Posted on 10/09/2015 12:58:49 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Donald Trump is not a fascistprobably.
His ex-wife Ivana once claimed he kept a volume of Hitlers collected speeches in a cabinet by his bed, and read from time to time the fuhrers vision of human life as a pitiless war of all against all. If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them, he told Vanity Fair in 1990. But consider something the architect of Trump Tower, Der Scutt, once said on how to evaluate the truth value of Donald Trump claims: divide by two, then divide by four, and youre closer to the answer.
Trump worships armed force, pronouncing at a rally in August in Derry, New Hampshire: I believe in the military and military strength more strongly than anybody running by a factor of a billion. (Applying Scutts formula, that means Trump believes in military strength 125,000,000 times more than Lindsey Graham, who opened his presidential campaign with a promise to go to war with Iran.)
When Trump speaks in the subjunctive mood, he can certainly sound like an aspiring dictator. Regarding a $2.5 billion plant Ford intends to build in Mexico, he announced that every car, every truck, and every part manufactured in this plant that comes across the border, were going to charge you a 35 percent taxO.K.? The Constitution, of course, grants Congress, not a president, the power to tax. Maybe its just ignorance on his part. Or maybe, by we hes referring to the Congressional coalition hes building in his spare time between stadium rallies. But if Trump has ever made reference to any understanding of the three coequal branches that govern the United States, I havent noticed it.
Trumpism is different. Donald Trump is the first Republican presidential front-runner to venture a demagogy so pure.
He refers lustily to his passion to destroy the malcontents stabbing America in the back, longing for the days when they received summary executions: So we get a traitor like Bergdahl, a dirty rotten traitor [pause for applause], who by the way when he deserted, six young beautiful people were killed trying to find him, right? . . . You know, in the old days: bing, bong. (Trump pantomimed cocking a rifle.) When we were strong, when we were strong.
Too much to expect procedural nicetiesinnocent until proven guilty?from the guy who in 1989 took out full-page ads in four New York newspapers, headlined: Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police! There followed a 600-word essay: What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we know it. . . . How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS. It went on to relate a tale from some mystically perfect past, where he witnessed two young bullies cursing and threatening a very frightened waitress. Two cops rushed in, lifted up the thugs and threw them out the door, warning them never to cause trouble again. I miss the feeling of security New Yorks finest once gave the citizens of this City.
The ad was Trumps response to the arrest of five kids for the vicious rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park. The kids were coerced into confessions, later proven to be false, by the same police force Donald Trump insisted had been intimidated into politically correct timorousness. Last year, after the five families settled for $41 million in compensation for the years the accused youths spent in prison, Trump published an op-ed calling the settlement ridiculous.
These men do not exactly have the pasts of angels, he claimed. At the time of the event, one of these men was 14 years old.
A demagoguery so pure
Trump has now provided more specifics about his immigration plan: a forced population transfer greater than any attempted in history, greater than the French and Spanish expulsions of the Jews in 1308 and 1492; greater than the Nabka of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from British-mandate Palestine; greater than the 1.5 million Stalin consigned to Siberia and the Central Asian republics; greater than Pol Pots exile of 2.5 million city-dwellers to the Cambodian countryside, or the scattering of Turkeys Assyrian Christians, which the scholar Mordechai Zaken says numbers in the millions and required 180 years to complete. Trump has promised to move 12 million Mexicans in under two yearsso fast your head will spin.
Only then will he start building the wall.
But all Republican politicians say stuff like this, right? They all want a wall, they all want to bury criminals under the jail, they all crave war, even if theyre not quite so explicit about it.
Not quite, actually. Previous Republican leaders were sufficiently frightened by the daemonic anger that energized their constituencies that they avoided surrendering to it completely, even for political advantage. Think of Barry Goldwater, who was so frightened of the racists supporting him that he told Lyndon Johnson hed drop out of the race if they started making race riots a campaign issue. And Ronald Reagan refusing to back a 1978 ballot initiative to fire gay schoolteachers in California, at a time vigilantes were hunting down gays in the street. Think of George W. Bush guiding Congress toward a comprehensive immigration bill (akin to that proposed by President Obama) until the onslaught of vitriol that talk-radio hosts directed at Republican members of Congress forced him to quit. Think of George W. Bushs repeated references to Islam as a religion of peace.
