Mediaboss Marketing

Reading president Obama's new book took me back to that November night in 2008 when after eight years of Cheney's endless wars we heard that an anti-war African-American man had won in the world's most powerful democracy. It was a moment of hope and renewal. And for me a moment of vindication. I had just won a bet. One of my colleagues, a senior anchor, had refused to believe when I told him that white America could choose a black president. In my nave exuberance I had challenged him to a bet in front of a live audience. At the time he accepted the challenge. But when results arrived I dont think he showed any inclination towards even acknowledging that he had lost the bet. Ecstatic about what I deemed a triumph of fundamental human decency over ugly stereotypes, I did not push my luck. The world was a good place, I knew it, and my vulnerabilities and ego insignificant in comparison.

Life would take a few more years to disabuse me of any false hope. Obama was a force of hope and America was fundamentally good. But the world was broken and cosmetic changes could not change that. Now as Obama writes one remembers that on that night another force was born that would do great harm to the world. McCain was a decent man and he proved it to the very end. But his running mate, chosen for token female participation and devoid of any outstanding credentials that unnerved strongmen around her, would take electoral rejection to her heart and make it personal. In her anger she would mainstream nativist talking points and spew borderline racist nonsense. Her failed candidature later attracted the likes of Steve Bannon, who even made a documentary on her life calledThe Undefeated. Later Bannon would latch onto the Tea Party movement and bring his racism to the Republican mainstream. In the end, it all led to the hot mess the US finds itself in.

When youre the first black president with the middle name Hussein' and have won on a Democratic ticket you must prove every single day that youre every bit as competent and patriotic as a white man, not a Muslim and tough on national security. Whether he was able to do justice to all will only be decided by history. But if we thought his victory would fix a broken world we could not be more wrong. The forces of darkness can cause damage even in broad daylight. Those forces kept working, sponsoring hate around the world. And then dominoes began to fall. Hardliners were rising like rabbits raising their heads in a hutch. Netanyahu won in Israel. A Nazi-inspired Hindutva party triumphed in India. Race fanatics started rising in Europe. Religious and authoritarian extremists had a field day in the Muslim world. Then Brexit happened and eventually Trump won. The arc of the immoral universe was complete.

One example of this broken world is Trump's refusal to concede after an electoral drubbing at the hand of a man he publicly accused of being an invalid. I still like to believe there is a good, patriotic man hiding somewhere in there. But how deep that man might be a hostage by the alt-right propaganda, personal greed and opportunism, and gullibility is anybodys guess. I recall on the day of the first presidential debate Alex Jones continued to claim on his show that Biden was a demon possessed zombie who would fall apart at Trump's first sight. And when that didnt happen he went on claiming that many litres of blood had been artificially pumped into his veins to make him look alive. This practice he claims is called plumping. When you are inhaling propaganda emanating from such a broken mindset you are likely to believe that a supercomputer called hammer and a software called scorecard could help steal the election. Just some more alt-right trivia: Biden is a half-dead zombie because he accepted to be Obamas vice-president, something a conscientious white Christian man would never do.

The second proof of a world broken beyond repair is the set of evidences presented by the Pakistani Foreign Office and army regarding India's alleged terrorist sponsorship in Pakistan. I call it alleged just out of the sheer need to preserve journalistic integrity. Otherwise, when you have already read the leaked FinCEN reports on the involvement of Indian banks (especially Punjab National Bank) in terror sponsorship and then you see a PNB receipt, showing a money transfer to the anti-Pakistan terrorists hiding in Afghanistan, flashed on the screen you know this is a real terror money trail. Many have speculated that Pakistan unveiled this evidence because it wants to influence the incoming Biden administration. I believe it did so because it worries the Modi government uses international turmoil and leadership vacuum from a messy transition to further indulge in adventurism and exposing it now may pre-empt that. And on top I came across some fascinating arguments from Indian pundits. The world knew this was a comeuppance for decades-long separatist sponsorship by Islamabad, they claimed. Sure geniuses, but thats not how it is supposed to work. You punish someone when some excess is commitment, not when someone has already atoned for mistakes. Even if your blinkered worldview leads you to believe Pakistan is not moving in the right direction you will concede that it is not moving in the wrong direction. And under Modi India has covered light years of the wrong territory. Broken. See.

