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The Washington Post published a picture of Stacey Abrams wearing a cape this weekend.

You may have seen it, since in certain corners of the conservative news media, this fawning coverage of the becaped former state representative and vice-presidential hopeful was the single most noteworthy piece of news from the weekend.

And Id like to preface the impending rant by saying, for the record, that in the narrowest possible sense, these conservative media critics have a sliver of a point. It is true that the number of glowing profiles given over to a failed gubernatorial candidate and long-shot vice presidential contender is absurd. And yes, it is impossible to imagine a losing Republican candidate being given this sort of treatment.

And yes, its telling that the biggest media outlets are unable to have even a modicum of self-awareness in situations like this. I wish they would stop. (See also: Cuomo, Andrew).

But while the professional media critics, anti-anti-Trumpers, and assorted both-siders were obsessing over the Stacey Abrams Caped Crusader feature, there were some other things happening in the actual real world.

Here are some of them:

(1) The president of the United States quote-tweeted an avowed alt-right account that flirts with Holocaust denial,

(2) The president also texted supporters false allegations that he had been illegally spied on by the previous vice president.

(3) The president also fired another independent inspector general without providing cause.

(4) The official American death toll from COVID-19 inched close to 90,000 souls while the president spent his time live tweeting cable TV.

(5) One of the presidents large adult sons grotesquely suggested that Joe Biden is a pedophile.

(6) Another of his large adult sons claimed that the virus was a hoax perpetrated by the left and the media and that it will disappear after the election.

(7) The President sent a tweet encouraging protesters who aggressively shouted down and chased after a random local news reporter with calls of you are the virus, traitor, and enemy of the people. (Note: This was entry number seven because I even forgot about it until after writing the article because Trump does so much insane stuff every day)

But who could find the time to care about any of this when the Washington Post publishes a picture of Stacey Abrams in a cape. #Capegate. What an outrage.

Three and a half years into the Trump experiment, the president is still using chaff to prevent people from zeroing in on any one of his actions. He veers from incident to incidentat any point in U.S. history, any of the above seven items would have been an all-encompassing scandal, a few couldve been career enders. Meanwhile, Trumps defenders run content farms of counter scandals which they litigate and re-litigate and then litigate some more. Which has the effect of paralyzing the mainstream media, which has produced a great deal of good journalism, but has been unable to change its fundamental priorities, which create recency bias, kabuki balance, and an evolutionary imperative for clicks.

The current conservative content farm scandal is Obamagate, in which Trump has fabricated an espionage claim against both his predecessor and general election opponent. This scandal has been a public-private partnership, created both with the tools of the federal government as well as Trumps campaign and its proxies in conservative media.

The very creation of this fake scandal is, as I wrote last week, being largely treated as a sideshow by those who either think it too stupid to be taken seriously or dont understand how the Department of Justice and director of National Intelligence are leveraging government assets in order to aid the presidents reelection campaign.

For those who have not followed it, the tl;dr of what the government is doing is this:

The Department of Justice has deputized U.S. Attorney John Durham to oversee a team of investigators aimed at looking into whether the Russia investigation was actually a Deep State plot. Durham has access to a grand jury and the resources to scour the globe. Meanwhile the acting director of National Intelligence, someone whose main experience for the job was pleasing President Trump with his aggressive trolling of reporters on Twitter, is selectively leaking innocuous intelligence gathering efforts in order to advance this conspiratorial narrative.

These leaks, in turn, are being driven by the Trump campaign. On Saturday the president used the leads from the director of National Intelligence to advance an elaborate lie that accuses his opponent of committing illegal espionage against him.

Just read that sentence again.

The president used the leads from the director of National Intelligence to advance an elaborate lie that accuses his opponent of committing illegal espionage against him.

This is the most outrageous and pernicious lie that a president has levied against his opponent in my lifetime.

And despite the president himself elevating this lie on Saturday, it was not discussed on front pages across the country. Forget front pages, its hard to find any article at all addressing the Presidents insane charges.

Most coverage of the issue is framed around discussing whether or not Obama and Biden did anything wrongthere is literally no evidence to suggest that they didrather than focusing on how the Trump administration is guilty of weaponizing American intelligence agencies for political ends by perpetrating this falsehood.