Trump has promised to move 12 million Mexicans in under two yearsso fast your head will spin. Only then will he start building the wall.
Trumpism is different. Donald Trump is the first Republican presidential front-runner to venture a demagogy so pure.
But isnt he just giving Republican voters what they want? Isnt this attention-starved shell of a man, a salesman ideationally hollow at the core, only following the smart money? A friend of mine argues that Trump would be perfectly willing to shift his core issue from immigration if the political winds change. Too shallow to venture dictatorship: he doesnt have anything to dictate. Which actually is the opposite of encouraging.
In the Derry event referenced above, Trump went into a familiar riff: China is killing us! Theyve taken so much of our wealth. Theyve taken our jobs. Theyve taken our businesses, theyve taken our manufacturing.
Then an audience member cried out: Our land!
Trump paused, pondered, gave it back as a question: Our land?
Then, why not? He decided to roll with the thought: The way theyre going, theyll have that pretty soon.
I think I know the conspiracy theory that perfervid Granite Stater was referring to. I heard it in Orange County about a decade ago. Chinese nationals were buying up residential real estate to make a killing at the expense of the Americans who actually lived there. Trump clearly hadnt heard it, but soon he will, and maybe hell fold that count into his rap. Watch for it.
Man and mob
My main interest, though, is that moment of symbiosis between man and mob. They feed off each other. The way his people eat up Trumps unalloyed joy in bullying: the way a purse of his lips and a glance offstage summoned the security guard who ejected Univisions Jorge Ramos from a press conference, like a casino pit boss with a whale who gets too handsy with the cocktail waitresses. Trumps not-quite-veiled threat to Megyn Kelly: Ive been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be. But I wouldnt do that. The body language he uses to intimidate a hapless and plaintive Jeb Bush during the second Republican debate.
If hes just giving the people what they want, consider the people.
Consider what they want.
Last fall, the Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of whites believe discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. A brand new Washington Post/ABC poll finds 57 percent of Republicans support the most massive ethnic cleansing in the annals of humanity (or, what The Washington Post blandly calls Trumps tough positions on immigration).
They all want a wall, they all want to bury criminals under the jail, they all crave war, even if they are not so explicit.
Pollsters at YouGov.com found that 29 percent of Americans (and 43 percent of Republicans) would hypothetically support the military stepping in to take control from a civilian government which is beginning to violate the Constitution. Which is quite a thing, considering that according to a 2012 Gallup poll 94 percent of Republicans consider Obamacares insurance-purchase mandates unconstitutional; not to mention the small technicality that the military taking control of the government for violating the Constitution is, in fact, violating the Constitution.
Then there is this. Evan Osnos of The New Yorker happened to be reporting on white nationaliststhe polite term for neo-Naziswhen the Trump phenomenon began. The fortuitous coincidence ended up unfolding as a natural experiment. Osnos was able to watch in real time as his subjects embraced Trump as one of their own. Usually, such extremists judge Republicans as tweedle-dee to the Democrats tweedle-dum. Thats not how they saw Trump. The Daily Stormer neo-Nazi web site endorsed him, advising its readers to vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests. The leader of a white-supremacist think tank told The New Yorker: I dont think Trump is a white nationalist, although he did reflect an unconscious vision that white people havethat their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country . . . he is the one person who can tap into it.
Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a like-minded publication, observed: Im sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.
But was Taylor correct? Asked if he would repudiate the endorsement of erstwhile Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Trumps response was less than resounding: Sure, I would if that would make you feel better.
The f-word
The f-word has nearly vanished from everyday political discussion in America, and for good reason. Its become the kind of epithet that stops thought instead of enhancing it. But serious people used to talk about the relevance of the German experience to American politics. In 1964, Philip Rahv, a founding editor of the marquee intellectual journal Partisan Review, wrote that the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater for president represented a recrudescence on American soil of precisely those super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions dead.
But within a couple of years, when student protesters were closing down universities through violence and the threat of violence, people like Ronald Reagan said that was exactly what fascists did, so he deployed National Guardsmen to keep campuses openwhich student protesters called fascist in turn.