The third example is of the South Asian reaction to Kamala Harris victory. While for the saffron-clad Modi bhakts she is not Indian enough, to many Pakistanis she is just another Indian. I have no solution to Modi's benightedness but I am disappointed in the Pakistanis who think this way. One, every South Asian should be proud that one of us has reached that high office. Two, South Asian nations should stop asking the diaspora to do more for them and strive to ensure that basic decency returns to the international order so the diaspora can survive the rising tide of nativism. Three, if India is turning into a dystopia the least Pakistan and other South Asian nations can do is reach out to the expat South Asians and remind them they have other places to call home, which even if are not perfect are places where good people have not given up the fight. Try empathy sometime. Its a miracle drug.

And while the world is already so broken we face devastating blows like the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying global economic meltdown. While the world should have been uniting to defeat new common enemies we are busy inventing new cold wars.

And now the real question: can all of this be fixed? The answer is, yes. But will it? Based on the long history of human instincts I would hazard a no. I refuse to believe in the fairytale of a light at the end of this long, long dark tunnel. The arc of this dark universe seems to bend towards more darkness. I will be happy to be proven wrong. But so far it looks like a universe meant for the Palins, Bannons, and Modis around us.

Read this article:
Arc of the immoral universe - The Express Tribune

Donald Trump's attempts to steal the election are fruitless. His legal theater is going nowhere, and it's becoming apparent that this is more about shaking down credulous supporters for cash than about actually overturning the election results. Michigan pounded another nail in Trump's coffin Tuesday, when two Republicans who were blocking the vote certification in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, relented in the face of public outrage. It's all over but the grifting, which will likely continue as long as Trump keeps getting people to give him money for his "legal defense" money that is being funneled through a PAC and likely straight into Trump's pocket.

Yet the Republican establishment is still tiptoeing around Trump, coddling his fragile ego by refusing to admit he lost the election. Some are going a step further, such as South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been exerting pressure on state officials to toss out legally-cast ballots. Why are all these Republicans so afraid of Trump, who will no longer be president in 63 days?

The main reason appears to be that Republicans really are worried about their electoral prospects after Trump. The record Democratic turnout in the 2020 election President-elect Joe Biden turned out 14 million more voters than Hillary Clinton in 2016 caused many Republicans down-ballot from Trumpto sweat their re-election prospects. Luckily for them, however,Trump also turned out an eye-popping 10 million new voters, which was enough to save the skins of many GOP candidates, even as Trump lost by slender margins in swing states.

Trump is a turnout machine for Republicans, who have been desperately casting around for years now for a way to save their party despite demographic changes that make the Democrats more popular among voters. The question of whether there will beTrumpism after Trump nowdogsboth Republicans who want to replicate their electoral successes under the reality TV president and Democrats who dearly hopethis whole disaster was an anomaly.

"[S]ome conservative opinion leaders are already looking forward to a post-Trump future where the viable things about the 45th president can be neatly separated from his troublesome persona," Ed Kilgore writes for New York.

He cites "a representative fantasy" by right-wing writer Kristin Tate at The Hill, wholongs for a "Republican with the political positions of Trump, but without decades of tabloid fodder," proposing that candidate might avoid "the bandwagon effect of suburban voters eager to show their public disapproval of his latest action."

Kilgore explores the various hopes that Republicans have for a "new Trump."Will it be Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Bible-thumper straight out of "The Handmaid's Tale" who has some crossover appeal for his occasional swipes at corporate America (though mostly for itsperceived degeneracy)? Or Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who brings the racism and militant neofascism of Trump, but without the gleeful sleaze of a shameless sexual assailant?

These choices expose whyRepublicans fear that there maybe no way to haveTrumpism without Trump. Those guys and other contenders areall missing the secret sauce that helped Trump recruit so heavily among non-voters and infrequent voters. And no, it's not his so-called charisma.

What Trump really has going for him is what I call the "crackpot factor."Trump speaks to voters who share the racism and sexism of typical GOP voters, but who often don't vote because they think politics is boring and areawash in conspiracy theories about how the system is "rigged."Those voters saw a kindred spirit in Trump, a man who speaks fluent conspiracy theory and who got his start in politics by promoting claims that Barack Obama wasn't a native-born U.S. citizen.

