I’d like to turn to remarks that Donald J. Trump Jr (DJT JR) made on December 19th at the most recent TPUSA conference. (TPUSA is the project of Charlie Kirk, the guy who had a follower recently stand up at a town council and ask, into a live microphone, “When do we get to use the guns?” Kirk, through TPUSA, also attempts to shape Covid policy.)
DJT JR lamented the GOP’s supposed lucklessness as a party (as well as a strong in-group) and suggested instead, in a sales pitch, that those prospective voters reconsider their overall strategy. I quote at length:
They’re the ones that are controlled by the Left. And that’s because we’ve allowed it to happen. Right? That’s why watching a group like this, here, means so much to me. It’s why I got my butt on a plane and flew all the way to the West Coast just to speak for half an hour, only to fly back. [Crowd hoots, cheers, and whistles.]
Because we are the front line of freedom. We are the front line of liberty!
And! If we band together, we can take on these institutions. But we’ve gotta do it together.
[gestures with both hands together with both index fingers pointing up and mirrored outward toward the audience; much like taking the sign language signs for ‘b’ and ‘d” and mirroring them in parallel, then drawing those hands apart, ending in a gesture as to say “no, no”]
That’s where we’ve gone wrong for a long time. And I’ve–you know, you’ve been, you’ve seen me speak here, you’ve heard me say it a thousand times, but: guess what, folks? If we get together, they cannot cancel us all [voice breaks, incidentally, exactly at all]. All right? They won’t!
And this will be contrary to our beliefs [uses pointed-index hands to gesture in opposite rotations], because I’d love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I’d love that it didn’t exist. But as long as it does [points both hands skyward], folks, we’d better be playing the same game. [again, a canceling gesture with “no, no” hands]
Okay? We’ve been playing T-ball for the last half a century, while they[‘ve] been playing hardball and cheating. Right?
We’ve turned the other cheek. I understand! [gestures with a double-handed, open-palm signal of closing, ending, finality, negation]
I understand, sort of, the Biblical reference [shakes his head no, gestures with open hands no] . . .
I understand the mentality [another open, waving, clearing motion; also communicating open-mindedness] . . . .
But it’s gotten us [zeroes out his forefingers and thumbs behind his skull while simultaneously thrusting hands upward] nothing.
It’s gotten us nothing. [gestures negation] While we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.
In these very short 1:45 seconds, DJT JR is imploring the audience to eschew the lessons from the Sermon on the Mount and to accept nihilism, specifically Nietzschean nihilism that declares that God is dead and that, precisely because God is dead, the world belongs to the “masters.” They, in turn, become god-like in their authority and power.
Embrace of the overman through white supremacy
As might now means right—“again”—it is their birthright if they simply take it. This entails rejecting 1) neighborliness as prescribed by the Golden Rule, and 2) non-retaliation. This is important, because this fascist movement bases itself on the idea that not only is their audience’s status overall threatened by risk, due to changing times and demographics, but that it is also being pursued and persecuted, a narrative which in a survival setting would necessitate a pre-emptive attack as a method of aggressive defense. This, translated, is simply justified violence. They’re providing a pretext for the acceptance of violence as a method of overthrow.
But note also the dog whistles. DJT JR specifically harkens back fifty years; this coincides with our current post-civil-rights era. Some of us in America in the last “half a century” have been “playing T-ball,” according to DJT JR, which he quickly follows with how liberals during that same time period have been “playing hardball and cheating,” a surreptitious (but clear) reference to affirmative action and how that program is supposedly a “quota” system. So here we have code words atop code words atop code words.
In total context, DJT JR is advocating 1) every individual in attendance (in person and virtually) to denounce core Christian values (lovingkindness and pacifism); 2) adopt an ethos of both nihilism and possibly even hardcore violence to effect a political outcome (that is, terrorism); and 3) a rollback of certain policy gains made in the last fifty years, to remove this “hardball and cheating.”
He is by implication promising to restore all pre-civil-rights-era unspoken understandings of white supremacy.
This restoration of white supremacy would manifest itself as (being modeled after) a deference culture:
Deference is the respect or esteem that one person displays and is expected to display to another. In deference culture the [culturally-recognized] superior person in the equation feels an entitlement to gestures of respect from the inferior members of society. Inferior[ity] may be defined in terms of age, rank, status, wealth, talent, skill or abilities [or other traits, such as skin color, creed, or national origin].
… visitors may well understand how the deference system works, because they see it from the outside looking in. They’ve not had constant indoctrination into a certain deference system that instills core values, attitudes and perspectives, ones that are accepted [as] fully valid and true and beyond discussion.
As it turns out, before the civil rights era, the South was just such a culture.
