Empire of Resentment: Populism’s Toxic Embrace of Nationalism

5. The Road to the Tiki Torches: The Blurry Convergence of Alienation and White Nationalism

1. A first-hand account of the Battle of Berkeley can be found at Scott Lucas, “Battle of the Bastards,” May 9, 2017, www.scottlucas.me/battle-of-the-bastards.

2. Richard Spencer, “What Berkeley Means,” Alt-Right.com, Apr. 16, 2017. Spencer opined on the street fighting: “The actual video footage is quite beautiful.” altright.com/2017/04/16/what-berkeley-means. Last viewed April 2018.

3. Spencer, was, in effect, raising the so-called Antifa to the level of the organized political parties and opponents of the Nazis. The analogy fails historically for reasons of the utter marginality of Antifa; to the extent Antifa has an ideological point of view, it is made up of anarchists, people who have been showing up at left-wing demonstrations for years with the intent of provoking police violence. See Sean Illing, “‘They Have No Allegiance to Liberal Democracy’: An Expert on Antifa Explains the Group,” Vox, Aug. 13, 2018, for an interview with Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House, 2017).

In the context of the Trump and alt-right era, Antifa functions as a symbiotic consort of right-wing violence. Politically, it gives cover to nonsensical left-right equivalencies, of which perhaps the most famous is Donald Trump’s view of Charlottesville—“good people on both sides.” Trump has also referred to the Antifa as the “alt-left,” as though to draw an equivalence to the violence and extremism of the outer reaches of his political coalition to something which, in effect, must exist on the left. See Linda Qui, “Trump Asks, ‘What About the Alt-Left?’ Here’s an Answer,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2017.

4. With guile, Spencer distinguishes himself from white supremacists, arguing that his politics are not about claiming racial superiority so much as they are about according white people the right to nationalism on the basis of whiteness that, for example, Jews get in the state of Israel based on Jewishness.

5. Katie Rogers and Nicolas Fandos, “Trump Tells Congresswomen to ‘Go Back’ to the Countries They Came From,” New York Times, Jul. 14, 2019. It is notable that Trump’s attack elicited Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s explicit recognition of the white nationalism of Trump’s politics:

Pelosi may have offered the bluntest take on Mr. Trump’s comments when she said his campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, “has always been about making America white again.”

6. See David Neiwert’s report, “Neo-Nazi Troll Andrew Anglin’s Celebratory Mood Crushed by $14 Million Judgment Against Him,” reprinted in Alternet, Jul. 16, 2019, www.alternet.org/2019/07/neo-nazi-troll-andrew-anglins-celebratory-mood-crushed-by-14-million-judgment-against-him.

Also see his Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2017).

7. Richard Spencer, “What Berkeley Means,” Apr. 16, 2017.

8. Brett Barrouquere, “Judge Upholds Bulk of Lawsuit Against Alt-Righters in Charlottesville After ‘Unite the Right,’ Dismisses Peinovich,” Jul. 10, 2018. This was a report on the suit in federal court brought against the Charlottesville organizers for conspiracy to commit violence, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/07/10/judge-upholds-bulk-lawsuit-against-alt-righters-charlottesville-after-unite-right-dismisses.

9. Disrupting government functioning on behalf of an electoral party made a brief appearance in 2000 in American politics. In what came to be known as the Brooks Brothers riot, Republican operatives stormed the offices where Miami-Dade County officials were engaged in a recount of presidential election votes.

Upstairs in the Clark center, several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff’s deputies restored order.

When the ruckus was over, the protesters had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting.

Several people who attended the demonstration said they had decided to do so after receiving an automated phone message, initiated by local Republican officials, encouraging them.

Dexter Filkins and Dana Canedy, “Protest Influenced Miami-Dade’s Decision to Stop Recount,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 2000.

A modified version of the Brooks Brothers riot occurred on October 22, 2019, when twenty-five Republican congressmen and women stormed a hearing room in the House of Representatives, bringing the impeachment hearing to a halt. (Richard Cowan et al., “Republican Lawmakers Storm Hearing Room, Disrupt Trump Impeachment Inquiry,” Reuters, Oct. 23, 2019, af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKBNlX216T.)

10. “Lone wolf” violence is an ambiguous problem in relation to political parties or politicians, but less ambiguous in relation to the alt-right. One lone-wolf example is the case of Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man (“whose white van … was covered in stickers celebrating Republicans and denouncing the president’s opponents”) who sent pipe bombs to opponents of President Trump. (Jon Swaine et al., “Florida Man Charged with Sending 13 Pipe Bombs to Trump Critics,” The Guardian, Oct. 26, 2018, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/26/suspicious-package-pipe-bombs-latest-found-cory-booker-florida.)

The question of “stochastic terrorism” has become deadly serious after attacks in the United States, among other countries, on synagogues in Pow-ay, California, and Pittsburgh, and on Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso. (See Arun Gupta, “Robert Bowers’ Synagogue Attack Is Only One of 16 Cases of White-Supremacist Killings Since Trump Was Inaugurated,” Raw Story, Oct. 28, 2018, www.rawstory.com/2018/10/robert-bowers-synagogue-attack-one-16-cases-white-supremacist-killings-since-trump-inaugurated.) These resemble attacks abroad such as the Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand, all of which have been tied to alt-right thinking or manifestos citing thinking like “replacement theory.”

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.

stochasticterrorism.blogspot.com.

See Eyal Press, “This Week’s Mail Bombs Are No Surprise: They Are Examples of Stochastic Terrorism—Individually Random, but These Days, Statistically Predictable,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/opinion/terrorismbombs-democrats-deniro-biden-soros.html.

See also Jonathan Chait, “The (Full) Case for Impeachment,” New York Magazine, Oct. 14, 2019:

There have been 36 criminal cases nationwide in which the defendant invoked Trump’s name in connection with violence; 29 of these cited him as the inspiration for an attack.

nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/the-full-case-for-trump-impeachment.html.

11. Much of the planning of Charlottesville took place on a website called Discord.

12. Here is an example of a journalist who was attacked using the gas chamber meme: twitter.com/brodiegal/status/788368180792131584?lang=en. Last viewed October 2017.

13. Joseph Goldstein describes the gathering:

[Spencer] railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. Mr. Spencer called out: “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” and then, “Hail victory!”—the English translation of the Nazi exhortation “Sieg Heil!” The room shouted back.

Joseph Goldstein, “Alt-Right Gathering Exults in Trump Election with Nazi-Era Salute,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 2016. For video of Spencer’s speech, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo6-bi3jlxk.

At a previous gathering of his movement in Washington, Spencer encouraged his followers: “Let’s party like it’s 1933,” specifying the year Hitler came to power. See John Woodrow Cox, “‘Let’s Party Like It’s 1933’: Inside the Alt-Right World of Richard Spencer,” Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2017.

14. Polls overwhelmingly indicated the American public appears to reject the alt-right’s white nationalism and the Nazi motifs of Charlottesville. See, for example, maristpoll.marist.edu/nprpbs-newshourmarist-poll-results-on-charlottesville.

15. Jonathan Berr, “PayPal Cuts off Payments to Right-Wing Extremists,” CBS News, Aug. 16, 2017.

[Other] digital platforms have also been increasingly assertive in removing White nationalist and other Far Right accounts. Alex Jones, for example, lost almost all of his mainstream digital accounts. Patreon, a site which manages recurring donations, also became more aggressive in removing Far Right activists, striking an important financial blow against them. Alt-Right attempts to form their own platforms have also largely failed.

From Spencer Sunshine, “Alt-Right and Far Right Mobilization in 2018,” Political Research Associates, nd, feature.politicalresearch.org/alt-right-and-far-right-in-2018.