Drawing historical analogies to Trumps behavior is more or less impossiblethere is no true analog. The best I can do is this: Imagine if, in 2012, President Obama had deputized a U.S. attorney to investigate claims that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush family, while asserting that the GOP engaged in illegal espionage against his campaign because the government was investigating the Tony Rezko scandal. And that he somehow tied Mitt Romney to the fiction, too.

Set aside the fact that this would be Wuhan batshit level crazy that would have caused people to wonder if Obama was even mentally fit for office. There is a 100 percent chance that these actions would have become the all-encompassing scandal for the rest of Obamas administration.

Trumps actions combine the politicization of intelligence, the misuse of tax dollars, and the creation of a phony investigation using the Department of Justice in order to advance the presidents reelection campaign. And thats just the nuts-and-bolts, the stuff you can probe with your hands. The president has also created a propaganda campaign that will lead millions to believe that one party actively spied on the other, further tearing the fabric of our country in ways that wont be repaired for a generation. Or maybe ever.

And if that isnt giving you cause for concern, the president has systematically fired the independent inspectors general overseeing the departments most intertwined with his COVID-19 response and his Obamagate abuses. The fired IGs include the State and Defense Departments, the pandemic response, and the intelligence community. The only person in the Republican Senate majority who seems to give a damn about this is Mitt Romney.

And for good measure the president elevated an avowed white nationalist and Holocaust denier who proceeded to brag about how Trump is helping him get around deplatforming.

Put all this together with beyond the pale defamation and the COVID lies and the Trump family went exponentially further than any previous president in eroding our norms rhetorical, political, and legal and that was just one weekend.

But hey, dont forget that cape pic.

***

Correction:An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Stacey Abrams is a former state senator, she is a former state representative.

Read the original here:
Trumps Weekend of Scandal Was Hiding in Plain Sight - The Bulwark

We fought two world wars in the 20th Century in defence of liberal values in this country. Then, after 9/11, we fought a series of engagements that attempted to impose those same values in other peoples countries. Now, the handle is turning again and even that recent aberration appears a long time ago. A new strategic epoch seems to indicate that we no longer need to go looking for a fight. Conflict will come to us.

The front line is no longer a nameless hillside in Afghanistan but the firewalls inside the computer systems of the power grid or what masquerades as news on social media. The digital revolution and globalisation have, in combination, dramatically increased the vulnerability of Western societies to severe disruption. We no longer have to speculate what a rupture of the distribution systems of the major supermarkets would look like. The creation of a black market in loo rolls at the start of the pandemic was a darkly comic moment but showed just how quickly the normal conventions of an apparently ordered society can unravel. And that wasnt even the result of a break in supply, but simply human frailty; what if the same systems were subject to a sophisticated and concerted cyber-attack?

Ever mindful that it might have to pick up the pieces, Lloyds Insurance conducted a recent study into the implications of a successful cyber-attack on 50 suppliers of the power grid covering the north east of America. It concluded that 93 million people would be without power immediately and for up to two weeks. During that time, and in the biting cold of a New York winter or the suffocating heat of a Washington summer, the immediate consequences of a blackout would be compounded by the secondary effects of opportunist crime and civil unrest, both of which would test the competence of government.

This is not an abstract, hypothetical threat the massive attack against Estonia in 2007 and the 2017 NotPetya malware attack against a variety of Western companies reveal cyber operations as a weapon of choice in contemporary conflict. And its not just the bad guys who are at it. The Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear programme set the standard for cyber intervention and seemed to leave a trail back to America and Israel.

At the same time, Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election by disinformation and fake news and even the faintly risible Iranian attempt to encourage Scottish separatism using the same methods during the 2014 referendum are a matter of public record. Cyber and information operations are being directed against this country on a daily basis in a form of conflict that is pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and rarely attributable. The attack on the Skripal family in Salisbury breathtaking in both its audacity and incompetence showed that chemical attack could also be part of contemporary conflict. What if, on the back of Covid-19, biological weapons became part of this sinister equation too?

Hittite texts written beyond 1000 BC speak of infiltrating people infected with deadly, communicable disease into rival communities in what is probably the first historical reference to biological warfare. The grotesque idea of using disease as an instrument in conflict has come and gone over the subsequent millennia and it was only in 1990 that Gruinard Island, off the west coast of Scotland, was declared safe after it had been used for experiments with weaponised anthrax in 1942. Today, an objective observer might see a Covid-19 death toll that will eventually run into millions, global economic dislocation and debt levels of individual nations that equate to multiples of GDP. These are conditions only normally associated with large scale conflict and is it entirely irrational for nation states, terrorist groups or even criminal organisations to ponder cause and effect?

