I missed the moment when a lone Christian gentleman was heaving foul epithets at people entering the festival gates. The police had moved him along or away already. Honolulu, Hawai’i generally, people are content to live and let live. Back in 1993, the state supreme court laid a foundation for gay marriage in the state by opining that the state constitution violated the rights of three same-sex couples who sued the state.1
Sadly another 20 years passed before the pacts were legally recognized. That’s in part the work of people like Tulsi Gabbard, who made her political bones here as a hard-core anti-gay bigot before transforming herself into a sweet-talking Democrat,2 which preceded an enthusiastic return to her bigoted reactionary roots.34
I’ve been following the lying Nazi homunculus Stephen Miller on Twitter for a while. He seems to be among the architects of the border-related frenzy into which Trump followers are being worked. He’s gone from a gloomy, dispiriting television presence during the Trump presidency to, now, a gleaming, well-trained speaker with a smile.
And so on. The unbridled dystopia he portrays is believable to frightened, angry people, particularly ones who don’t have a lot of experience with major cities and border areas. It’s brown people, criminal cartels, storming the borders and it’s Black people, led by leftist, often Jewish elites, who have turned our great cities into charnel houses.
And if you don’t live there, how would you know? Even if you do live there, you know or say you know about the no-go zones where cops and preachers fear to tread.
This is all day, every day, followed by nightly appearances on Fox. Miller has almost a quarter-million Twitter followers plus his Fox devotees, and he’s just one part of a chorus blasting this stuff out, a chorus very much including a broad swath of elected Republicans, and that chorus is just the public face of this, with other, seedier platforms carrying out the same messaging, or even more blatant, explicit versions of it more or less out of sight from most of us.
Along with hammering on the dystopian hell-hole we’re all presumably dwelling in, the right has economic issues to pound on, which are legitimate if sometimes exaggerated, and which they work hard to tie to the panic-mongering. Inflation is a brutal stressor, and the economic situation under Biden has never been as rosy as Democrats paint it.
The True Rate of Unemployment, as defined by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), measures the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $20,000 annually before taxes.5
For most of this year that functionally unemployed rate has been hovering around 22%, which is a lot of people who are not doing well, who are looking for someone to blame, and some of whom may be susceptible to the hysteria Miller and company are injecting into the national veins—hysteria that commingles racism, antisemitism,6 and all flavors of anti-LGBQT bigotry, and paints Democrats as homicidal communists.
Fully appreciating the pervasiveness of this fascist propaganda on the right is difficult until one sees it in action. It’s a firehose, it’s multiple firehoses, spraying a reactionary base every time they open Twitter or Facebook, or watch Fox or one of the more extreme networks, or watch their favorite YouTube channels, or open an email from a candidate or any among dozens of incumbents, and it replicates.
And the propagators aren’t only people like Stephen Miller, or Bannon, or what used to be elected Republican outliers like Boebert or Greene; they’re in the mainstream of the GOP now.7
As Representative Mary Miller embarked on her first congressional campaign, she described herself in salt-of-the-earth, all-American terms: a mother, grandmother and farmer who embodied the “Midwestern values of faith, family and freedom.”
“Hard work, using God-given talents, and loving each other well,” a voice declared over video clips of Ms. Miller, a 63-year-old Illinois Republican, embracing her family, praying and walking on her farm in an ad in early 2020.
“In the world today,” the ad continued, “we could use a lot more of this.”
But there is another side to Ms. Miller’s wholesome image. Since entering Congress, she has routinely vilified Democrats and liberals, calling them “evil” communists beholden to China who want to “destroy” America and its culture. And President Biden’s plan, she seethed on Twitter this spring, is to “flood our country with terrorists, fentanyl, child traffickers, and MS-13 gang members.”
This is Bircher stuff supercharged, fascist and nativist to a greater degree — and to an audience larger and broader — than Grandfather Koch or Robert Welch or Ronald Reagan could have dreamed of.
Meanwhile, Democrats are running on abortion rights and GOP threats to Social Security and Medicare — solid issues in better times — while ignoring or sometimes denying the economic pain afflicting significant quantities of people. Republicans are trying to meet the Democratic sense of urgency about foundational rights under assault with the sense that the entire country is in flames, economically tormented, with a fatally compromised electoral system (when Republicans lose) to boot.
Who is more enthused; who is more frightened?
The Black Keys, “Dropout Boogie;” I don’t understand why so many people hate on these guys. Funke and The Two Toned Baby’s “Battles;” I could see how people would have strong opinions about them. Wayne Shorter, too, inspires opinions. I listened to “Peaches and Cream,” one of his less taxing albums, followed by a compilation of great Eric Dolphy performances entitled “Sugar,” an odd choice by the label. At nearly two hours, the Dolphy album played us out.
And that, comrades, is all I got. Take care, be well.