By the end of the 1960s both sides were throwing the f-word at one another with abandon. But in current American politics, the word has survived via the abject stupidity of many thousands of right-wing readers of one of the worst books ever published, Jonah Goldbergs Liberal Fascism (2008), which made much of the fact that both Hitler and a heck of a lot of liberals were vegetarians.
The usage also survives among a considerably smaller number of only slightly less perfervid liberals. These folks borrow from the scholarship of outstanding historians like Roger Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism, and Robert Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism, and bastardize it into checklists, the most widely circulated from an obscure political scientist about whom I could find nothing elseLawrence Brittwho would have us believe that when a politician checks off enough boxes like rampant sexism and obsession with national security, America will suddenly find itself locked into a totalitarian nightmare from which there is no escape except all-out war.
But this confuses a historically specific description with a usefully predictive model. It treats political development as a biological process, fascism as something nations descend intothe natural entropy of failed national institutions.
Its a devolution to an older style of political thinking that felt perfectly logical in the 1950s and early 1960s, among writers for whom civilizations descent into blood-soaked barbarism was recent memory. The writing that followed it was either explicitly or implicitly rooted in a Marxist style of thinking, which is to say a Hegelian style of thinking: if history was supposed to develop in a certain direction (toward socialism; toward liberal democracy), how, then, to account for the hard-right turn no one had predicted? The process of strong men taking advantage of weak men, with the strongman, his victims, and their willing executioners produced by the neuroses attending the breakdown of traditional ways of life, seemed to be encoded within modernity itself.
Asked if he would repudiate the endorsement of erstwhile Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Trumps response was less than resounding: Sure, I would if that would make you feel better.
And some of this story still rings so very true. Fascist leaders promise national rebirth, the merging of a mystically perfect past and a transcendent future from a present fatally compromised by wickedness. (Niftily, the scholarly term for that, as if nodding to John McCains 2008 running mate, is palingenetic ultranationalism.)
But lots of political movements do that. And history is not a biological process; theres no reason to believe that the alienation we see all around us need devolve into violent nationalism with its end state. Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, and Chile, to cite the major cases, in the peculiar moments when their strong men arose, suffered weaknesses in their institutions that are just about unimaginable in the United States. For instance, it is hard to imagine a President Trump turning America into a one-party state. (Isnt it?)
Movie matinee monsters
Which provides us with a delicate analytical problem, because, all the same, the postwar thinkers making sense of that experience bequeathed useful tools of analysis, now mostly lost to us because of the discussion-busting nature of the f-word.
So, in fact, did popular culture.
Ordinary people can become monsters. Everyone who experienced World War II knew that. How does it happen? Any attentive cinema-goer or TV-watcher of the 1950s would have a decent grasp of an answer. In Ace in the Hole, from 1951, a little-remembered Billy Wilder masterpiece, the effort to rescue a man trapped in a cave collapse in New Mexico turns into a lurid carnival as folks flock from miles around, with rides, concerts, and gambling. The party ends when the rescue fails, the man dies, and the revelers slink away in shame at how thin the veneer of civilization truly was. Likewise, in The Shelter, a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone, a convivial suburban neighborhood hears a radio announcement that reveals an impending nuclear attack, everyone flocks to the towns only fallout shelter, which can only accommodate three people, and the seething hostility, resentment, and racism none of them even understood themselves capable of surges to the surfaceuntil the announcement is revealed as a false alarm, and the threads of trust that had bound a community together are revealed as irreversibly vulnerable.
There are many more examples. In an interview with NPRs Terry Gross, the director Wes Craven explains what horror films are really about: fear, which is certainly one of the most primal, primal emotions. About the necessity for taking action or else not surviving . . . . They always sort of perceive where theres sort of that subcutanenous, subconscious fear thats in the culture at the time . . . post-World War II where you had culture coming out of shock of what they had just seen . . . these sort of horrendous events being perpetrated by the Nazis, and in a sense by everybody that went to war against each other. Craven cited Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho, because that is a pure case of not a monster in the sense of Godzilla or something, but its a human monster.