Before the 2020 election, the team at FiveThirtyEight took a deep dive on the views of people who vote infrequently or not at all. There's a lot of reasons for non-voting, such as a belief it doesn't matter orthe obstacles that make voting difficult, but oneimportant factor was a lack of trust in the system. For some voters, especially nonwhite voters or liberal-leaning voters, this is unfortunately a realistic assessment of the situation, where social progress often feels glacial and voting doesn't seem to make much difference.

But for right-leaning voters, I suspect a lot of this distrust flows from a conspiratorial mindset, born from a steady diet of misinformationthat has been made all too readily available bythe internet. These are the types that populate the audience forJoe Rogan and Alex Jones. These are people whohate Democrats but also feel alienated bythe religiosity and elitism of mainstream Republicans, and turn to "alternative" sources of information that are thick with paranoid conspiracy theories. Trump, who indulged the same"alternative facts" that they enjoy,stirred something in them that other Republicans simply couldn't.

In 2014, Pew Research, using extensive data, developed a political typology that sorted Americans into sixgroups. Two of the Republican-leaning ones are incredibly familiar topolitical observers, the "steadfast conservatives" and "business conservatives,"or, respectively,the religious right and the rich folks whoare in itfor the tax cuts.

But they also detected an emerging group, which they deemed "young outsiders," who "do not have a strong allegiance to the Republican Party" and, in fact, "tend to dislikebothpolitical parties."These voters registered as "socially liberal,"insofar as they don't support bans on abortion or gay marriage and, importantly, aren't especiallyreligious.

But the "young outsiders" doshare the racism of traditional conservatives. They are easily riled up by thedemonization of social spending programs like Obamacare or food stamps They approve of programs, like Medicare, that are viewed as benefiting white people. They're in favorlegal marijuana butoppose gun control. And they vote farless often than other conservatives.

I personally believe that the Pew research failed to capturehow sexist this group is. The usual proxy questions to measure sexism, such as attitudes towards abortion, simply aren't adequate in this context. I suspect this group, while not as opposed to abortion as otherconservatives, is angry about other feminist concernssuch as the #MeToo movement, where men's privilegeto mistreat women are being attacked.

These are, I suspect, the Gamergaters and the alt-right types who flocked to Trump in the years after this survey. They gobble down internet conspiracy theories like QAnon, which creates engagement with right-wingpolitics for those who aren't religious conservatives or business elites. They like to imagine that embracing more authoritarian attitudes is an "edgy" revolt against liberalism. They are overwhelmingly white (though 14% are Hispanic), and under 50 years old. While more than half of those defined as"strong liberals" are college graduates, three-quarters of the "young outsiders"don't havecollege diplomas.

Trump gota whole lot of those people who don't usually vote to do so, turningout more non-college-educated white voters in 2016, for example, than Mitt Romney did in 2012. These votersoverlooked his alliance withthe religious right and were instead fixated on his playboy persona, his over-the-top sexism and racismand, of course, his sweeping embrace of nutbar conspiracy theories of all kinds.

Over the past four years, everything that Trump's opponents hate about him his grossness, his cruelty to women and people of color, his rejection of the polite norms of D.C. politicsand, of course, his conspiracy theories likely generated even more enthusiasm from this subset of voters that other Republicans have had trouble capturing or motivating.

That's why it's reasonable to be skeptical aboutthe likely success of the current crop of wannabe Trumps. Hawley's religiosity and culture-war rigiditywon't play well with these Trump Republicans whoare just fine with premarital sex and legal weed, even if they're not fond of women having the right to file sexual harassment complaints. Cotton may roll out fascist fantasies that appeal to the QAnoners and the alt-right, but he's a stiff and, I suspect, won'tappeal to those who enjoy Trump's wrestling-heel gift forinsulting and degrading people. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who also wants to be the next Trump, has intense weenie energy that makes it hard for him to win these people over.

Trump speaks to the great American crackpot, especially the younger set that was otherwise more interested in perusing conspiracy theory websites or "pick-up artist" forums than in voting. These folks won't be moved by Hawley's promise ofa handmaid in every bed or Cotton's promise of stormtroopers on the streets. In the face of the growing Democratic majority, Republicans need this subset ofcrank voters, who don't care about old-school culture-war fights over abortion or evolution, but sure do love QAnon. Without Trump's demented tweeting and his willingness to leave empirical reality behind, it's not clear how the GOP cankeep the crank vote going.