16. See Denise Lavoie, “White Supremacist Sentenced to 2nd Life Term for Deadly Charlottesville Car Attack,” Business Insider, Jul. 16, 2019, www.businessinsider.com/james-alex-fields-sentenced-2nd-life-term-charlottesville-car-attack-2019-7. See also Christine Hauser and Julia Jacobs, “Three Men Sentenced to Prison for Violence at Charlottesville Rally,” New York Times, Aug. 23, 2018.

17. See Alan Feuer, “Planners of Deadly Charlottesville Rally Are Tested in Court,” New York Times, Feb. 12, 2018. The case is being argued on the basis of the Reconstruction Acts that undermined the first wave of the KKK—the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the KKK Act of 1871. See chapter 4, note 38, which points out how twentieth-century fascism was prefigured by the KKK’s marriage of a private militia and an electoral party. Feuer quotes one defendant’s explicit view of Charlottesville as the attempt to move the alt-right from the web to the streets:

“The goal here is to break us and keep us from taking to the streets,” said Jeff Schoep, the leader of the National Socialist Movement.

As Jane Coaston points out (“The Alt-Right Is Going on Trial in Charlottesville,” Vox, Mar. 8, 2018, www.vox.com/2018/3/8/17071832/alt-right-racists-charlottesville):

[Lead attorney Rebecca] Kaplan’s team collected thousands of hours of chats and videos created by the defendants and leaked online—including white nationalist pundit Richard Spencer, rally organizer Jason Kessler, and Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website—that urged participants to prepare for and commit violence in Charlottesville.

Kaplan’s complaint is available online (files.integrityfirstforamerica.org/14228/1567613983-first-amended-complaint-as-filed.pdf) and is well worth consulting. In addition to a complete list of the defendants, the complaint cites absolutely exhaustive evidence of planning for violence among the defendants, largely accumulated by following their posts on Discord.

An excellent discussion of the complaint is available at Dahlia Lithwick, “Can the Organizers of the Alt-Right Be Held Responsible for the Violence in Charlottesville,” Slate, Oct. 12, 2017, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/two_new_lawsuits_against_the_organizers_of_charlottesville_s_unite_the_right.html. Last viewed April 2018.

Richard Spencer, one of the defendants, acting as his own lawyer, unsuccessfully moved to dismiss the case against him on the grounds that he was unable to find a lawyer willing to defend him. (See Zoe Tillman, “Richard Spencer Said He Couldn’t Find a Lawyer to Defend Him Against a Lawsuit About the Violence in Charlottesville,” BuzzFeed, Jan. 30, 2018, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/richard-spencer-says-he-couldnt-find-a-lawyer-to-defend-him.)

This was a far cry from his exhilaration in the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville demonstration, when he opined that some of the video from the march was beautiful; that it was fun and established a model that would be repeated; that it was well known that the alt-right was a nonviolent movement—and even that the murderer of Heather Heyer, in his automobile, was acting in self-defense. (See Brandi Bushman, “Charlottesville Lawsuit Aims to Stop White Nationalist Militias,” Courthouse News Service, Oct. 12, 2017, www.courthousenews.com/charlottesville-lawsuit-aims-stop-private-militia-groups. And Alt-right.com, Aug. 13, 2017. Last viewed December 2017.)

18. See German Lopez, “Unite the Right 2018 Was a Pathetic Failure,” Vox, Aug. 12, 2018.

19. The complaint is available at www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2018/02/lawsuit-charlottesville.pdf.

20. See “Kessler Settles Lawsuit over Militia Groups at Unite the Right Rally,” NBC 29, Jul. 12, 2018, www.nbc29.com/story/38630548/kessler-settles-militia-lawsuit-7-12-2018.

21. Luke O’Brien, “The Making of an American Nazi,” The Atlantic, December 2017.

22. Roger Eatwell, “Fascism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Michael Freeden et al., eds., 478.

23. Il Popolo d’Italia, Nov. 15, 1919.

24. The Futurist Manifesto is available online at www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manifesto_futurista.pdf.

25. Quoted in Jacob Siegel, “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather,” Tablet, Nov. 29, 2016, www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218712/spencer-gottfried-alt-right.

26. See Sarah Posner, “How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists,” Mother Jones, Aug. 22, 2016, www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news.

27. See Marcia Clemmitt, “‘Alt-Right’ Movement,” CQ Researcher, Mar. 17, 2017, library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2017031700&abstract=false. And Josh Harkinson, “White Nationalists See Trump as Their Troll in Chief. Is He with Them?” Mother Jones, Jan.–Feb. 2017, www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/trump-white-nationalists-hate-racism-powerteh.

28. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXDXJQxbVkY. Bannon also tied his agenda to undermining the “mainstream media” he saw as the natural ally of the “administrative state.”

They’re corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has … there’s a new political order that’s being formed out of this…. We’re a nation with an economy, not just an economy in some global marketplace with open borders. But we’re a nation with a culture.

Essentially, what Bannon called the administrative state Donald Trump came to call the “deep state” as president, and argued over and over again it acted as a cabal to undermine his administration.

29. I calculate that fully 19 percent of Trump’s 2019 State of the Union dealt either with dreadful criminal behaviors of “illegal aliens” or with security threats and solutions—like a wall—at the southern border. Some excerpts:

As we speak, large, organized caravans are on the march to the United States. We have just heard that Mexican cities … are getting trucks and buses to bring them up to our country….

One in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north. Smugglers use migrant children as human pawns to exploit our laws and gain access to our country. Human traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery.

Tens of thousands of innocent Americans are killed by lethal drugs that cross our border and flood into our cities—including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl.

The savage gang, MS-13, now operates in 20 different American States, and they almost all come through our southern border. Just yesterday, an MS-13 gang member was taken into custody for a fatal shooting on a subway platform in New York City. Here tonight is Debra Bissell. Just three weeks ago, Debra’s parents, Gerald and Sharon, were burglarized and shot to death in their Reno, Nevada, home by an illegal alien.

30. Nate Silver calculates that “the shift among union voters was enough to swing the 2016 election to Trump.”

Hillary Clinton’s loss of Union support in 2016 compared to Obama in 2012

All Union members: 64.8%–55.2

White male Union members: 52.3%–40.7

Nonwhite male Union members: 81.4%–73.2

White female Union members: 64.5%–55.7

Nonwhite female Union members: 88.5%–83

According to the CCES [Cooperative Congressional Election Study], Obama won union voters by 34.4 percentage points in 2012, but Clinton did so by only 16.7 points in 2016. That roughly 18-point swing was worth a net of 1.2 percentage points for Trump in Pennsylvania, 1.1 points in Wisconsin, and 1.7 points in Michigan based on their rates of union membership—and those totals were larger than his margins of victory in those states.

FiveThirtyEight, May 2, 2019, fivethirtyeight.com/features/silver-bulletpoints-the-union-vote-could-swing-the-election.

31. Bannon bet heavily on backing senatorial candidate Roy Moore for the 2017 special election in Alabama to replace Jeff Sessions, who was moving on to become the U.S. attorney general. Bannon stuck with the candidate despite the emergence of news stories of his sexual abuse of underage young women. Moore lost to the first Democratic senator from Alabama in a generation. This was Bannon’s major domestic political initiative after his dismissal from the Trump administration. Moore’s loss severely undermined Bannon’s stature within the Republican Party, and seemed in no small part a motivation to take his political consulting skills abroad to Trumpian candidates and parties. See Andrew Procop, “Steve Bannon’s Republican Critics Are Gleefully Dunking on Him for Roy Moore’s Shocking Loss,” Vox, Dec. 12, 2017, www.vox.com/2017/12/12/16770678/roy-moore-loses-steve-bannon; and Maxwell Tani, “Republicans Blame Steve Bannon for Roy Moore’s Shocking Loss in Alabama,” Business Insider, Dec. 12, 2017, www.businessinsider.com/republicans-blame-steve-bannon-for-roy-moores-loss-2017-12.

