Trump WILL NOT Unify This Country!

 Unless unifying means suppressing everyone who opposes selling out American democracy for a MAGA autocracy.

Greg Sargent over at The New Republic wrote Trump’s Ugly New Post-Shooting Rant Instantly Wrecks His “Unity” Pivot.

Those positions are irredeemably incompatible with any stated goal of unifying the country, at a very fundamental level. They embody the notion that there was nothing whatsoever wrong with trying to cling to power illegitimately, through violent means, in defiance of the votes and political aspirations of a majority of his fellow Americans. They also embody the idea that he and his movement should not be subject to the same laws that the rest of us are. Trump is telegraphing that he won’t back off any of that in the slightest.

Trump doe snot see fellow citizens, he only sees suckers for his con and enablers of his drive for power.

Here is a conspiracy theory for you: the mainstream press is in the bag for Trump and hides behind its ethical stance of balanced reporting.

There are signs this scam may have some success. First, some media coverage is already slipping into a subtle fallacy. The GOP argument right now is that Democrats are depicting Trump as an existential threat to the country and this inspired the shooting. It’s not lost on news organizations that Trump too constantly depicts Democrats in similar terms: He regularly says that electing them will mean “we won’t have a country” and that a Democratic victory will only be achieved via illegitimate means. News accounts have been pointing out that both sides offer a version of this message about the other.

There is one way for Trump to win - he cons enough people into thinking he is not what he says he is, and those who know better refuse to vote for Biden.

From Canada's Walrus comes What Trudeau and Biden Don’t Seem to Understand by Melissa J. Gismondi.

In the case of the US—though perhaps here in Canada too—there would almost certainly be unprecedented change to the democratic process. After all, Trump did try to overturn an election. But that radical-change mentality Trump and now Poilievre embody doesn’t extend to the root problem of what’s really making life hard for people: mainly, unchecked corporate interests and rising economic inequality as well as a climate crisis that’s literally killing people. These are the bogeymen neither Trump nor Poilievre show any willingness to seriously tackle, and which Biden and Trudeau have been relatively ineffective in tackling in the past.

You should see what an honest expression of liberal/leftist looks like: When the Cold War Came Home: An Oligarchy in Search of a Dictator. Patrick Nathan does a great job of exploding American myths. I wish I could have written such an essay.

This conscious deployment of myth is, I think, the real subject of Ganz’s book – and the crux of what might be the most fateful turning point in American history since Vietnam. A mythic narrative is an ahistorical narrative; and fascism, as a movement, cannot gather momentum in a society that understands itself historically. This is why the American right has spent decades investing not only in revisionist history – bringing back the “lost cause” narrative of the Confederacy, the “agitator” cliché of the Civil Rights movement – but fabricating and disseminating conspiracy theories. The target, as many have said, is truth itself, and history along with it.

One such myth I mentioned above Trump is a conservative.

 One myth I’d like to retire is that Trump – or anyone in his party, at this point – is a conservative. These are deeply radical people, more radical than any political party in the United States. Even anarchists are more closely aligned with the original principles of the nation’s constitution. And this requires, too, that we retire calling his most visible opponents “liberals.” A party that seeks to keep things as they are, that allows corporations to enrich themselves while ordinary citizens grow poorer and poorer and have fewer and fewer protections, that sends an unending supply of bombs to a nation openly committing genocide, is not a liberal party. A party leader that stands up and says, “There is no place for this kind of violence” after the nation’s most infamous inciter of violence is shot in the ear is not a liberal leader – especially since he’s fomented and supported unimaginable violence during his own four-year administration. These are conservative people.

If you want to facilitate a radical overhaul of the American way into a two-bit dictatorship, then stay at home and do not vote. No, Biden is not a radical leftist. He is actually more conservative than Trump - he is willing to let the people run their own government and live their own lives. Vote for federal and state legislators, not just the President.

Another myth I’m tired of hearing from politicians and newspapers is the idea that there is a “radical left” in this country. Almost all terrorism and other forms of extremism, from mass shootings to bombings to arson to driving into crowds of protestors, has been the radicalized product of the domestic right-wing imagination. In fact, you can always tell when terrorism doesn’t come from the right because the government actually responds with force (up to and including invading a country that had nothing to do with it). All one has to do to discredit this paranoia is look around. That oil pipelines are largely intact; that the internet is rarely interrupted; that commerce continues without the slightest hiccup; that warehouses are never seized; that entire server farms don’t go dark; that an entire online retailer doesn’t just disappear for 24 hours; indeed, that the experience of being a consumer need never be interrupted with even one political thought – all of this makes the total benignity of leftist resistance in this country profoundly obvious. And maybe the first step toward ensuring that our political leaders put forth a vision, that they offer us something resembling a future, that they give us something to vote for rather than against – maybe that first step is making this absence a little less obvious.

So long as people remain apathetic consumers, the politicians will give you what they think you want. Hoosiers do not want the General Assembly's abortion ban, they should not have voted for Republicans. 

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