How did politicians become monsters? That question received its own postwar cinematic treatment. In A Face in the Crowd, TV creates a Frankensteins monster out of an unknown guitar picker turned into a national sensation via empty promises and an aw-shucks manner. Then a group of shadowy millionaires draft him as a front for their dictatorial political ambitions, the hayseed ubermensch becoming fatally drunk on his power in the process. Elia Kazan wrote in the preface to the screenplay: we took cognizance of the new synthetic folksiness that saturated certain programs, and the excursion into political waters by these I-dont-know-anything-but-I-know-what-I-think guys. (You know those guys. The ones you see on Fox News.)
All the Kings Men, the 1949 Academy Award winner based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, was the classic exposition. It told the story of country boy Willie Stark (based on Huey Long), who begins his political career crusading against injustice, until the seductions of absolute power and the frustrations of democracy find him surrendering to an abject lust for domination. Warren had witnessed Mussolinis rise to power in the 1930s, and spoke of how the alienated nature of life in Romes slums made their denizens easy pickings for inspired idiots like Il Duce.
The way his people eat up Trumps unalloyed joy in bullying: the way a purse of his lips and a glance offstage summoned the security guard who ejected Univisions Jorge Ramos from a press conference. . . .
All the Kings Men was philosophically sophisticated, while A Face in the Crowd was pretty simple-minded. But both converge on an insight utterly lost to our intellectual moment. Its an insight that speaks to the riddle in a thousand op-eds on the Trump phenomenon: what makes him so popular? Our mid-century American kin would never bother asking the question: it was too obvious. All that was required was a charismatic figure willing to say anything to animate the masses darkest prejudices, promising easy answers to intractable problems, offering frenetic action where conventionally constrained politics, sclerotic bureaucracies, and the messiness of democratic proceduralism promised only gridlock.
At least the boss does something, says one of the kings men as he excuses the sins of the dictator he works for. Mussolini, famously, made the trains run on time. All it required was a demagoguery that was fully unleashedthe willing scapegoating of the enemy within as the only reason the masses desires are frustrated. Say, by promising to expel 12 million undocumented immigrants so fast your head will spin.
Herrenvolk democracy
Describe Donald Trump to a mid-century social scientist and he would respond: of course he is in first place. And Im fairly certain George W. Bush would fully understand that he could have further expanded his own massive grant of post-9/11 power were he only to scapegoat all Muslims. It is to his great credit that he did not. He seemed to have understood something the current crop of Republican candidates chasing after Trump do notsomething about Pandoras Boxes, toothpaste that cannot be put back into tubes, the demiurge. Bush was, unlike Donald Trump, unwilling to say anything.
George Bush, however, was constrained by a set of commitments in a way that Donald Trump is not: commitments to transnational corporate capitalism and its ideological handmaiden, neoliberalism. But Paul Krugman has recently noted an apparent irony. Donald Trump, the most frightening of the Republican candidates, is also the most sane in terms of economic policy, the most willing to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy. Among the measures he has nodded toward, in his vague, stream-of-consciousness, non-committal way: raising the taxes of the super-rich and single-payer healthcare. Krugman notes: Mr. Trump, who is self-financing, didnt need to genuflect to the big money, and it turns out that the base doesnt mind his heresies. This is a real revelation, which may have a lasting impact on our politics.
David Weigel of The Washington Post has written about how Trump has built deep support among blue-collar voters in places like Michigan by talking about trade deficits and the loss of American manufacturing jobs. He is the only Republican candidate to speak about the damage transnational capitalism inflicts on blue-collar Americans. A writer for Vox.com trumpets this as a welcome rift in the red-blue gridlock, suggesting it means the electorate is more multidimensional than our partisan narratives tell us. It is interpreted, that is to say, as almost a salutary thing: the Republican frontrunner, if you squint hard enough, is even a little bit liberal.
Our notional midcentury social scientist, or better historically informed pundits, wouldnt be so sanguine. They would recognize the phenomenon that sociologist Pierre van den Berghe in 1967 labeled herrenvolk democracy: a political ideology in which members of the dominant ethnic group enjoy privileged provision from the state, as a function of the economic and civic disenfranchisement of the scapegoated group, to better cement dictatorship. This was why elites feared Huey Longs promise of a guaranteed incomeEvery Man A King. This was how George Wallace governed Alabama. This was apartheid South Africa.