32. The “Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017” lowered the corporate tax from 35 percent to 21 percent and cut the top rate of taxation (for married couples filing jointly) from 39.6 percent to 37 percent. The tax cut was a real test of the limits of the administration’s commitment to “economic populism”: Steve Bannon argued for increasing the top rate to 44 percent. See Anna Edgerton, “Bannon’s Plan to Tax Top Earners 44% to Be Considered by GOP,” Bloomberg, Jul. 26, 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-27/bannon-s-plan-to-tax-top-earners-is-said-to-be-considered-by-gop.

Bannon was fired as White House advisor after seven months, and had his major financial backers drop him a few months later. Maggie Haberman et al., “Bannon, Key Voice of Populist Right, Exits White House,” Aug. 19, 2017; Kenneth P. Vogel et al., “Donors and Candidates Abandon Bannon After His Break with Trump,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 2018.

33. “Donald Trump has now had more turnover in his Cabinet in the first two-and-a-half years of his presidency than any of his five immediate predecessors did in their entire first terms.” Madeleine Joung, “Trump Has Now Had More Cabinet Turnover Than Reagan, Obama and the Two Bushes,” Time, Jul. 12, 2019, time.com/5625699/trump-cabinet-acosta.

34. Miller seems almost uniquely able to channel Trump. During the 2016 campaign, Miller often opened for Trump at rallies, where he specialized in delivering the red meat of immigrant criminality—feeding images of the Imagined Other. Miller is noted for his extreme confrontational attitude in interviews and news conferences. He has also been Trump’s speech writer for his most important addresses, like the inaugural address and the State of the Union.

35. In effect, Navarro is arguing that China has successfully undercut the United States’ comparative advantage in its exports of high valued-added goods and services, like aeronautics and tech and financial services. ideasandinsights.jpmorgan.com/ipbonline-tl/api/attachments/2409/en/macro_markets_2018_07_ll.pdf.

Navarro’s policies in action have not produced. See Ana Swanson, “Trump Vowed to Shrink the Trade Deficit, but It Keeps Getting Wider”: “The overall trade deficit continued to widen in the first nine months of 2019, suggesting that the global trade wars haven’t had the desired effect,” New York Times, Nov. 6, 2019.

Navarro has also brought into his militarized notion of trade the conservative bias of zero-sum thinking.

Navarro [is] a zero-sum economist, who, like Trump, believes that every item not made in the U.S. represents the theft of an American job.

Jacob Heilbrunn, “The Most Dangerous Man in Trump World?,” Politico, Feb. 12, 2017.

36. See Linda Gordon’s excellent The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (Liveright, 2017). Gordon’s study makes clear that, with Jim Crow firmly established in the South, the Klan’s second coming was aimed at immigrants and was especially strong in northern cities. The rhetoric against “immigrant hordes” is remarkably reminiscent of Trumpian warnings about immigrant “invasions.” Also worthwhile is Archie Mayo’s 1937 film, Black Legion, starring Humphrey Bogart, which portrays an actual Detroit-based group of that name that had its origins in the KKK.

37. Belew, Bring the War Home (Harvard University Press, 2019), 120. Belew also attributes the beginnings of national militia solidarity to the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, which resulted in the deaths of four members of the Communist Workers’ Party who were holding a “Death to the Klan” march. “The Greensboro shooting had the effect of consolidating and unifying the white power movement,” p. 75. For the early history of white nationalism, also see Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009).

38. “Timothy Snyder, a historian and professor at Yale University, said ‘alt-right’ is a term … meant to provide a fresh label that would sound more attractive than ‘Nazi,’ ‘neo-Nazi, ‘white supremacist,’ or ‘white nationalist.’”

Kurtis Lee, “President Trump Says the ‘Alt-Left’ Was Partly to Blame for the Violence at Charlottesville. Wait: What’s the Alt-Left?,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 16, 2017, www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-alt-left-20170816-story.html.

39. Kat Chow, “What the Ebbs and Flows of the KKK Can Tell Us About White Supremacy Today,” NPR, Dec. 8, 2018, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/12/08/671999530/what-the-ebbs-and-flows-of-the-kkk-can-tell-us-about-white-supremacy-today. Blee is the author of Women of the Klan (University of California Press, 1992) and Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (University of California Press, 2003). See also Caroline Kitchener, “How the KKK Resonates Today,” The Atlantic, Oct. 31, 2017:

Before the alt-right, the 1920s KKK was the last white supremacist group to engage seriously in national politics, according to Blee. Sixteen Klansmen became senators, 11 became governors, and approximately 75 became congressmen. Far more were sympathetic to the Klan’s agenda. “By taking over the political parties, the Klan sought to institutionalize the organization,” said Blee. “They had a big influence on the presidential level.”

www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2017/10/how-the-kkk-resonates-today/544565.

40. Alan Blinder, “David Duke, Ex-K.K.K. Leader, to Seek Senate Seat in Louisiana,” New York Times, Jul. 23, 2016.

41. James Oliphant and Steve Holland, “After Firing, Bannon Returns to His ‘Killing Machine,’” Reuters, Aug. 18, 2017, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-bannon-right/after-firing-bannon-returns-to-his-killing-machine-idUSKCN1AY2JQ.

42. From Joshua Green’s Fresh Air interview with Dave Davies, NPR, Oct. 9, 2019, www.npr.org/2019/10/09/768556474/how-a-political-hit-job-backfired-and-led-to-trumps-impeachment-peril.

“Looking at it from their point of view,” the liberal strategist David Brock told me of Schweizer and GAI, “the Times is the perfect host body for the virus.”

There was a New York Times story based on Schweizer’s reporting…. And, as Bannon intended, a whiff of corruption attached itself to Hillary Clinton…. The book really succeeded in what Bannon had set out to do. And that was to raise doubts about the ethics and morals and fitness for the presidency of Hillary Clinton.

Bannon’s critique of how Republicans deal with the media goes back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton’s impeachment, when he thought that Republicans really just wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber…. Voters didn’t listen to them.

43. See Tim Gosling, “The Nationalist Internationale Is Crumbling: Steve Bannon Is Trying to Sell Trumpism to Eastern Europeans—but Shared Ideologies Die Hard When They Run into Economic and Military Realities,” Foreign Policy, Jul. 20, 2018, foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/20/the-nationalist-internationale-is-crumbling-steve-bannon-eastern-europe-hungary-czech-republic-slovakia-trade.

44. See www.ebizmba.com/articles/political-websites. After Breitbart at number 2, there are Drudge (3); Infowars (7); Blaze (10); Daily Caller (11); WND (12); Newsmax (13); Washington Times (14). Last referenced October 18, 2017.

45. Vintage, 1960.

46. The Statler Brothers’ 1965 song, “Flowers on the Wall,” is a virtual anthem of the alienated young man, circa the 1950s and ’60s, when TV (“Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kangaroo”) anticipated the media role that the internet would supplant—and make interactive—in the twenty-first century. The Statler Brothers’ performance of the song, and the lyrics, may be found at www.google.com/search?q=smoking+cigarettes+and+watching+captain+kangaroo&oq=smoking+cigarettes+an&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l5.11862j1j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.

47. Garret Keizer, “Nihilist Nation: The Empty Core of the Trump Mystique,” New Republic, Oct. 25, 2018, newrepublic.com/article/151603/nihilist-nation-empty-core-trump-mystique.

48. Throwing out an alternative to Russian hacking emails in the 2016 election, Donald Trump referenced an image of the shut-in young man at his internet keyboard in his first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton:

She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t—maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?

Transcript of the first debate, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/us/politics/transcript-debate.html.

49. See M. Ambedkar, “The Aesthetics of the Alt-Right,” Post-Office-Arts Journal, Baltimore, February 2017, baltimore-art.com/2017/02/ll/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right.