In 2011, Dutch virologists working at the Erasmus Centre in Rotterdam caused a mutation of the H5N1 (bird flu) virus. Around the same time, research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was working on grafting the H5N1 spike gene on to H1N1 swine flu virus. The mortality rate of bird flu is higher than 50 per cent and an animated academic debate ensued about whether both pieces of research should be published or whether the risk of rogue scientists replicating the work was too great. In the event, the research was published in Science and Nature respectively and is now available in the public domain.

So, bad stuff is out there, but the problem has always been in weaponising it in a way that creates mass dissemination, as the failed attempts of the Aum Shinriyko millenialist cult to use anthrax in Tokyo in the 1990s illustrated. Unfortunately, advances in genetic engineering and delivery techniques mean this challenge becomes ever more soluble and a determined programme could probably overcome the technical hurdles. If it did, a biological weapon would have a number of advantages over other forms of anonymised attack: even miniscule quantities can be lethal; symptoms can have delayed onset; and, subsequent waves of infection can manifest beyond the original attack site. The effect would be pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and perhaps unattributable exactly the fingerprints of contemporary conflict.

Lets go one step further and explore the very boundaries of rational action. Is it inconceivable that a state actor lets call it China for the sake of argument might contemplate a form of biological self-immolation? If it was confident in the ability of its large and compliant population to absorb an epidemic, its ubiquitous security and surveillance apparatus to impose control and with the advantage of foreknowledge, might it seek strategic advantage in creating a pandemic in the certain knowledge that strategic competitors would suffer far more?

It probably is inconceivable but not in the conspiracy-obsessed social media echo chambers that pass for news reportage among the more fevered parts of the American alt-right community. And so this article turns full circle: a piece of thin analysis and opinion feeds a conspiracy debate and adds to the dead weight of fake news that bends our sense of reality. Or, alternatively stated, this is what future conflict might look like.

The implications are profound and beg questions such as: what is now the point of nuclear weapons; how do we deter these forms of attack; and is a defence doctrine built around expeditionary operations and platforms like the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers remotely relevant to the future?

Continue reading here:
After Covid-19, what is the future of conflict? Part 1 - TheArticle

A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound, wrote Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, in his 1862 classic Fathers and Sons.

But for some pictures, Turgenev might be undershooting the mark. Select snapshots are worthy of hours of reflection; others deserve volumes written about them. One recent photo sums up not just Americas politics in 2020, but its culture over the past decade.

On March 4, a photographer caught Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz wearing a gas mask on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the photo, Gaetz is sitting alone, wearing the mask while scrolling through his phone.

Gaetz later tweeted a photo of himself wearing the gas mask while consulting with a staff member.

At the time, only 130 cases of COVID-19 had been identified in the United States, with 11 Americans having died from the virus.

Despite the warnings of the devastation the coronavirus could cause, Gaetz thought it was hilarious to mock people who were trying to sound the alarm about the virus by wearing a full-face gas mask. After all, this was back before Donald Trump was a wartime president, when he was still downplaying the threat from COVID-19, dismissing the concerns of experts, and insisting that it would all go away on its own. As Gaetzs constituents panicked over the arrival of the deadly virus, their elected representative decided to carry Trumps water by ridiculing the people who were trying to warn the public of the looming danger.

But, as we would soon find out, if idiocy were currency, Jeff Bezos would be Gaetzs butler.

Within days, Gaetzs first constituent died of the disease. Around the same time, Gaetz announced that he had been in contact with an attendee at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference and would be self-quarantining for 14 days.

Gaetz said his gas mask stunt was sincere. Thats difficult to believe. Had he been sincere he would have worn a surgical mask and gloves, not a contraption designed for chemical warfare. And his outlandish behavior over the years suggests that theres no reason to grant him the benefit of the doubt. After all, this is the same guy who invited a holocaust-denying white supremacist alt-right troll to the State of the Union speech. The same guy who attempted to blackmail a witness before Congress in order to try to protect Trump.

And Gaetz is the guy who orchestrated a stunt during a presidential impeachment trial that compromised national security. Remember last October when Gaetz and his fellow Republicans staged a sit-in at a secure hearing facility demanding Republicans be allowed to take part in the hearing even when nearly 1-in-4 House Republicans were actually members of the Intelligence, Oversight or Foreign Affairs committeesall of which were allowed to take part in the impeachment inquiries?

