Who's The Chicken, Who's The Egg?
Unless you live in North Carolina, you probably never heard of Michele Morrow, a psychopath the GOP nominated to run the state’s education department. You wouldn’t find more typical lady-MAGAt. After she got all worked up at the J-6 insurrection, she filmed a video urged Señor Trumpanzee to put “the Constitution to the side” and use the military to stay in power. According to a CNN report, “In a deleted Facebook livestream she filmed from her hotel room, Morrow called for mass arrests of anyone who helped certify the 2020 election. ‘And if the police won’t do it and the Department of Justice won’t do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act,’ said Morrow. ‘In which case the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.’… In March’s Republican primary, Morrow defeated the incumbent North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that manages the state’s $11 billion budget for K-12 public schools and helps set education priorities and implement curriculum standards. That same month, CNN’s KFile reported Morrow had previously called for the public execution of Barack Obama and the death of Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats in comments on a since-deleted Twitter account. ‘I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in a since-deleted post from May 2020 about Obama. ‘I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.’”
Trump can’t win in November without white supremacists— and some racists, though not Morrow, are getting skeptical of his commitment to their particular grievances. Trump is trying to shed some of the more outré connections that alienate suburban voters— even as he tries to fight off the term that is sticking to him like no other: weird.
Yesterday, Jamelle Bouie wrote that “‘Weird’ doesn’t sound like much. But of all the attacks Democrats have levied against Republicans since Trump came down that escalator, this one appears to hit the hardest. Republican politicians seem taken aback by the idea that they’re outside the mainstream, by the charge that their interests and priorities are alienating to the average American. Now, stepping back a bit, they shouldn’t be. The signature obsessions of Republican politics since 2020— election denialism, book banning, abortion bans and the crusades against trans and other gender-nonconforming people— are either unpopular with most Americans or electoral dead weight. Democrats in local, state and federal elections have scored win after win in opposition to these and similar preoccupations. In fact, if not for its commitment to this divisive, far-right cultural agenda, the Republican Party might have gotten the ‘red wave’ of its dreams in the 2022 midterm elections. Through all of this, Republicans still insist that they’re the party of normalcy. This is why they can’t quite deal with the charge that they’re weird… [A] funny thing happened after Trump won. He purged the old-line Republicans and brought to prominence a new crop of far-right politicians, activists and media personalities who stood well outside the mainstream. As Trump strengthened his hold on the Republican Party so too did these figures come to dominate conservative politics nationwide. Out with Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; in with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz… The Republican Party under Trump has fallen so far out of the political and cultural mainstream that the central aim of its most ambitious representatives and apparatchiks is to use the power of the state to bend that mainstream to their will.”
So what about Trump’s KKK base? Shakey, reported Ellie Houghtaling yesterday. One of Trump’s most ardent Nazis, Nick Fuentes, has abandoned him, dramatically revoking his endorsement Thursday night:
“Despite white men making up a massive part of Trump’s primary support base— and his attempts to pander to them this election cycle— the Republican nominee,” wrote Houghtaling, “has seen a stunning slip in support within this demographic.”
John Bolton is from a different wing of far right authoritarians and crackpots but he’s way over the Trumpism as well, telling a CNN audience after Trump’s weird press conference that “Trump can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false. It’s not that he lies a lot because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference. So he makes up what he wants to say at any given time. If it happens to comport with what everybody else sees, well, that’s fine. And if it doesn’t comport with anybody else, he doesn’t really care and he’s had decades of getting away with it. So in his mind, the truth is whatever he wants it to be. And that’s what you heard today yeah.”
The nazis saying the quiet part out loud is becoming far more prevalent. And the nazi party putting those saying the quiet part out loud into positions of influence in society is also becoming more prevalent. All the while, your side does nothing about nazis except to campaign as being NOT them. And you've lost more than you've won in the past 56 years.
I wasn't in Germany in the late '20s, but I've read of a similar dynamic. The noise was all being made by the nazi, though a small minority. The majority did nothing. And when the GD hit, the majority in power had no answers (that they dared implement) which swung the door wide open for …