50. www.pokemon.com/us/pokedex/pikachu.

51. www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658. The film is based on a Philip K. Dick story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Along with Ursula K. Le Guin, Dick is perhaps the most prominent writer of the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s, which marked a movement from outer-space stories, and otherwise the imagining of nonterrestrial worlds, to imagining life on earth fundamentally changed by largely sinister developments, both technological and political.

52. Lawrence Person, “Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto,” Slashdot, nd, news.slashdot.org/story/99/10/08/2123255/notes-toward-a-postcyberpunk-manifesto. Last viewed October 2019.

53. From “Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG),” on the Technopedia website:

A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) refers to videogames that allow a large number of players to participate simultaneously over an internet connection. These games usually take place in a shared world that the gamer can access after purchasing or installing the game software.

In addition to RPGs and real-time strategy (RTS) games, the online gameplay has become an essential feature in many first person shooters (FPS), racing games and even fighting games. For many gamers, the ability to compete with players from all over the world in a variety of online-only game modes overshadows the single player mode that many of these games were originally designed around. www.techopedia.com/definition/27054/massively-multiplayer-online-game-mmog.

54. M. Stephanie Murray, Arizona Daily Wildcat, Oct. 8, 1997. Accessed at Arts Ground Zero (“Bethke crashes the cyberpunk system”), wc.arizona.edu/papers/91/32/13_l_m.html.

55. Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (Penguin, 2017), 145.

56. Green, Devil’s Bargain, 145. See also Mike Snider, “Steve Bannon Learned to Harness Troll Army from ‘World of Warcraft,’” USA Today, Jul. 18, 2017, www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001.

57. Jonathan Rauch writes:

Trolls attack real news; they attack the sources of real news; they disseminate fake news; and they create artificial copies of themselves to disseminate even more fake news. By unleashing great quantities of lies and half-truths, and then piling on and swarming, they achieve hive-mind coordination. Because trolling need not bother with persuasion or anything more than very superficial plausibility, it can concern itself with being addictively outrageous. Epistemically, it is anarchistic, giving no valence to truth at all; like a virus, all it cares about is replicating and spreading.

Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, no. 41 (Fall 2019), www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

58. See, for example, Sarah Jeong’s harrowing first-person account of her own and others’ harassment around Gamergate. Sarah Jeong, “When the Internet Chases You from Your Home,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2019.

Similar battle lines have been drawn in almost every form of popular culture over the last decade, but perhaps most virulently in the world of comic books—see the right-wing Comicsgate movement—and superhero films, whether from the Marvel or DC Comic Universe. Over and over again young men’s morbid fear of the modest entry of women and queer voices into a space they had once regarded as a “safe space” for them has produced hysterical fits of outrage, in several cases leading to the organized effort to lower the ratings of a film on Rotten Tomatoes because of the perception that a film had too many women or diverse characters. This reached its apotheosis with the release of the Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi. See www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/18/16791844/star-wars-last-jedi-backlash-controversy.

59. Henry Farrell, “The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Explained: What Jordan Peterson Has in Common with the Alt-Right,” Vox, May 10, 2018.

60. BuzzFeed tells the story of Bannon’s cultivation of Yiannopoulos based on an extraordinary cache of emails between them and with others. See Joseph Bernstein, “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled White Nationalism into the Mainstream,” Oct. 5, 2017, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism. The emails tell the story of Steve Bannon’s grand plan for Yiannopoulos, whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger.

61. From Yiannopoulos’s “Full Text: Milo on How Feminism Hurts Men and Women,” Breitbart, Oct. 7, 2016.

[Yiannopoulos] told angry young men that they were being terrorized by “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers,” and gave his young followers permission to embrace the politics of destruction.

Excerpted from Amanda Marcotte, Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018), www.alternet.org/heres-how-us-became-troll-nation-gamergate-rise-trump.

62. Marcotte, Troll Nation.

63. Megan Condis, “From Fortnite to Alt-Right,” New York Times, Mar. 28, 2019. See also her study, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture (University of Iowa Press, 2018).

Gamergate united men’s rights activists, white nationalists, and neo-reactionaries around indignation over the inroads that women and minorities had made into video game culture, previously dominated by young white men.

Henry Farrell, “The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Explained: What Jordan Peterson Has in Common with the Alt-Right,” Vox, May 10, 2018.

April Glaser reports on the website Discord, which melds “150 million gamers” with virulent white supremacy.

What’s common among most of these groups is that they blur juvenile-seeming, semi-ironic meme making with outright racism—that is, they’re what experts on white supremacy recognize as on-ramps to indoctrination. This isn’t a new tactic for the far right…. The tactic was pioneered on Stormfront, the largest and oldest white-supremacist community on the internet, which was started in 1995 by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. “On Stormfront, they would sometimes have paid moderators that are waiting there for when someone shows up and asks things like, ‘What is white nationalism? What do you guys really believe in?’ And then there were moderators there waiting to engage them when they showed interest in having a more serious discussion,” said [Joan] Donovan [the lead researcher on media manipulation at the Data & Society Research Institute].

“White Supremacists Still Have a Safe Space Online: Discord Is a Hub for 150 Million Gamers—as well as Some of the Worst People on the Web,” Slate, Oct. 9, 2018, slate.com/technology/2018/10/discord-safe-space-white-supremacists.html.

64. “Pepe the Frog Meme Branded a ‘Hate Symbol,’” BBC News, Sep. 28, 2018, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37493165.

65. Incels are “involuntary celibates,” and their websites traffic in rhetoric about violence and rape posed as revenge for incels’ sexual deprivation. Like white nationalism, incel sites raise the issue of stochastic terror. (See note 10, this chapter.) Lone wolf attacks on women have included those at École Polytechnique in Toronto (1989), at Virginia Tech (2007), at Collier Center women’s fitness center outside Pittsburgh (2009), and at Isla Vista (2014). Like a number of white nationalist shooters including Breivik in Norway (2011) and Bowers in Pittsburgh (2018), Elliot Rodger, the shooter in Isla Vista, left behind a manifesto (others, including Rodger, have left videos, even real-time videos of the shootings), which is frequently cited in positive terms on incel sites.

“The Incel Rebellion has already begun! … We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Niraj Chokshi, “What Is an Incel? A Term Used by the Toronto Van Attack Suspect, Explained,” New York Times, Apr. 24, 2018. (Chads are hunky young men understood by incels to be successful with voluptuous hyperfeminine women, known as Stacys.)

See Zack Beauchamp, “Our Incel Problem: How a Support Group for the Dateless Became One of the Internet’s Most Dangerous Subcultures,” Vox, Apr. 23, 2019, www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit. See also Jeff Sharlet, “Are You Man Enough for the Men’s Rights Movement?,” GQ, Feb. 4, 2014, www.gq.com/story/mens-rights-activism-the-red-pill.

66. Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)Right?,” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019). Anton’s article is a review of the book, which, he argues, “has struck a chord with younger people—especially men—who are dissatisfied with the way the world is going and have no faith in mainstream conservatism’s efforts to arrest, much less reverse, the rot.”

Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset (Independently published, Jun. 6, 2018), www.amazon.com/Bronze-Age-Mindset-Pervert/dp/1983090441.

67. On “cuckservative” see George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (Columbia University Press, 2017), 94–99. See also Alan Huhas, “‘Cuckservative’: The Internet’s Latest Republican Insult Hits Where It Hurts,” The Guardian, Aug. 13, 2015, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/13/cuckservative-republicans-conservatives-jeb-bush. See also Alan Rappeport, “From the Right, a New Slur for G.O.P. Candidates,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 2015.

6. (Grayed-Out) Illiberalism: The Road Taken

1. See coverage of the marches in Susan Chira and Yamiche Alcindor, “Defiant Yet Jubilant Voices Flood U.S. Cities,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 2017; and Perry Stein et al., “Women’s Marches: More Than One Million Protesters Vow to Resist President Trump,” Washington Post, Jan. 21, 2017.