And this, more than anything else, is what horrifies the Republican establishment about Donald Trump. As Jonathan Chait has observed:
The official (i.e. non-Trump) Republican Party has experienced its activist base during the Obama years as an incessant and implacable series of demands for ideological purity. Republicans have dutifully complied with every policy demand. They have refused to increase taxes, even at the cost of programs they support. . . . It has never been enough. . . . Next to the tiny ideological bumps Republicans have obsessively smoothed from their record, Trumps profile of deviations is incomprehensibly vast. . . . It must be galling for the party regulars to prostrate themselves helplessly before the base, purging any hint of independent thought, only to watch a formerly pro-choice, libertine if not liberal, Democratic donor waltz into the lead.
Chait chalks that up to the Donalds success in matching the rageful affect of the Republican base. And of course thats some of it. But the other part of it is that the economic neoliberalism with which the Republicans serve their donor base, and which most motivates conservative leaders, has always been an electoral albatross. What became known in the 1970s as the social issues helped distract Republican voters from their partys economic agenda. Back then, according to Gallup, the public favored wage and price controls as the answer to inflation by a margin of 46 to 39 percent. Eighty-five percent liked the idea of a public jobs program on the model of the New Deals Civilian Conservation Corps, with only 10 percent opposed. Even Ronald Reagan got elected and reelected not because of his embrace of neoliberalism but despite it.
The statistics are compiled in the perennially useful 1986 study Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics by Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers. One poll they cite from Opinion Research Corporation asked voters in 1980 whether too much was being spent on the environment, health, education, welfare, and urban aid programs. Only 21 percent thought so, the same percentage as in 1976, 1977, and 1978. Those who responded that the amount spent was either too little or about right was never lower in those years than 72 percent. The number favoring keeping taxes and services about where they are was the same in 1975 and 198045 percent.
The pattern continued well into Reagans presidency. In 1984, when Reagans approval rating was 68 percent, only 35 percent favored cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit, which of course was their presidents strenuously stated preference. Sixty-five percent believed such cuts were imminent. Yet that November, well over 60 percent of them voted for Reagan instead of the Democrat Walter Mondale.
George Bush was constrained by a set of commitments in a way that Donald Trump is not.
But as has been demonstrated time and time again by empirical social science, one reason white Americans frequently vote against candidates promising to support spending for the public good is the fear that their tax dollars will be spent on minorities at the expense of themselves. The herrenvolk democracy limned by Trumpin which downwardly mobile whites hear themselves promised economic protection that wont be shared with the scapegoated Othersis a powerful tool for understanding why his popularity with Republican voters grows and grows.
But wait: Donald Trump is just a con man? Probably. And most definitely, his audience is a pool of very juicy marks. Lets see how much comfort you can draw from that.
Direct mail hustlers
A few years ago, I wrote about what happens when you join the mailing list of conservative publications. You are instantly bombarded with come-ons for the 23-Cent Heart Miracle that Washington, the medical industry, and the drug companies REFUSE to tell you about. You are promised the insiders code (which Ill tell you) and you could make an extra $6,000 every single month. Youll be offered INSTANT INTERNET INCOME . . . to put an end to your financial worries and give your family the abundant lifestyle they so richly deserve.
My piece, which appeared in The Baffler and was entitled The Long Con, argued that such hustles were not incidental to conservatism but central to the Republican moment itself. They are part of the strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers who collaborated in coral[ling] fleeceable multitudes all in one place, inculcating a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.
If you doubt that Donald Trump notches perfectly with this tradition, I recommend the documentary Trump, Whats the Deal? It was completed in 1990 but never released because of threats from its litigious subject but now, its available online. Its the source of the quote, regarding Trump and the truth: divide by two, then divide by four, and youre closer to the answer. In the film, you see Donald promising the most luxurious appointments available in his Trump Tower.
We decided to go absolutely first class all the way, Trump said, which was why Sofia Loren and the Prince of Wales were buying in (both lies). An interior decorator explains that the apartments, unlike the pink marble lobby, are anything but first class: Ive never seen more sloppily installed and more cheaply built kitchen cabinets. (The installers were illegal Polish immigrants, whom Donald Trump did not pay.)
You see more of the hustle in Trumps own book The Art of the Deal, where Trump claims he bought his Palm Springs mansion for $8 million cash, when he only came up with $2,000 cash. You see Trump building literal castles in the sky out of these liesand, of course, since there is no con without a mark, you see people buying the lies, which is what lets the game work in the first place.