Read more here:
The crackpot factor: Why the GOP is worried about turning out the vote after Trump - Salon

Satire is ridicule of the powerful, or at least it should be. Clown is another form of comedy, but in the hands of Sacha Baron Cohen it is also a way of puncturing the pomposity of the mighty and self-important.

In his early Ali G interviews with the foolishly famous, Donald Trump included,they nearly all fell for it, too vain to realise the ruse being played on them. There were rare exceptions like the late Tony Benn, who immediately challenged Ali Gs use of crude sexist language, his dignity shining through.

Baron Cohen has now returned in a sequel to his hit Borat, the Kazakh clownwho exposed the prejudice and hypocrisy of George WBushs America back in 2006. No one can doubt the English actor's bravery - in that first film he stood in front of a stadium full of foaming red-faced Republicans and made them boo him in fury, causing a horse to collapse amid the mayhem.

In his reprise of Borat, he returns to his fictive version of the central Asian nation, with Borat in prison and given a second chance by the countrys thuggish president, who wants Donald Trump (now US president) to include him among his friends, sending Borat back to America to deliver a gift to the orange one.

The Kazakhstan of Borat is a post-Soviet backwater where there are no mobile phones, people live in shacksand young wives are kept in cages, while the national festival is the running of the Jew".In other words, its a gruesome conjuring of Muslim central Asia, where people cheerfully live under a veil of hatred, misogyny and incest.

This may all be a cosmic joke that allows Borat to go to the US and expose the prejudices and ignorance of evangelical America and Trumps Republicans, which he does brilliantly. On the other hand, as satire it is a very uneasy mix - punching up at right-wing America, while punching down against a developing country and a whole swathe of humanity -Asian Muslims.

The comedian fatally undermines himself - or worse, is smuggling prejudice beneath a liberal facade

In Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Baron Cohen forms a double act with Bulgarian actor Maria Bakalova. She steals the show as his plucky, wildly unschooled daughter, who comes with him to America and makes each set-up zing with a tone-perfect mix of innocence and sass.

In the most gobsmacking scene of the film, and there are a few of these, she honey traps former New York mayor and Trumps liar in chief, Rudy Giuliani,in an interview at a hotelwhich, after some queasy flirtation, ends up in the bedroom. Only thelast-minute entry of Borat in underwear halts proceedings. Even as Rudyfiddles with his flies, Bakalova remains unflappable.

These moments of undeniable genius, though, cant get us away from the fundamental flaw in Baron Cohens comedic ouvre. For someone whose Jewishness is so evidently part of his motive in exposing the prejudice of his victims, the comedian fatally undermines himself - or worse, is smuggling prejudice beneath a liberal facade. Baron Cohen is the king of wince-making bad taste. We love his irreverence, but it comes with a hefty dose of bigotry.

In probably the most outrageous bit of historical revisionism, the Kazakhs are proud of their purported role in hosting the Holocaust death camps. In the US, Bakalova is shocked when she discovers a far-right Facebook page denying the Holocaust, believing it to be true, and her genocidal national pride now shattered.

This little joke of Baron Cohens can hardly be an accident, and presumably someone so sharply intelligent cannot have missed that this is the reverse of the historical truth. Kazakhstan was a refuge for thousands of Jews during the Second World War, as they fled eastwards from the invading Nazi forces, who massacred Jews in the wake of Hitlers Operation Barbarossa. Its one thing to make village idiot jokes, its another to falsely accuse a nation of hosting the Holocaust.

Its one thing to make village idiot jokes, its another to falsely accuse a nation of hosting the Holocaust

So we have a real lie, wrapped up in the filmmakers lie. To reverse the history of the Second World War, and accuse a former Soviet state of participating in the Holocaust, when in reality it was the Soviets who fought the Nazis at the cost of 26 million dead, and liberated Auschwitz, cannot be dismissed as mere comedic licence. It is the kind of historical revisionism that only the far right, and the Trumps of this world, would engage in. Baron Cohen is doing what hes sending up.