2. See Lauren Gambino et al., “Thousands Protest Against Trump Travel Ban in Cities and Airports Nationwide,” The Guardian, Jan. 29, 2017, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/29/protest-trump-travel-ban-muslims-airports.

3. See Elana Schor and Rachel Bade, “Inside the Protest Movement That Has Republicans Reeling,” Politico, Feb. 10, 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/02/protest-movement-republicans-234863.

4. On January 30, 2005, 58 percent of the Iraqi electorate defied threats of violence to vote in the first elections since Saddam’s ouster. After reaching the polls, Iraqis proudly displayed their ink-dipped purple fingers as indications that they had voted. In Washington, Republican congressmen flaunted purple fingers as a sign of solidarity with Bush and pride at how the United States had brought democracy to Iraq.

In his 2005 State of the Union address on February 2, President Bush proudly saluted the Iraqi voters….

The speech also showed that Bush had been reading from the neocon handbook; he proclaimed to the world that his administration’s goal was the promotion of “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

“This is real neoconservatism,” Robert Kagan, a leading neocon, told the Los Angeles Times. “It would be hard to express it more clearly.”

Craig Unger, American Armageddon, originally published as The Fall of the House of Bush (Scribner, 2007, 327).

In the Republicans’ pre-Trump ideological orthodoxy, foreign policy was essentially farmed out to neoconservatism. Despite the claim that the aim of invading Iraq was the nonexistent threat of weapons of mass destruction (“WMD”), the invasion was really the long-awaited realization of a pre-existing “regime change” agenda, spelled out in the 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” published by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Infamously, the report lamented that the project of regime change might have to await a “catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor”—which September 11, 2001, provided as the needed pretext. http://web.archive.org/web/20130817122719/ http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf. Last viewed November 2019.

PNAC had proposed a military invasion to depose Saddam to the Clinton administration, without success. At least ten members of the project held high positions in the Bush administration. Only when the WMD causus belli had been discredited was the “freedom agenda”—which accurately tracked neoconservative thinking—rolled out into the light of day as the administration’s goal of imposing democracy, oxymoron notwithstanding.

5. On the fifth-year anniversary of “Mission Accomplished,” May 2008, during the final year of the Bush presidency,

the war in Iraq ha[d] claimed the lives of at least 4,058 members of the U.S. military—3,924 of whom have died since Mr. Bush landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

“‘Mission Accomplished,’ Five Years Later,” CBS News, May 1, 2008, www.cbsnews.com/news/mission-accomplished-5-years-later.

6. I deliberately use the word “unitary” here. In the long historical debate about presidential, or executive, power under the Constitution, the case for relatively unrestricted presidential power—independent of oversight by legislative or judicial power—has been made in the form of the theory of the “unitary executive.” In pre-Trump Republican orthodoxy, legal theory and jockeying for sway in judicial appointments fell to the Federalist Society, which grew up as a conservative counterweight to the American Bar Association. The strong theory of the unitary executive was argued by Federalist Society legal theorists and became prominent during the George W. Bush administration, which claimed unrestricted freedom of action above all in its prosecution of military action. Trump has vulgarized the “unitary executive” considerably, arguing that “I have an Article 2 [of the Constitution, which defines executive power] where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” www.c-span.org/video/?c4809509/user-clip-trump-constitution-i-president.

See Michael Brice-Sadler, “While Bemoaning Mueller Probe, Trump Falsely Says the Constitution Gives Him ‘the Right to Do Whatever I Want,’” Washington Post, Jul. 23, 2019. And Jason Lemon, “Trump Insists the Constitution’s Article II ‘Allows Me to Do Whatever I Want,” Newsweek, Jun. 16, 2019, www.newsweek.com/trump-insists-constitution-allows-do-whatever-want-1444235.

Trump’s third attorney general, William Barr, comes out of the Federalist Society’s unitary executive wing and has stood out for opinions and policies that so defend the president against submitting to congressional oversight he seems to hew to a Trumpian ideal that the Justice Department is more a legal arm of the executive—Trump’s lawyers, in effect—than an independent agency. (Note that in most states, attorneys general are independent elective positions, rather than executive appointments.) Trump’s Justice Department conjures up Sarah Churchwell’s observation that locates in “both American populism and European fascism” a “willingness to sacrifice the rule of law to defeat those whom it views as enemies.” Sarah Churchwell, “America’s Original Identity Politics,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 7, 2019.

7. These issues were raised by some Democrats as justification for Trump’s impeachment in the years before the party’s leadership decided in September 2019 to proceed with impeachment based on Trump seeking to blackmail Ukraine’s president into “investigating” Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Vermont Representative Peter Welch wrote his constituents a letter in this regard in July 2019, which is articulate in citing these issues:

I wanted to let you know that I have concluded President Donald Trump should be impeached.

I do not arrive at this conclusion lightly. The power of impeachment granted to Congress by our Founding Fathers should not be casually employed. In our democracy, every deference should be given to the outcome of every election.

However, after 30 months in office, President Trump has established a clear pattern of willful disregard for our Constitution and its system of checks and balances. His presidency has wrought an unprecedented and unrelenting assault on the pillars and guardrails of our democracy, including the rule of law on which our country was founded.

Instead of embracing the fundamental responsibility of every American president to unite our country, this president has unleashed a torrent of attacks on fellow citizens based on their race, gender, religion and ethnic origin.

Instead of respecting the constitutional principle that no person, including the President of the United States, is above the law or beyond accountability, this president attacks our courts and judges and stonewalls Congress in the exercise of its Article 1 oversight responsibility.

Instead of strengthening the institutional pillars of our democracy, this president is methodically tearing them down. He fired the FBI Director and made every effort to derail the Mueller investigation. He calls for the jailing of political opponents and pardons political allies. And at every turn, he demeans, attacks and discredits the free press, dangerously labeling it as the enemy of the people.

And instead of ensuring fair elections, this president and his administration have labored to limit the fundamental right of Americans to vote and welcomed the assistance of hostile foreign powers in his campaigns.

America’s democracy is resilient, but it is also fragile. Its stability and progress depend on the consent of the governed, a respect for the rule of law, and the capacity of our leaders to inspire trust and confidence in each other and in the federal government.

On January 20, 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood on the West Front of the United States Capitol, placed his left hand on two Bibles, raised his right hand, and swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I have concluded that he has failed to honor that solemn oath which, in my view, merits impeachment under our Constitution.

8. Yascha Mounk, The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Harvard University Press, 2018). See Mounk’s fourfold table of exemplars on p. 36.

9. Mussolini was particularly proud of Fascism’s invention of the term “totalitarian.” In its essence, it meant the virtual erasure of civil society. In Mussolini’s well-known formula: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

10. Quoted in Eliah Bures, “Don’t Call Donald Trump a Fascist,” Foreign Policy, Nov. 2, 2019.

11. In the 1970s, when Italy was experiencing incidents of domestic terror from both its far right and its far left, there were threats of a coup d’état from the right—for example, the alleged Borghese coup plot of 1970. A bulwark against a coup was Italy’s membership in the EU, which would be threatened if the country’s parliamentary system was overthrown. Italy’s founding membership in the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of the European Common Market and the EU, was widely popular in Italy. Having emerged from Fascism only six years before the community’s 1951 founding, being a “normal” nation was nothing short of a source of national pride. That both upstart winners of Italy’s 2018 national elections, the Five Star Movement and, especially, the League, are anti-Europe speaks volumes of the galloping advances populist nationalism has made in Italy since 2015.