Which isnt fascism. Its more like professional wrestlingwith which, as we know, Trump has a long and storied history.
Its not that his supporters dont know hes a con man; they revel in it. Its what makes Donald a winner. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In these respects, as in so many others, conservatism resembles the multi-level marketing, or pyramid schemes, that so many Republicans buy into. Closing the sale is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher.
Which isnt fascism. Its more like professional wrestlingwith which, as we know, Trump has a long and storied history.
Or maybe its both.
A wrestlers life
You know who else organized his life like a professional wrestler?
No, really: comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler would give the American hustler far, far, too much credit.
I will, however, compare the uselessness of the political press that bought into der fuhrer to our own. I recently read about Hitler At Home, a forthcoming University of Buffalo book by architectural historian Despina Statigakos. The author describes how Hitlers advisors used his home life, and architecture, to manipulate the public, crafting spaces that, like movie sets, evoked the right emotions. Then, according the University of Buffalo News Center, they invited reporters in for tours where they experienced Hitler in a setting that felt exclusive and emanated warmth. . . .
News outlets from home magazines to The New York Times portrayed the Nazi leader as a country gentleman and cultured statesman with a mountain chaletunaware that the image was propaganda created by an inner circle of experts for political ends.
Whatever the ultimate meaning of Trumpism, I hardly think our political press will prove any better at safeguarding our liberties. Again and again, the editorial line has been that his latest supposed gaffe will finish him, when theyve only preceded greater heights of popularity. The most recent variation on that theme came only days ago in The New Yorker, where John Cassidy wrote, In the political world . . . there has been growing acceptance that Trump can get away with saying things that other candidates cant . . . Until now, that is.
Which is, of course, exactly what they said about Trumps remarks about Mexican immigrants being rapists, and about John McCain being a loser for getting shot down, etc. It hardly matters that this time the show-stopper was calling Carly Fiorina ugly. What matters is our willful refusal to grasp that his appeal doesnt fit the received categories of journalistic analysis, which journalists refuse to revise.
Political journalism is married to a discourse of consensus, that radicalism is always absorbed into the mainstream. So CNN headlined an article about its new poll finding that 43 percent of Republicans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim: Misperceptions persist about Obamas faith, but arent so widespread. We were reassured, however, that Most Republicans think Obama was born in the country. As off-base as this is, it maintains a touching faith that politics can be governed by a simplistic version of Enlightenment rationality, in which false claims, once debunked, will somehow go away.
We want to think about Trump using our familiar categories, according to familiar norms, judging him by familiar rules. But what Donald Trump is all about is incinerating the existing ruleswhich are revealed as all too easy to incinerate. He breaks the system just by his manner of being. Its humbling, because the system he breaks is the only one we know how to understand.
But with Trump, everything requires revisionfor me as much as anyone else.
Well, that’s certainly a lot of words.
LOL I’m old enough to remember in the 60s wire rim glasses were the sign of a lefty.
I read two sentences of this bilge. That was enough.
He works for the Public Concern Foundation.
Concern troll is probably his title
Pajama Boy with a beard.
Do you remember when gays were being hunted down in the streets of California when Reagan was governor? My memory is soooo bad.
Hence, I wear wire rims. And they’re flexible memory metal, so wearing them with the motorcycle helmet isn’t an uncomfortable or damaging issue.
When one is faced between the choice of a perpetual wimp and someone who might have sometimes been wrong, and the barbarians really ARE at the door, one might be pardoned for going with the one who might have sometimes been wrong.
I checked Wikipedia on him. He likes to plagiarize.
That’s what I have too. For me light weight is the goal.
Good read for later. I read long articles better at night for some reason lol.
The “Public Concern Foundation”? What is this ... professional “concern trolls”?
... faced with the choice between ... [apologies to grammar nazies]
Look like a young Mark Levin. Can’t be further politically.
This has all the hallmarks of having been written by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Heh. Good catch.
I was going to elementary school in Chino at the time, but I have no recollection of that.
The author’s appearance, and his self-indulgent logorrhea, lead me to suspect that he might possibly be homosexual.
I see you running down the streets of Chino with a hatchet!
se cupp
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