But Gaetz isnt the whole story here. In virus-speak, he is merely a symptom of how we got to a place in American politics where trolling has overtaken expertise and self-promotion has eclipsed competence.

People of the future who look back to the photo will see a political era when acting as a loathsome, self-aggrandizing grifter was the quickest way to earn credibility within ones party. An era when no problems were addressed until they had spiralled out of control and seriousness and expertise were viewed with suspicion and contempt.

You can think of this era as Americas Golden Age of Anti-Knowledge. And soon it will have cost upwards of 100,000 Americans their lives.

To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in the virus. But the virus is interested in you.

Whatever happens nextwith the pandemic, with Trumpism, with Americawe will always have that photo to remind us of exactly what this time in our lives was like: A time when toadies like Matt Gaetz tried to ignore mass death with sarcasm. A time where we picked the leader of the free world not because we believed he could manage the ship of state in crisis, but because he seemed very forceful when he fired Meat Loaf that one time on his reality show.

News moves quickly these days, with each days ridiculous headlines supplanted by tomorrows even more absurd ones.

But Gaetzs gas mask photo should stay with us for a very long time, an artifact reminding America how one man gleefully lowered himself to match the moment.

Read more here:
A Picture Is Worth 100,000 Lives - The Bulwark

Some people say it doesnt even exist that its meaningless, or even a term of abuse. But from the 2008 financial crisis to the vote for Brexit in 2016, from the rise of the alt-right to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no way of properly grasping our world without thinking about how neoliberalism informs our politics and economy.

But what is it? Broadly speaking, neoliberalism can be defined as the raft of policies and overarching political ethos that enabled governments in the late-1970s to turn away from state-directed economic planning, towards an economic model that extended competitive markets into every sphere of human activity and initiated the reign of finance capital (the kind dreamed up in the City of London and Wall Street) by removing constraints on capital mobility.

Importantly, neoliberalism is not merely a policy agenda but also a moral framework that teaches individuals to conceive of themselves not as, say, wage earners but rather as risk-taking entrepreneurs who should expect to shoulder the financial risks of their participation in higher education, the credit system and deregulated labour markets.

First implemented as an economic programme in the UK and the United States by the Thatcher government and the Reagan administration, its principles continued to underwrite the third way politics of New Labour and Clintonite Democrats. Although centre-left politicians reject the applicability of the term to their politics, a wealth of scholarship produced by economists, sociologists and historians demonstrates how third-way politicians advanced the neoliberal project.

So, where does the ideology stand today? Some are calling time on the neoliberal age. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Paul Mason declared that the exigencies of the crisis would mean that, in short order, the UKs political class would soon consist entirely of either enthusiastic or reluctant socialists progressive state intervention was inevitably back on the agenda. However, claims of this sort should be treated with caution, not least because similar predictions were made following the financial crisis, and after the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as US president. And those predictions turned out to be seriously awry.

For instance, at the height of the financial crisis, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz announced, Neoliberalism is dead. Yet it soon became abundantly clear that this was premature. It is true that the crisis seemed to pose a serious threat to the veneration of markets, as governments were forced to bail out the financial sector. But, as scholars such as Philip Mirowski have shown, neoliberals have long understood that their project requires state intervention to create and maintain markets. Rather than thinking of the crisis-fighting of governments in 2008 as a repudiation of market-friendly policy, its more useful to think of it as an extreme instance of pro-business government intervention that aimed to maintain the long-term primacy of the market.

On the face of it, the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump appeared to more plausibly represent a break with neoliberalism. But that diagnosis arose from a failure to understand how neoliberalism can adaptively recombine with elements of other ideologies.

While the Brexiteers may loathe the European Union (an institution that neoliberal intellectuals have long disagreed about) they remain committed to the core of neoliberal ideology. For example, the Australian points-based immigration system so beloved by the Brexiteers is perfectly congruent with the neoliberals view of human beings as bundles of assets (of greater or lesser value). The post-Brexit immigrants educational background, work experience and connections are redefined as forms of capital that may or may not be worth investing in (by letting them in) in order to secure a future return on that investment for the national economy. Points-based immigration systems, in other words, do not represent a straightforward shift away from neoliberal, free-market orthodoxy towards rightwing protectionism.