12. Quoted in Wikiquotes, en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini.

13. “The Doctrine of Fascism” was composed by Mussolini in collaboration with Giovanni Gentile, the regime’s chief ideologist and legal theorist who came to Fascism from the Italian Nationalist movement. The article was prepared for the 1932 edition of the Enciclopedia Italiana (Italian Encyclopedia), and can be read in its entirety at www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm. Last viewed November 2019.

14. Randall Collins, “Trump and the Sopranos,” Sociological Eye, Dec. 1, 2016, sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2016/12/trump-and-sopranos.html.

15. See Neil Siegel, “Political Norms, Constitutional Conventions, and President Donald Trump,” Indiana Law Journal, Vol. 93, 2017.

16. See video at www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2017/may/25/trump-appears-to-push-aside-montenegro-pm-at-nato-photocall-video. See also Niraj Chokshi, “Trump Appears to Push Aside the Leader of Montenegro,” New York Times, May 25, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/us/politics/trump-push-aside-leader-montenegro-nato-summit.html.

17. See John Haltiwanger, “Trump Gave a Thumbs-Up in a Photo with a Baby Orphaned by El Paso Mass Shooting,” Business Insider, Aug. 9, 2019, www.businessinsider.com/trump-gave-thumbs-up-photo-baby-orphaned-el-paso-shooting-2019-8.

18. See Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Eileen Sullivan, “Trump Praises Manafort, Saying ‘Unlike Michael Cohen’ He ‘Refused to Break,’” New York Times, Aug. 22, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/us/politics/trump-cohen-manafort.html.

19. See Dareh Gregorian and Ali Vitali, “Lawmakers React to Text of Trump’s Ukraine Call: ‘A Classic Mob Shakedown,’” NBC News, Sep. 25, 2019, www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/classic-mob-shakedown-lawmakers-react-summary-trump-s-ukraine-call-nl058631.

Randall Collins’s article, “Trump and the Sopranos,” published in the Sociological Eye on December 1, 2016, before Trump’s inaugural, was prescient on this score. He pointed out that the Trumps were a “family in the pre-modern mold,” with their businesses “family held, avoiding bureaucratic strings … stay[ing] as far as possible from the formal rules and record-keeping of big corporations, publically-traded companies, and government regulations. Like the Mafia, it is based on the opposite of transparency—which means open to formal oversight and outside interference.”

On the cultural level, Trump’s candidacy also recalls Charles Foster Kane’s run for New York governor in Orson Welles’s movie Citizen Kane. Like Kane (“He never gave himself away. He never gave anything away. He just left you a tip…. He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life.”), Trump was a narcissistic silver-spoon trust-fund baby who fancied himself the hero of the “common man.” Like Trump, after developing fame in media, Kane suddenly enters politics at the level of high office, promising to throw his opponent into jail when he wins. Unlike Trump’s Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing tape, the exposure of Kane’s sexual misconduct—pre–World War II America was culturally far from 2016 America on such issues—dooms his campaign at the last moment. Recalling Trump’s repeated assertions of the vote being “rigged,” and his suggestions of not accepting an electoral defeat, Kane’s newspaper prepares two headlines for election night: one, “Kane Elected”; the other “Fraud at Polls!” See film clip at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iMy0969BTw.

Trump uses his dogged insistence that he was the victim of voter fraud to explain away defeat in the 2016 popular vote. See Abby Phillip and Mike DeBonis, “Without Evidence, Trump Tells Lawmakers 3 Million to 5 Million Illegal Ballots Cost Him the Popular Vote,” Washington Post, Jan. 24, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/23/at-white-house-trump-tells-congressional-leaders-3-5-million-illegal-ballots-cost-him-the-popular-vote.

20. Much has been written about Orbán and his party, Fidesz, which is sometimes called a party of lawyers. An excerpt from The Economist’s coverage of their methods for dominating the judiciary:

The party quickly set about using its two-thirds supermajority to change the constitution. It raised the number of justices on the constitutional court from 11 to 15, appointing four of its own to the new places. It then lowered the compulsory retirement age for judges and prosecutors, freeing up hundreds of posts for Fidesz loyalists. It set up a National Judiciary Office run by Tunde Hando, a college contemporary of Mr Orban’s. Her nine-year term, which is due to end next year and under current laws could not be renewed, makes her unsackable by parliament. Ms Hando can veto judicial promotions and influence which judges hear which cases. Fidesz now enjoys control of prosecutors’ offices, the constitutional court and the Curia (the highest court of appeals).

“How Viktor Orban Hollowed Out Hungary’s Democracy,” The Economist, Aug. 29, 2019, www.economist.com/briefing/2019/08/29/how-viktor-orban-hollowed-out-hungarys-democracy. More generally, see also Kim Lane Scheppele, “Autocratic Legalism,” University of Chicago Law Review 85 (2018): 545–83, lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/autocratic-legalism. For an assessment of the state of Trump’s grayed-out shadow of an illiberal regime, see historian of Nazi Germany Christopher Browning’s “The Suffocation of Democracy,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 25, 2018.

21. Rick Klein, “Clinton, Trump Aides Angrily Clash at Election Forum,” ABC News, Dec. 1, 2016, abcnews.go.com/Politics/clinton-trump-aides-angrily-clash-election-forum/story?id=43913148.

22. “Fake News: Trump Golf Resorts Display Fake Time Magazine Cover,” BBC News, Jun. 28, 2017, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40427357; Vivian Yee, “By Fudging Math, Trump Takes His Towers to Greater Heights,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 2016.

23. See Glenn Kessler et al., “President Trump Has Made 13,435 False or Misleading Claims over 993 Days,” Washington Post, Oct. 14, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/14/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days.

24. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967.

25. See www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/conway-press-secretary-gave-alternative-facts-860142147643.

26. Lori Robertson and Robert Farley, “The Facts on Crowd Size,” Fact-Check.org, Jan. 23, 2017. The administration edited its versions of photos as part of its claims on crowd size. See Chris Riotta, “Trump Inauguration Photos Edited to Make Crowd Look Bigger After President Intervened, Documents Reveal,” The Independent, Sep. 6, 2018.

27. See Jacob Carter, “Sharpiegate and 120 Other Trump Attacks on Science,” The Hill, Sep. 11, 2019, thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/460937-sharpiegate-and-120-other-trump-attacks-on-science.

28. The term was introduced in Ron Suskind’s “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004. The step between “reality-based community” and “post-truth” America was the emergence of the term “truthiness,” which was Merriam-Webster’s 2006 “word of the year.” See Caroline McCarthy, “Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year: Truthiness!,” CNet, Dec. 11, 2006, www.cnet.com/news/merriam-websters-word-of-the-year-truthiness.

George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community… . A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation…. divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart…. Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”

From Kurt Andersen, “How America Lost Its Mind, The Atlantic, Sep. 20, 2017.

29. Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.”

30. Anonymous, New York Times, Sep. 6, 2018. See Sabrina Siddiqui, “Trump Calls for Investigation of New York Times over Op-ed ‘Treason,’” The Guardian, Sep. 7, 2018, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/trump-calls-for-investigation-new-york-times-op-ed-treason.

31. David Jackson, “Donald Trump Now Accuses Nancy Pelosi of ‘Treason’ (and Wants to Impeach Her),” USA Today, Oct. 7, 2019. See also Katie Rodgers, “As Impeachment Moves Forward, Trump’s Language Turns Darker: “Treason” is a word the president has increasingly used when talking about his critics,” New York Times, Oct. 1, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-treason-impeachment.html.

32. See Philip Bump, “Trump, Not Understanding Treason, Names People He Thinks Committed the Capital Crime,” Washington Post, May 23, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/23/trump-not-understanding-treason-names-people-he-thinks-committed-capital-crime.

33. The deep state is more or less equivalent to Steve Bannon’s notion of the “administrative state” he promised to smash. (See chapter 5.)