The actor-comedian has made a career in playing fools who are inescapably Muslim, from Ali G to Borat to The Dictator, a little disguised Muammar Gaddafi. To be fair to him, hes also sent up others, from an Austrian fashion designer to an Israeli martial arts instructor inWho is America?

With his tremendous success he has also showed up many a wealthy celebrity with his generous donations to Syrian refugees, and he is peerless in exposing the bigotry of Americas politics, gun culture and religious extremism.

In this newfilm, he meets an old Jewish lady while absurdly disguised as a Jew with a ridiculous prosthetic nose. She responds with love and understanding to the Jew-phobic Kazakh. But his lesson in antisemitism is wrapped up in Islamophobia (Borat believes the Jew will suck his blood).

No group can be immune from comedy, but in a world in which actual history is being falsified in order to mainstream far right ideas, blaming central Asian Muslims for the Holocaust is up there with the worst that any Trump alt-right revisionism has to offer. And its not even very funny.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Read the original here:
Borat is brilliant, but its Holocaust jokes are beyond the pale - Middle East Eye

Peter Jukes looks at the rise and fall of the dark money and online culture war strategies that put Donald Trump in the White House and pushed Britain out of the EUExporting Polarisation

For most of the last 40 years, British domestic politics has been out of synch with the United States. Though Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher composed a formidable Cold War alliance and promoted the Anglo Saxon model of privatisation and deregulation, the reality of every day cultural life around politics in the US was very different from the UK at the time.

I lived in Boston as an exchange student at an American high school in the early 80s and, compared to the Punk-era Britain I had left behind, the political scene was much more consensual and polite. My teachers were a mix of small c conservatives and former Vietnam War protestors, but discussions were fluid and, unpredictably, likely to arrive at an agreement. Among the pupils, few would think of not dating someone because of political allegiance. This was echoed in the broader political culture. In Congress at that time, politicians would cross the floor and vote across party lines. There was still a belief in bipartisanship in contrast to the grim, grey UK I returned to.

Under the cosh of Thatcherism, nuclear re-armament and radical industrial restructuring, there was no way you could snog someone for long as a British student in the 80s without ending up asking the question: whose side are you on?The dirty war in Northern Ireland, the miners strike, the Conservative Party Brighton bombing, Murdochs Wapping dispute, CND women at Greenham Common, City of Londons Big Bang, Harry Enfields Loadsamoney, Yuppies, Sloane Rangers and the Looney Left during that decade it was almost impossible to chat with a London cabbie or have a family Sunday lunch without an unpalatable political argument.

Twenty years later, all that had reversed. When I returned to live and work in the United States again in the early noughties, the polarisation of Britains Thatcher years seemed to have been exported there.

Issues like gay marriage, abortion, gun control, religion they were intractable discussions for Americans, which you avoided raising at the diner or a bar, for fear of ostracism and permanent estrangement. American political culture had polarised and cocooned, with Democrats telling me theyd never date a Republican, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, in Britain, under the premierships of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and even heir to Blair David Cameron, the idea of a culture war over matters of sexual orientation, religious observance, or the role of socialised healthcare and gun control seemed unlikely and vaguely absurd. Even the right-wing tabloid the Sun used a Barack Obama lookalike poster for David Camerons 2010 election campaign with the slogan Yes, we Cam!

I remember remarking to an American friend around that time that I was glad our Conservative Party wasnt infected by the atavistic, vote-suppressing extreme politics of the American Conservative right.

How blind I was about what was to happen.

The key moment for the unleashing of hard-right US Conservatism into UK politics was the US Supreme Court Ruling: Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission in 2010.

Citizens United was an activist group chaired by David Bossie, who went on to be Donald Trumps deputy campaign manager in 2016 (hes still working for him now trying to overturn the recent election result). In 2010, Bossie managed to revise a law which prohibited for-profit and not-for-profit corporations from advertising or broadcasting political messages during elections or primaries. The legal judgment was based on the constitutional first amendment right of free speech and the Supreme Court effectively ruled that these corporations were people and had the same rights to political self-expression as individuals.

Whatever the metaphysical import of this ruling, the practical effect was to unleash unlimited spending on political campaigns by American corporations and rich individuals in vehicles such as SuperPacs and that wave of money soon hit the UK and jolted British politics to the right.

