the very least, our corporate media cares about perceived threats to American democracy, right? Not so fast sparky; let's look at a breaking story that absolutely should be all over your TV screen right now but almost certainly isn't:

Republicans Plan to Rig Elections for a Decade

The above article is a lengthy, nuanced and extremely informative piece of analysis and in light of the generally sparse, vapidly sensationalist and out of context coverage this incredibly important story is getting, I think it's only fair to give The New Republic some credit for printing Alex Shephard's piece as is. Let's summarize the most important parts of this story:

"The New York Times reported on Thursday that the estranged daughter of Thomas Hofeller, the GOP operative who had “achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering,” had discovered some hard drives. Those hard drives—left in storage when Thomas died last year—revealed that Hofeller played a central role in the Trump administration’s decision to push for the citizenship question on the census. Why? No need to guess—Hofeller recorded it for posterity (or some other reason he took to the grave): Doing so “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” 

This is quite frankly, mind-blowing stuff. As someone who has written about racialized voter suppression in the past, I doubt most informed observers will find it surprising that the GOP is purposely attacking minority voting rights to ensure election victories - but it is truly rare indeed to catch a Republican operative straight up admitting it. Rare however, is not unheard of and astute readers may recall North Carolina based GOP consultant Carter Wrenn letting the cat out of the bag in 2016 when he attempted to defend voter suppression techniques that disproportionately targeted African Americans in the Tar Heel State:

“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.

“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”

Returning to the Shephard article, the piece goes on to explain how these revelations may (or may not) impact the already rotten legal case to ram through the (as we can now confirm) objectively racist "citizenship question" in the upcoming US census - the added emphasis is mine: 

"As the Times and others have revealed, the DOJ’s demonstrably false contention that a citizenship question is necessary to defend the integrity of the Voting Rights Act is first diagrammed in Hofeller’s files. In some places, the arguments that were made by the Department of Commerce (the agency that oversees the Census) are lifted, almost verbatim, from Hofeller’s writings.

The implications are profound even beyond the Commerce case and the citizenship question, which many fear is all but certain to appear on the 2020 census. If there had been any doubt, the Hofeller bombshell rips away any veneer of respectability from conservative arguments, revealing, once and for all, the partisan, racist underpinnings of GOP assaults on voting rights. 

Of course, it had been abundantly clear the Trump administration was lying about its justification to include the citizenship question for some time. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Congress that he included the question at the behest of the Department of Justice. But Ross’s own emails later revealed it to be the other way around—the Commerce Secretary was pushing for the citizenship questions nearly a year before DOJ took it up. It was Ross and his allies in Commerce that directed the Department of Justice on the question. The administration also argued before the Supreme Court that the citizenship question would help protect Hispanic voters; Hofeller’s emails reveal that the citizenship question was designed to disenfranchise them.

There is nothing to the contention that the added census question was inserted to help more minorities vote—the intention is and always was to suppress their ability to participate. Republicans have long feared a “demographic time bomb,” one that would outpace their traditional white constituencies. Rather than find ways to entice those growing populations—with, for example, attractive policy positions—the GOP has doubled down on excluding them from the electorate. Lowering the number of Latinx people counted by the census would aid Republican efforts to gerrymander away just representation for this growing population. That would allow for another decade of over-representation of non-Hispanic whites, who are, presumably, mostly by Republicans. This isn’t a post-facto analysis—Hofeller wrote it all down in advance."

While I unfortunately also share Shephard's pessimism that any of this information will influence a right wing extremist Supreme Court's decision in Department of Commerce v. New York it's still safe to say that the Hofeller leaks have the potential to create a catastrophic political (and potentially legal) scandal for the Trump Administration, corrupt shit-gremlin Wilbur Ross Jr. and the North Carolina GOP; if the story is given the proper level of attention and context:

"But even if it doesn’t influence the outcome in Commerce, the trove from Hofeller’s storage locker is still crucial evidence in the case against racist gerrymandering and other efforts aimed at explicitly reducing minority representation and participation. And in the case against Republican lies used in those efforts’ defense. When the GOP rails about “election integrity” and “voter fraud,” what they’re really talking about is suppressing votes—the absurd, process-driven arguments used to defend gerrymandered districts in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan, notwithstanding. Republicans might win on the citizenship question and other court challenges—and so they will continue to claim that their maps pass constitutional muster—but Hofeller was the cartographer on many of these maps, and the architect of many of the strategies used to make and defend them. And it is the materials found in Hofeller’s locker that now show everyone what’s really going on."