34. Quoted in Elizabeth Chuck, “Trump Names Tillerson as Nominee for Secretary of State,” NBC News, Dec. 13, 2019, www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-names-rex-tillerson-nominee-secretary-state-n695281.

35. Allan Smith, “Trump Lashes Out at Rex Tillerson for Saying Putin Out-Prepared Him,” NBC News, May 23, 2019, www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-lashes-out-rex-tillerson-saying-putin-out-prepared-him-n1009156.

36. See “Trump and Kim in Quotes: From Bitter Rivalry to Unlikely Bromance,” Aljazeera, Feb. 27, 2017.

37. Michael Shear et al., “Strikes on Iran Approved by Trump, Then Abruptly Pulled Back,” New York Times, Jun. 21, 2019.

38. Paradigmatic example: “Trump Revives Year-Old Insult for House Intel Chair Adam ‘Schitt,’” Eileen A.J. Conelly, New York Post, Nov. 16, 2019, nypost.com/2019/ll/16/trump-revives-year-old-insult-for-house-intel-chair-adam-schitt.

39. Jonathan Rauch, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” National Affairs, no. 41 (Fall 2019). Rauch adds, “Trump’s signature claim to be ‘a counter-puncher’ is simply an act of gaslighting. He is always the victim, according to his account. So he’s always ‘counter-punching,’ even if he throws the first five, 10 or 20 blows.” www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-constitution-of-knowledge.

This parallels Mussolini’s characteristic and nonsensical claim that the Fascist movement’s punitive expeditions were always defensive in nature—not proactive but responses to aggression by their enemies. In his news conference the day after Charlottesville, Richard Spencer argued that James Fields, who drove his car into counter-protesters, killing one and injuring others, was acting in self-defense. Spencer added the nonsensical assertion that everyone knows the alt-right is nonviolent.

40. From “Donald Trump on Social Media,” Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_on_social_media. Viewed Nov. 29, 2019.

41. Trump’s calls for violence against opponents, the occasional dissenter in his rally crowds, and the press are legion. An early summary as a candidate may be found in Kate Sommers-Dawes, “All the Times Trump Has Called for Violence at His Rallies,” Mashable, Mar. 11, 2016, mashable.com/2016/03/12/trump-rally-incite-violence. On Trump’s continuation of this behavior as president, see David Leonhardt, “It Isn’t Complicated: Trump Encourages Violence,” New York Times, Mar. 17, 2019. And Jonathan Chait, “Trump Isn’t Inciting Violence by Mistake, but on Purpose. He Just Told Us,” New York Magazine, Nov. 5, 2018, nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/trump-isnt-inciting-violence-by-mistake-he-just-told-us.html.

42. See, for example, John Wagner, “Trump Takes Aim at Obama, Clinton, Judges, Election Officials, Reporters and a Host of Others Before Leaving the Country,” Washington Post, Nov. 9, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-takes-aim-at-obama-clinton-judges-election-officials-reporters-and-a-host-of-others-before-leaving-the-country/2018/11/09/bd52140a-e435-lle8-b759-3d88a5ce9el9_story.html.

43. From Michael Shaw, “Six Rare Images That Capture Trump’s TV Addiction,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 31, 2017, www.cjr.org/politics/trump-tv-addiction.php.

See Elaine Godfrey, “Trump’s TV Obsession Is a First,” The Atlantic, Apr. 3, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/donald-trump-americas-first-tv-president/521640.

See also Brandon Carter, “Trump Watches up to Eight Hours of TV Per Day: Report,” The Hill, Dec. 9, 2017, thehill.com/homenews/administration/364094-trump-watches-at-least-four-hours-of-tv-per-day-report.

44. For example, former Fox TV host Lawrence Kudlow was made director of the National Economic Council in March 2018; and John Bolton was named national security advisor the following month—he lasted five months in the position.

45. A perhaps extreme example: Trump spent fifty-three minutes on the phone with Fox and Friends the morning of November 22, 2019. (See Axios, www.axios.com/trump-fox-and-friends-call-impeachment-ukraine-el739c65-33d3-4c35-a723-7a31abb488ef.html.)

46. See Jessica Kwong, “Fox News’s Sean Hannity Basically Has a Desk at White House as President’s Most Influential Counselor: Trump Advisor,” Newsweek, Sep. 5, 2019, www.newsweek.com/sean-hannity-white-house-desk-counselor-donald-trump-1457917.

47. For example, see Chris Cillizza, “Why Donald Trump Feels Betrayed by Fox News,” CNN, May 21, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/05/20/politics/fnc-fox-news-donald-trump/index.html.

48. One (quite painful) example of Trump buying into the conspiracy fevers on the right was the case of the death of Seth Rich.

Fox News played an instrumental role in helping push the conspiracy theory that the 27-year-old Rich, who was murdered in a botched robbery in July 2016, had contact with WikiLeaks, which released thousands of Hillary Clinton campaign emails during the 2016 presidential race.

Ari Berman, “Seth Rich’s Family Just Won a Legal Victory Against Fox News, Mother Jones, Sep. 14, 2019, www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/seth-richs-family-just-won-a-legal-victory-against-fox-news. See also Ed Pilkington, “The Strange Case of Fox News, Trump and the Death of Young Democrat Seth Rich,” The Guardian, Aug. 7, 2017, www.theguardian.com/media/2017/aug/07/seth-rich-trump-white-house-fox-news.

In “Exclusive: The True Origins of the Seth Rich Conspiracy Theory,” Michael Isikoff traces the chain of Rich conspiracy thinking through the populist right media and its path to Fox News and to Donald Trump. An excerpt illustrating that passage:

Along the way, the idea that Rich was murdered in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks was championed by multiple allies of Trump, including Roger Stone. The same day [WikiLeaks head Julian] Assange falsely hinted that Rich may have been his source for DNC emails, Stone tweeted a picture of Rich, calling the late DNC staffer in a tweet “another dead body in the Clinton’s wake.” He then added: “Coincidence? I think not.”

Yahoo News, Jul. 9, 2019.

49. From Matthew Gertz, “I’ve Studied the Trump-Fox Feedback Loop for Months. It’s Crazier Than You Think,” Politico, Jan. 5, 2018, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/05/trump-media-feedback-loop-216248.

From Daniel Moritz-Rabson, “Video Compilation Shows Thirty Times Trump Repeated ‘Fox and Friends’ Talking Points in 2018,” Newsweek, Dec. 28, 2018:

A video compiled by news monitor Media Matters shows 30 times President Donald Trump repeated talking points from Fox & Friends in 2018, illuminating the close connection between the president and the morning show.

www.newsweek.com/trump-fox-and-friends-influence-video-twitter-tweets-fox-news-1274231.

50. F.W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism, vol. 1 (Doubleday, 1966), 41–42.

51. Murray Kempton, “A Genius of Journalism,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 7, 1982. Kempton notes that half of Fascism’s Grand Council in 1930 consisted of journalists.

52. See Jessica Estepa, “Reporter Says Donald Trump Used Alter Ego ‘John Barron’ to Get onto Forbes 400 List,” USA Today, Apr. 20, 2018, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/20/reporter-recalls-trumps-alter-ego-amazed-didnt-see-through-ruse/537312002.

As John Cassidy pointed out:

These days, when Trump has a self-serving whopper to spread around, he goes on Twitter and attaches his own name to it. In the age of @realDonaldTrump, there is no longer any need for John Barron.

“Trump’s History of Lying, from John Barron to @realDonaldTrump,” New Yorker, Apr. 23, 2018, www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/trumps-history-of-lying-from-john-barron-to-realdonaldtrump.

53. In this Trump most resembles his British counterpart Boris Johnson.

“Boris Johnson is more of a journalist than he is a statesman by a considerable margin,” said David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun, a tabloid. “His instincts are those of a newspaper columnist, and his consistency is that of a British newspaper columnist, in the sense that he says one thing on a Monday and another on a Tuesday and it doesn’t matter.”