The networks to receive this influx of cash were already in place. Sir Anthony Fisher, an Eton-educated businessman, having made his money from US-style intensive chicken farming and the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in 1955, set up the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US in 1981. Funded by the oil industry giants, big tobacco, and other right-wing not-for-profits like the Koch Brothers Foundation, it acted as a transatlantic umbrella for a range of libertarian and free-market think tanks.

The Atlas networks role in pushing for Britain to leave the EU was apparent when leading Brexiter and former MEP Daniel Hannan delivered its Toast to Freedom in New York in 2018 and celebrated the factory-farmed broiler chicken as a symbol of liberty. The lowering of food hygiene and factory farming standards to US levels has been touted as one of the main benefits of Brexit at least to those in the food industry.

But the Citizens United overspill, and its emphasis on free speech, went much further than these obvious commercial and lobbying networks in the UK, and had a toxic effect on the culture of British politics.

One hidden channel for right-wing US thinking and practice was the Young Britons Foundation (YBF), a self-described Conservative madrasa and a UK offshoot of the Young Americas Foundation (YAF), which was funded by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.

For 12 years, until it was closed down over allegations of bullying after the suicide of a young Conservative activist in 2015, the YBF hosted some of the key figures who led Britain to Brexit.

Hannan was the YBF president. Matt Richardson, who went on to be the secretary of Nigel Farages UKIP, was the executive director. Matthew Elliot, of the TaxPayers Alliance at 55 Tufton Street and destined to become executive director of Boris Johnsons Vote Leave campaign, hosted talks and panels.

Apart from the potential channels for US dark money, the striking thing is the change of tone ushered into Conservative politics through the Young Britons Foundation.

A key moment was its 10th anniversary conference at Churchill College, Cambridge in 2013. Steve Bannon, who was then the managing director of the Alt-right website Breitbart, was a major presence, discussing the role of online campaigning with the Guido Fawkes political editor Harry Cole, and recruiting their fellow panellist Raheem Kassam to run his London branch.

Bannon had also just co-founded the notorious digital campaigning company Cambridge Analytica which would target individuals based on their fears and paranoias. Bannon called this combination of news and psychometric targeting his weapons which he would use, in the UK too it would seem, to flood the zone with sh*t.

Also billed to appear that weekend was Douglas Murray, associate director the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), to talk about Jihad, Islamism, Israel, the War on Terror and Neo-Conservatism. The founder of the HJS, Dr Alan Mendoza, was also a regular attendee.

According to a founding director and former associate director of the HJS, it began to become around this time a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation. As Nafeez Ahmed has reported in Byline Times, the HJS was also a recipient of dark money from key donors in the US who began to back Donald Trump.

If youre wondering why British political discourse began to degrade, look no further than the arrival of American right-wing conservatism via both the funding of activists and new media outlets which propagated their message.

It is no accident that the UKs culture wars were also triggered by a US Supreme Court ruling over free speech. Free speech was the wedge by which formerly marginal expressions of xenophobic nationalism, racism, and Islamophobia could become central in Britains public debate.

It didnt matter if many of the voices expressing these opinions online were paid for by multiple accounts, boosted by dark digital analytics, or indeed often outright replicants run by troll farms hosted and funded by hostile foreign countries. If the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations were people, why not networks of bots and troll armies?

And we fell for it. Millions of Brits and Americans read and believed opinions and facts effectively generated by robots. The pioneer of computing, Alan Turing, once suggested that artificial intelligence would arrive when, during a conversation, we failed to spot the difference between a computer and a person. We failed the Turing test, politically, in 2016.

The media of the 20th Century was once described by the philosopher Noam Chomsky as manufacturing consent. By the time of Britains EU Referendum and Donald Trumps election in 2016, with most people receiving their news and opinions through algorithms devised by social media giants like Facebook and YouTube, this was effectively replaced by the automation of consent.

Some people seek to minimise this, pointing to the existing racial and economic fissures in British and American society that made them both ripe for populism, particularly after the financial crash of 2008. But just one in 50 of the votes cast in the EU Referendum, or 70,000 votes in the US Rust Belt states in the 2016 Presidential Election, won the twin shock victories either side of the Atlantic.Did the intervention of these dark-money-funded culture war interventions make enough of a difference to tip things over the edge?