It's important to understand that while the ongoing process of stacking the American judiciary with reactionary candidates hand-picked by the Federalist Society makes this a political struggle by necessity, this story goes far beyond mere politics. This is ultimately a story about civil rights, racial discrimination that should be illegal and the fundamental democratic rights of every non-Republican in America. As numerous studies and recent election results have so aptly demonstrated, racialized voter suppression works - we're talking about blatantly rigging elections all across the United States; this is a very real threat to American democracy. 

And therein of course lies the rub; as anyone who has been clicking on the links I've provided in this story can see, I'm hardly suggesting that US corporate media hasn't covered the Hofeller leak story. The underlying problem however is that the press has treated the issue as a largely Trump-based political contest to be decided by the Supreme Court, instead of what it really is - a slow-moving fascist takeover of the nation's political process that demands vigorous opposition from every level of our society. Racialized GOP voter suppression represents an existential threat to American democracy, while Russian social media activity does not - and yet, if you were to judge these two stories based solely on the depth and context provided by corporate media coverage of each issue, you'd be forced to assume the exact opposite.   

Sadly, once you peel back the illusion of Amerikkka's two party system and examine the motivations of a mainstream media at once dominated by capital and actively interested in promoting highly-profitable (for some) Pig Empire imperialism, it's not all that hard to guess why. As I and many others have written in the past, the Russia part of "Russiagate" has been a smashing success for the elite "liberal" establishment in America. From manufacturing consent for a lucrative New Cold War, to suppressing an a growing left wing insurgency and most importantly, ensuring that nobody who punted a winnable election to a reality TV show rapist suffered any real consequences for gift-wrapping the White House for a fascist - the new Red Scare has definitely delivered.

Conversely, while racialized (and economic) voter suppression hurts the Democratic Party as a whole, it is a wound disproportionately borne by grassroots, left wing and minority candidates as opposed to the elite neoliberal leadership of the party. Indeed, corporate-friendly establishment Democrats have even been known to engage in a little targeted voter suppression of their own, to ensure the continued success of "moderate liberals" favored by the party's donor class. Of course, it would be absurd to suggest the entire Democratic Party is a monolith; there are many party members in Congress that recognize the vital importance of fighting GOP voter suppression, but with only lukewarm support from the mainstream media, a stacked reactionary Supreme Court, an obstructionist Republican Senate and the quiet opposition of the party's elite donors, prospects for success remain dim.

What (if anything) is To Be Done?

 

Before we can plot a course to the future, it is important to be completely honest with ourselves about where we stand today across the Pig Empire. We are observing the terrifying global rise of an Americanized brand of modern fascism that has been facilitated by decades, if not centuries of reactionary ideas, policies and abuses promoted by elite capital, the mainstream media establishment and the Western ruling class.

In the United States, this movement has taken the form of an unholy alliance between reactionary billionaire families, Wall Street criminals, lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry, wealthy Christian fundamentalists, the Republican Party, right wing media, opportunistic political grifters, hatemongers and various nationalist street gang style organizations. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are at once both a natural byproduct of this reactionary fascist movement and also a catalyst for a transformative shift from poorly concealed hyper-capitalist police states posing as liberal democracies, to overt fascist oligarchies here in the West.

Our society has largely stood by as our corrupt institutions, unenforceable political norms and compromised regulatory bodies have fallen to the reactionary right one by one, in country after country throughout the entire Pig Empire. Finally, even as you read this significant if not overwhelming portions of our ruling aristocracy, mainstream media and corporate class are happily punching left and silencing dissent while openly collaborating with and normalizing fascists for personal gain.

In other words, our time to react has grown short and the situation is alarmingly bleak. 