If neither the crises of 2008 nor 2016 signalled the end of neoliberalism, what about Covid-19? Today, as in 2008, politicians such as Rishi Sunak have been forced to implement policies that seem to contradict their adherence to market supremacy, but the intention is again to do so in order to swiftly return to normal and wean the public off their addiction to state support. The governments frustrated desire to curtail the furlough scheme, and the clear opposition to implementing a universal basic income, indicate a commitment to maintaining the core of neoliberal welfare policy. This means opposing generous, non-means-tested payments, which neoliberals view as detrimental to fostering entrepreneurial activity and disciplining the workforce.

More disturbingly, in the context of pandemic and the climate crisis, the persistence of the neoliberal view of individuals as human capital raises the possibility of governments treating populations of low value as disposable. Increased state intervention to protect incomes is welcome, but could be used by governments to implement a kind of economic triage, with populations deemed not worth bailing out excluded from state support. As Michel Feher has shown, there are milder precedents for this in welfare reforms carried out by mainstream political parties in Ireland and Portugal, which reduced benefits for younger cohorts in order to encourage emigration and, in the case of Portugal, to swap young, relatively poor Portuguese for wealthier retirees from abroad. In a context of ballooning national debt, where migrant populations are being treated as vectors of disease, its not difficult to see how an exclusionary neoliberal politics that supports investment in certain populations and disinvestment in others could gain traction.

All of this is not to deny that the Covid-19 crisis poses a real threat to neoliberal orthodoxy. Physical distancing and enforced quarantine have disrupted the labour market, potentially shifting the balance of power between labour and capital in favour of workers. The increase in wildcat strikes and the emergence of mutual aid groups are certainly encouraging. And the furlough scheme has temporarily revealed the artificiality of government spending constraints. But given the persistence and adaptability of neoliberal ideology over the past 10 years, any sober assessment of the current situation needs to be attuned to the possibility of its survival (or successful mutation), as well as its possible demise.

Alex Doherty is the host of the Politics Theory Other podcast

Read this article:
Has the coronavirus crisis killed neoliberalism? Don't bet on it - The Guardian

Georgia is leading a national conversation today about white men with guns.

A few weeks ago, the Michigan branch of Vanilla Isis carried rifles into the state capitol and screamed hell past lines of state troopers. And we asked ourselves, if they were black men with guns, how quickly would they have been arrested, or shot?

Last week, we watched video footage of three white men confront and shoot to death a black jogger in south Georgia footage that the Glynn County prosecutor had been sitting on for more than two months. And we asked ourselves, if they were black men with guns, how quickly would they have been arrested, or shot?

Wittingly or not, I think were linking these scenes together in our minds. The news cycle juxtaposes these images in front of us. We can bear only so much hypocrisy.

We are seeing our elected leaders ignore terrorism, though people resist calling it that because white men with guns dont just shape our policies, they also shape our language about who is and is not considered violent or threatening. And I think were finally tiring of it.

Under any other conditions, a man with a rifle screaming demands of you is an act of intimidation. In my view, it is a terroristic threat and a crime. And they know it. Its a dare.

I had a chat with Jerry Henry, the executive director of Georgia Carry, about the capitol protests last week. Georgia Carry is amid a fairly important and frankly interesting legal battle with Governor Brian Kemp over gun permits. If you moved to Georgia, you cant get a Georgia drivers license right now with all the tag offices closed. Hell, theyre handing drivers licenses to 20,000 people without a road test. The governor has been able to suspend enforcement of some laws, like one outlawing the wearing of a mask in public. But if you want a new gun permit with the county courthouses closed, youre out of luck.

For gun rights activists, this is infuriating. But Henrys crew doesnt participate in public gun demonstrations, and certainly not at the capitol, he said. A protest can make you look real good or look real bad, Henry said. The liberal press will pick out the worst people there or no one will show up.

So, to be clear, armed protesters at state capitols in Michigan, Texas and elsewhere dont have much of anything to do with gun rights. But I dont think the white supremacist messages were seeing with those armed protests are incidental.

If they were black men with guns, how quickly would they have been arrested, or shot? Well, probably pretty quickly, because thousands of black people are not having long chat room sessions fantasizing about armed insurrection after a confrontation with state police, as they are on the Fascist Forge board right now.

Heres some context people might be missing.