The protagonists certainly thought so. Nigel Farage raised a pint after the EU Referendum victory to thank Bannon and Breitbart we couldnt have done it without you while Trump declared: Im Mr Brexit plus plus plus.

The failure of Donald Trump to secure a second term is a severe setback to that transatlantic Alt-right alliance of libertarians and neo-nationalists.

The prospect of a US/UK trade deal with Joe Biden as President, though it was never going to be that favourable to Britain, is even more problematic given different priorities in the White House, and Congresss demonstrable objection to anything that would undermine the internationally-binding Good Friday Agreement.

Boris Johnsons Internal Market Bill, currently being debated in Parliament, threatens to break more international treaties and, if not directly punished, will undermine the prestige and reliability of Britain in any other future negotiations.

On a personal level, Johnson has many fences to mend with the President-elect, because of his perceived proximity to Bannon and Trump, and his frankly racist remarks about Barack Obamas attitude about Brexit stemming from his antipathy to Britain because of his part-Kenyan ancestry. Biden has called Johnson the physical and emotional clone of Donald Trump.

More profoundly, the media and lobbying networks around MAGA and Brexit are going to have much less influence in Washington, where they matter. Steve Bannon is currently indicted for fraud and, with a Biden nominee leading the Department of Justice, an unredacted version ofSpecial Counsel Robert Muellers report on Russian interference could reveal more transatlantic connections with Vladimir Putins Russia.

Other ongoing FBI investigations into campaign finance and counter-intelligence will expose more about Trumps various business dealings with hostile foreign powers and those could entrammel some key Brexiters.

Many on the UK right, and not just Farage and his Brexit Party outriders, were heavily invested in a Trump second term. We could soon discover why.

But beyond any criminal or intelligence liability, the simultaneous arrival of Biden and Brexit in January next year will make the UK even more irrelevant to the global considerations of a new US Government.

As a result, British think tanks will be of less interest to US for-profit and not-for-profit corporations. With no place at the EU table and with a declining economy, hit by the dual shock of leaving the Single Market and the worst Coronavirus impact of the G7 nations, were just not in crude financial terms such a key asset. And right-wing British activists will receive fewer remittances of dark money as a result.

The US culture wars were always designed to create wedge issues around guns, religion, education, race and class to get working-class Americans, particularly in the South, to vote against their economic interests and for tax cuts for a wealthy elite because, at least, they shared the same nominal values.

This Southern Strategy was echoed by Johnson and Dominic Cummings in the 2019 General Election and the apparent collapse of the Labour Red Wall in north-eastern constituencies. It led to a stunning tactical victory, but the long-term strategic consequences are still moot. Trumps Rust Belt defence collapsed after one term. This does not bode well for the Conservative Partys current rhetoric pitting working-class voters against metropolitan elites.

When it comes to Britains role in American culture wars, as Steve Bannon identified early on, the UK was a bridgehead in the battle for the populist right. With its reputation (at least in the US) for prudence, propriety and stiff upper lip sobriety as Bannon told his head of research at Cambridge Analytica Chris Wylie in 2014 Britain is an exemplar. If the UK fell for Bannons brand of nationalist populism, the US would be likely to follow and the EU collapse: Brexit would be a lesson to everyone.

Well, Brexit was a lesson to everyone a bad one dont, whatever you do, follow. The countrys reputation for transparency and reasonableness is permanently tarnished: both its economy and soft power influence are badly trashed. The disparate nations of the United Kingdom are more in danger of breaking up than they have been for decades and their people are restive, divided and destined to continue the Alt-right battles about wokeness and cultural Marxism long after they have lost any wider resonance.

In that way, the transatlantic alliance of dark money and polarisation is over. We are on our own. Britain served its role as part of a larger offensive but it is now abandoned like a rusting aircraft carrier waiting to be sold for scrap. We may remain as a rump Trumpocracy, and our think tanks will still receive dribbles of cash from the US Conservative right. But we will be increasingly irrelevant and rapidly ignored, and then will finally have to confront our own demons without blaming or relying on monsters from abroad.

View original post here:
Citizens Disunited: The End of the Transatlantic Trumpist Alliance - Byline Times

This weekend, the Denier Roundup had a rare chance to observe a concentrated group of people steadfastly refusing to acknowledge reality in the real world, instead of online. We didnt go looking for the circus, but when some thousands of them decided to come to DC, during another surge of the pandemic many of them refuse to even really acknowledge, with the express purpose of claiming their candidate won an election he very much lost we couldnt resist the call of duty.