When do we as a society say that this has gone on long enough? How far into delusion, depravity and death must we descend before it becomes reasonable to demand coordinated opposition from our leaders, elitist media intellectuals and those who claim to defend democracy?

What was it that finally made you decide that you could tolerate no more of this naked malice, greed and inhumanity? Was it the criminality, corruption and contempt for the law? Was it the bald-faced racism? Was it the creation of a white nationalist government, the swine emperor's open embrace of violent reactionary thugs or the growing number of innocent people murdered by neo-nazis the Amerikkkan Injustice Department no longer bothers to monitor? Was it trading arms sales for support of a genocidal client-state dictatorship lead by a man who we know ordered the murder of a Washington Post journalist in cold blood? Was it the Republican Party's war on women, the LGBT community and non-white minorities? Was it the Klepto Kaiser's scorched earth assault on freedom of the press, the DoJ's unlawful crackdown on political dissent or the Supreme Court's blessing for authorities to harass activists and protesters? Was it when you realized the president is probably a rapist? Was it the way the system bent over backwards to protect billionaire pre-teen rapist Jeff Epstein? Was it when you noticed that these cracker reactionaries were trying to get a couple of Muslim freshmen Congresswomen murdered? Was it the habitual lying, the virulent Islamophobia or perhaps the open nepotism? Was it when the Trump administration decided to help Israel starve Palestinian refugees out of existence? Was it the concentration camps, the stolen brown babies and the growing number of imprisoned migrants our government has murdered? Was it the potential destruction of all life on this planet? Was it when Trump's imperialist cronies started maneuvering America towards up to three wars all at once? Was it halfway through this article when you realized voting the fascists out might soon be impossible? Or was it some other monstrous atrocity the people around you have already forgotten as we all fall further under the yoke of reactionary tyranny? 

With injustice manufactured by a corrupt executive branch and sanctified by a partisan judiciary, what is clearly needed now is a broad-based protest movement to occupy the places of government, to take the battle to the court of public opinion, and if necessary the streets. Politicians, the judiciary and the pro-corporate American establishment must be pressured at all times to help fight the reactionary far-right takeover, and if they will not do so then they must be replaced with those who will. We must create a unity of action, not one of feckless civility and meek acquiescence to the rising tide of overt fascism. It is time to start forcing those who would collaborate with white supremacists, mass murderers and thieves to suffer material consequences for their monstrous betrayal of the public trust; for far too long, inaction from those who should be opposing Downmarket Mussolini and the Buckley Bunch with every fiber of their being, has served to provide legitimacy for this fundie fascist regime. It is time to name the revanchist, elitist beast that dwells inside the both the American "right" and significant portions of the elite "liberal" establishment; it is time to publicly disown, disempower and destroy those who would lay down with fascism for personal gain.
  
The fight against the fascist creep must be undertaken on all levels; in the legislature with impeachment proceedings and contempt referrals, in the courts by lawyers or judges who still believe in civil rights and the supremacy of law, and in the streets by everyday people who do not intend to slip quietly into the Pork Reich simply because five respectable crypto-fascists in funny robes say so. The forces that were assembled to fight Herr Donald's travel ban, oppose the GOP's plans to cancel the Affordable Care Act and the combined Trump inauguration protests, must be reformed and set to the task of fighting not Russian collusion and dank memes, but instead the reactionary Republican (and neoliberal) assault on what few precious democratic rights we have remaining. 

In short, we need a real resistance - not just against swine emperor Trump, but also this entire Pig Empire-wide modernized fascist movement and the mainstream establishment elements of our society who collaborate with and provide succor to the fascist cause, for prestige, profit and power. It is time to accept that the cavalry is not coming to save us. We the people are the resistance against reactionary ethno-nationalism and if our ruling classes, media establishment and elected officials won't help us fight literal goddamn fascists, then they have abdicated the mantle of leadership and they too must go.

I don't know about you gentle reader, but I for one have no desire to explain to my grandchildren that we let fanatical fascists murder the planet primarily to preserve the bipartisan sanctity of Manhattan Island dinner parties and Beltway working brunches.

Which side are you on my friends?


- Nina Illingworth


 
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter and Facebook.