The 2017 racist alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., fundamentally screwed up the white supremacist movement in America, believe it or not. Heather Heyers murder and the images of running street battles turned the world decidedly against the alt-right. Activists like those behind Unicorn Riot infiltrated and exposed racists Discord channels, making clandestine recruiting all but impossible. They began outing the foot soldiers identities through social media, like Trent East, a deputy sheriff and National Guardsman in Haralson County who lost his job last year after activists spotted his online racism. The increased attention cost them their jobs, personal relationships and community standing. (This, by the way, is why the far-right loathes Antifa and propagandizes against it as much as it does: its an effective intelligence-gathering group).

White nationalist leaders and publications got sued and de-platformed, and financial supporters abandoned anything tinged with racial hatred. People like Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopolous were cut off from being able to raise money easily from the public. Two of the largest formal groups the Traditionalist Worker Party and the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement no longer exist as functional organizations today.

That doesnt mean things are getting better. Theyre just getting weirder, and perhaps if the El Paso shooting is any indication, more violent.

As a Southern Poverty Law Centers surveillance report notes, the white supremacist movement has fractured, and the conversation in the quiet places has changed.

The movements followers are breaking into two major strategic camps: so-called accelerationists who wholeheartedly embrace violence as a political tool and mainstreamers (or the dissident right, as they often call themselves) who are attempting, with a degree of success, to bend the mainstream political right toward white nationalist ideas.

Consider how both views play out in Georgia. Last year, Chester Doles, who has a lengthy history of white supremacist organizing, staged a rally in Dahlonega. Shortly after that, he launched American Patriots USA. This group has made four political endorsements across the state. Amazingly, one of them is in DeKalb County that of Hubert Owens, the Republican challenger to State Rep. Darshun Kendrick. Owens has allegedly accepted this endorsement perhaps because as a relatively recent transplant to Georgia, he doesnt know any better.

God bless Mr. Owens for his service and dedication he showed his country. And now he is in another war. Let's help him out Wwe need a representative like him!

Posted by American Patriots U.S.A onSaturday, April 4, 2020

This post was not available on Huberts Facebook page as of Wednesday, May 13. Reached by phone, Hubert said he was unaware of this endorsement and hadnt removed anything from his Facebook page.

Im not even in the state of Georgia right now, he said. He ended the conversation with, Im in D.C. Ive got to get back to work.

On the other side of the coin, the FBI arrested three Georgia men in January, who are charged with conspiracy to commit murder and participation in a criminal gang. They, and other members of The Base are accused of, plotting to murder a Bartow County couple they believed were Antifa members and training for a race war on a range just south of Rome.

Theres a lot of push and pull between these views among white supremacists. Mainstream white supremacists want to carry their message in a suit and tie into schools and churches and legislation. Accelerationists want someone, somewhere, to kick off the boogaloo, or the long-awaited apocalyptic race war that will reset America. And they want to recruit fighters.

But every time theyve tried to stage a major public demonstration like the neo-Nazis tried in Newnan two years ago, or Chester Doles tried in Dahlonega last year, theyre met fifty-fold with anti-fascist local protesters and cameras ready for a repeat of Charlottesville. They look weak, because they are weak. Theyre completely outnumbered and despised.

And then the pandemic locked everyone down.

The guys with guns wearing Hawaiian shirts under their camo and giving the Pepe the Frog OK sign arent out here because theyre protesting the pandemic. Thats incidental.

Theyre out here because we cant counterprotest in force.

Theyre piggy-backing off the pandemic protests in exactly the same way that black bloc anarchists use the relative anonymity of anti-police brutality street protests to flip over cop cars. Its an opportunity presenting itself, a means to an end. The end, for the alt-right guys, is visibility without the opposition making them look small. They know theyre running a risk of getting COVID-19, but if the rest of us start confronting them as before, our greater numbers would actually create an exponentially greater risk of infection.

Its an elegant game theory put to disturbing use.

While weak, theyre hoping for a galvanizing Ruby Ridge confrontation of some sort to rekindle public support. The best thing that could happen to them, in their view, is a violent confrontation with authority preferably liberal authority that sparks massive armed conflict. Its a fantasy. But it shapes how we react. State leaders across the country are denying them their Waco moment.

George Chidi is a political columnist and public policy advocate.

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George on Georgia: Why We're Not Just Arresting White Guys With Guns - Decaturish.com