Similarly incidental, such a return to a region-wide (or, in the case of fascist overthrow, nationwide) adoption of this attitudinal expectation would overlay almost exactly with the kind of deference inculcated in many conservative churches, especially fundamentalist Christian churches which already adhere to a Manichean (good vs. evil), chiliastic (that is, the Endtimes) worldview. These worshippers ostensibly are precisely the people to whom DJT JR is pitching most directly: Give up your most precious tenets. He is trying to convert them, basically over to the diametric opposite of their currently held beliefs.
Swapping of values
Other evidence that the GOP and their operatives are seeking to radically alter the value system of the fascist movement’s new adherents comes from, speak of the deuce, Laura Ingraham. Back in August, she had as a guest on her show John Taffer who also hosts a reality show. His is called Bar Rescue, where he performs Gordan Ramsay “Hotel Hell”/HGTV Extreme Makeover Home Edition-type remodels of failing taverns, bars, and dives.
The way Taffer’s show is structured, the clientele of the establishments come from all walks of life (especially the lower classes—a lot of the neighborhoods where these bars are located are a bit shabby, or otherwise are showing signs of economic strain). However, Taffer himself deals primarily with the owners of the bars. This means that his clientele on the show are all small businessowners. He too is a businessowner.
In August, just as the entirety of the media ecosphere had reared up to wound Biden for daring to withdraw from Afghanistan, that’s when Taffer went on Ingraham’s show. The topic was unemployment and the relief benefits due to remain ongoing through that next month. Ingraham and Taffer exchanged theories as to why more people weren’t returning to work. (Remember, right-wing media outlets at this time were telling their viewers that the virus was no big deal, while simultaneously shaming viewers, trying to get them to take on guilt for staying home and thus supposedly not contributing to the economy).
The two commiserated in public. Here’s Newsweek (emphasis mine):
[Taffer said,] “We're incentivizing people to stay home. What if we gave that additional unemployment benefits to employers to incentivize people to go to work?"
Ingraham then chimed in and asked what would happen if the unemployment benefits were cut off.
"Hunger is a pretty powerful thing," she said. "I don't mean physical hunger because people who truly are in need, need help. I'm talking about people who can work but refuse to work."
Shortly after, Taffer made similar comments and supported Ingraham's remarks by comparing the current unemployment situation to military dogs.
"I have a friend in the military who trains military dogs and they only feed a military dog at night because a hungry dog is an obedient dog," Taffer said. "Well, if we are not causing people to be hungry to work, then we're providing them with all the meals they need sitting at home."
It’s just as appalling as it sounds when viewed instead of simply read.
It’s shocking, for me, to encounter folks who have no compunction openly discussing using starvation as a motivational tool. These are purely capitalistic-minded people we’re talking about here, looking strictly at bottom lines.
This is an excerpt from a larger diary that more cleanly details the propaganda that Ingraham used in her recent abhorrent segment about General Mark Milley’s positive Covid diagnosis. I’ve decoupled that diary’s independent thesis (which is that Ingraham is using rhetorical tactics to upload depravity wholesale into the imaginations of viewers) from this diary, so each can stand independently.
Last December, I penned an open letter to all clergy and leadership in all American Christian churches highlighting just the argument DJT JR made that month, this hidden appeal to disavow their most cherished beliefs. I only hope more people talk more amongst themselves with their neighbors about this value creep, if they too see it.
See also Tucker Carlson’s messaging in his “Patriot Purge”, material properly and fairly described as agitprop. In it, he reverse-engineers a cognitive bias in order to exploit the illogic of his viewers, trying to convince them that they should identify with the insurgents of January 6th.
Nietzsche, as it turns out, was wrong. Is wrong. His philosophy presupposes but a binary worldview, one where there is only the one hand or the other, only above or below. We have more/another perspective(s). We have laterality; we have mutuality; we have intersectionality; we have leagues and coalitions; we have law and contracts that codify agreements entered into by mutual parties and valid only in cases devoid of coercion—that is, not under an undue power imbalance. We have all of these things that provide an outside perspective away from rigid dichotomies, especially arbitrary ones. Power-over is a method of power, but so is power-with.
The era of mass man demands—if we are all to pursue (as Jung put it) a path of individuation—a power-with structure. It’s the best (the only?) way to get out of the concept of monarchs. We need to find a way to get away from this idea of kingship (not just arbitrary/hereditary kingship, but the concept altogether).
As Jason Stanley put it, in his How Propaganda Works (p. 61, all emphasis mine):
The political ideal of a monarchy is obedience to authority. Revolution is being taken as the embodiment of obedience to authority. But it is effective because of the existence of a flawed ideology connecting revolution to the will of a state that makes decisions on one’s behalf. Those who possess this flawed ideology would not see the clear contradiction between revolution and obedience to authority.
The fascists have co-opted “1776” as their revolutionary rally cry, in order to install a dictatorship. We defeat this by working together and developing each and every day fellow feeling for all of our compatriots, all of the citizenry, all of the people who live here.