By Climate Denier Roundup

The impetus for this somewhat impromptu gathering were the celebrations around the world as people spontaneously hit the streets to revel in Trumps loss and President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harriss win. In response, a smattering of publicity-seekers glommed on to an existing event permit in DC. It brought in the likes of racist Trump-orbiting speakers like Sebastian I swore a lifelong oath to the Nazi-collaborating Hungarian nationalist group Vitzi Rend, as indicated by my taking of v. as a middle initialandwearing its medal to Trumps Inauguration L v. Gorka. There was also a speaker who led the crowd in a chant of a Q-Anon slogan, and presumably some very fine (mostly) white people and of course Trump flags.

And thats the problem with this loser festival. Theyre not just pathetically incapable of accepting that Trump lost the 2020 election by both the popular vote and the electoral college; theyre also actively trying to delegitimize President-elect Biden, force their way into a second Trump term, and dismantle the entire notion of democracy.

Gorka, for example, was actively encouraging the assembled crowd of a few thousand maskless faces in front of the Supreme Court to lobby their local electoral college electors to disregard the legitimate election results, which they are told was rigged and manipulated by Democrats (despite key portions of multiple swing states election infrastructure being controlled by Republicans) and instead cast electoral ballots for Trump so that he could remain in power.

This wasnt just one last hit of the ol Trump Rally high, it was an incitement to overthrow the election, to ignore its results, and keep fighting for Trump. And while that may mean, for many of the attendees, simply continuing to feed his email marketing machine their social security checks, for some it was a much more literal message, and the mixing of those groups is what mainstreams fascism.

Because, along with the families and the alt-right media personalities that consider Fox News part of the lamestream media (because even Fox wont have them on), were groups like the Proud Boys, for whom political violence is aprerequisite for advancementwithin their organization. And they werent there to be nice, and celebrate four great years of owning the libs, they were there to intimidate the predominantly Black residents of DC, and to then pick fights with their perceived enemies: people who oppose fascism. This is not exaggeration or hyperbole. One Proud Boy leader, Kyle Chapman,actually resigned last weekbecause he thought the group that embraces western chauvanism as a euphemism for its age-old bigotry wasnt sufficientlyhomophobic, racist, and anti-semitic. Chapman is known by followers asBased Stickmanbecause of a picture that went viral of him attacking a Trump protestor with a leaded stick in 2017.

So, this wasnt just a bunch of Fox-fried Boomers throwing a politically impotent meme-fest, (though it was also definitely that). It was an attempt to radicalize the audience to do anything they could to overthrow the election an audience that included people for whom political violence is a proud rite of passage.

This was plain from the very start. The rallys visitors to DC, a (farfromperfect) liberal, multicultural, multiracial city, made forBlack Lives Matter Plazaas soon as they arrived on

Friday night. Their first order of business? Ripping down the memorial posters for Breonna Taylor and other victims of racist policing that had been adorned to the fence Trump had erected around the White House.

Nevertheless, many called for the people of DC to stay home, ignore the influx of fascists into the streets of our nations capital, to humor their little show and let them rally in peace. We should cede the public square, they implicitly advised their millions of Twitter followers, to let these fascists lick their wounds in peace, in public, by dominating the streets of DC.

But on Saturday morning, local organizations put out the call for those who could to show up, so that the people who fought for Black lives to matter could at least hold on to that space. Otherwise it would be bastardized by the very politically-cultivated racism and hatred that required the words BLACK LIVES MATTER to be written in 35-foot letters down 16th Street, as a reminder to the man currentlyoccupying the Peoples House, in the first place.

Ceding public spaces to election-denying fascists would do nothing to dissuade them from coming back, and preemptive surrender would only embolden them further to believe their violence is condoned by those who dont actively oppose it.

This big, white, cis-straight, able-bodied, right-down-the-street, masculine-presenting, Denier Roundup writer, got that call for help protecting BLM Plaza, so he masked up, and headed out

Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

Link:
Deniers In The Wild: A roundup from Saturday's racist-right rally denying Trump's loss - Red, Green, and Blue