Benjamin Mueller, “For Pro-Brexit Press, Boris Johnson Is Already a Winner,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/world/europe/brexit-newspapers-boris-Johnson.html.

54. The Putin quote is from a Financial Times interview with him in June 2019. See Lionel Barber et al., “Putin Says Liberalism Has ‘Become Obsolete,’” Financial Times, Jun. 27, 2019, www.ft.com/content/670039ec-98f3-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36.

55. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Is Putin Right? Has Liberalism Lost the World?,” Patrick J. Buchanan Official Website, Jul. 2, 2019, buchanan.org/blog/is-putin-right-has-liberalism-lost-the-world-137223#more-137223.

Buchanan’s embrace of Trumpism includes lionizing Trump’s tariff policies. See his “Tariffs: The Taxes That Made America Great,” Buchanan Official Website, May 13, 2019.

Tariffs were the taxes that made America great. They were the taxes relied upon by the first and greatest of our early statesmen, before the coming of the globalists Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

That is economic patriotism, putting America and Americans first.

Once a nation is hooked on the cheap goods that are the narcotic free trade provides, it is rarely able to break free. The loss of its economic independence is followed by the loss of its political independence, the loss of its greatness and, ultimately, the loss of its national identity.

As he did with World War II in his book Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (Crown, 2008), Buchanan was attempting to recast tout court a pillar of received liberal thinking—in this case on the New Deal and the causes of the Great Depression:

That the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the Depression of the 1930s is a New Deal myth in which America’s schoolchildren have been indoctrinated for decades. The Depression began with the crash of the stock market in 1929, nine months before Smoot-Hawley became law. The real villain: the Federal Reserve.

buchanan.org/blog/tariffs-the-taxes-that-made-america-great-136986.

56. Gottfried decried what he called “multicultural totalitarianism.” With some reluctance he increasingly understood the inherent connection between anti-liberal nationalism and race that would become the hallmark of the alt-right:

In a 2009 essay, Gottfried wrote: “To the extent that anything resembling the historic right can flourish in our predominantly postmodernist, multicultural and feminist society—and barring any unforeseen return to a more traditionalist establishment right—racial nationalism, for better or worse, may be one of the few extant examples of a recognizably rightist mind-set.”

Jacob Siegel, “The Alt-Right’s Jewish Godfather,” Tablet, Nov. 29, 2016, www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/218712/spencer-gottfried-alt-right.

57. VDARE was named in honor of Virginia Dare, the first white child born on the American continent.

58. Roy Beck, The Case Against Immigration (Norton, 1996).

See Jason DeParle, “The Anti-Immigration Crusader,” New York Times, Apr. 17, 2011, for the place of John Tanton as a pioneer of establishing the modern field of anti-immigrant pressure groups. Also see Nicholas Kulish and Mike McIntire, “Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2019, for the unique role of Cordelia Scaife May, who bankrolled the movement to the tune of $180 million over the years.

59. See chapter 5, note 34. Also notable in expounding the nationalist point of view prefiguring Donald Trump was the radio talk show host Michael Savage, who used the phrase “borders, language and culture” to summarize his views. Racist anti-immigrant views were expressed popularly throughout this period. One notable instance was the case of the Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker. Rocker was vocal about his extreme distaste for the diversity of New York, and in particular what he encountered on the subway ride out to Shea Stadium in Queens or walking the streets in Manhattan:

The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. I’m not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?

Jeff Pearlman, “At Full Blast,” Sports Illustrated, Dec. 23, 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/20000817193712/ http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/cover/news/1999/12/22/rocker.

60. As for the white nationalist dimension of paleoconservative and anti-immigrant nationalism:

The heart of where these guys differ from neoconservatives and Republican orthodoxy is basically: “What is the American nation and what is the nature of American nationhood?”… It’s not based on “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It’s based on “What were the color of the people who wrote those words?”

Lawrence Rosenthal, quoted in Katie Rogers and Jason DeParle, “White Nationalists’ Websites Influenced Miller,” New York Times, Nov. 18, 2019.

61. See George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right, 97.

62. Publius Decius Mus, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, Sep. 5, 2016, www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election.

Anton began the argument for the creation of a new “national conservatism” that would continue after Trump’s election. Conservatism had lost its way in the globalist consensus it had come to share with liberalism:

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same—as will the election of Hillary Clinton…. Most important, [that means] the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.

63. See Jennifer Schuessler’s report on the “Claremonsters” at “‘Charge the Cockpit or You Die’: Behind an Incendiary Case for Trump,” New York Times, Feb. 20, 2017. See also Jon Baskin, “The Academic Home of Trumpism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Mar. 17, 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academic-Home-of-Trumpism/239495.

64. “Fact Sheet: Immigrants in California,” American Immigration Council, Oct. 4, 2017, www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrants-in-california.

65. Jeremy W. Peters takes up the problem of California as the center of Trumpian intellectual ferment in “In the Heart of ‘The Resistance,’ California Conservatives Are Invigorated,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/us/california-republicans-bannon-miller-conservative.html.

This California reverse effect—that immigrant proximity inflamed anti-immigrant feeling among ideologues—was also reflected in California having contributed disproportionately to the militant leaders of the alt-right, including the violent characters of Charlottesville, the Battle of Berkeley, and elsewhere.

66. Daniel Luban, “The Man Behind National Conservatism,” New Republic, Jul. 26, 2019, newrepublic.com/article/154531/man-behind-national-conservatism.

See also Jacob Heilbrunn’s report on the conference at “National Conservatism: Retrofitting Trump’s GOP with a Veneer of Ideas,” New York Review of Books, Jul. 18, 2019, www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/07/18/national-conservatism-retrofitting-trumps-gop-with-a-veneer-of-ideas.

Anne Applebaum covered a February 2020 National Conservatism conference in Rome. See her report, “This Is How Reaganism and Thatcherism End,” The Atlantic, Feb. 10, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/the-sad-path-from-reaganism-to-national-conservatism/606304.

67. Yoram Hazony, Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018). According to Luban, Hazony, who was raised in the United States, was reportedly “mesmerized” by meeting ultranationalist rabbi Meir Kahane as a young man, and participated in Benjamin Netanyahu’s early inner circle.

Other significant texts related to the conference include: Michael Anton’s “The Trump Doctrine,” Foreign Policy, Apr. 20, 2019, foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/20/the-trump-doctrine-big-think-america-first-nationalism; Senator Josh Hawley’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference, www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-josh-hawleys-speech-national-conservatism-conference; and Rich Lowry’s The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free (HarperCollins, 2019). (It is also worth noting Charles King’s response to Lowry, “America’s Original Identity Politics: Rich Lowry’s Flawed Case for Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, Nov. 7, 2019, www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-U-07/americas-original-identity-politics.)

68. Yoram Hazony, “Conservative Democracy,” First Things, Jan. 2019, www.firstthings.com/article/2019/01/conservative-democracy. It is notable how significantly this privileging of the ethnic and spiritual basis of conservatism over the words of the U.S. foundation documents contradicts the “originalism” that has characterized conservative thought since the 1980s and has established itself as the cornerstone of right-wing and right populist notions of jurisprudence.

The emergence of the Anglo-American conservative tradition can be identified with the words and deeds of a series of towering political and intellectual figures, among whom we can include individuals such as Sir John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, John Dickinson, and Alexander Hamilton. Men such as George Washington, John Adams, and John Marshall, often hastily included among the liberals, would also have placed themselves in this conservative tradition rather than with its opponents, whom they knew all too well.

69. Hazony, “Conservative Democracy.”

70. Daniel Luban, “The Man Behind National Conservatism.” From Michael Anton’s “The Trump Doctrine”:

While traditional empires may have gone out of fashion, globalization has taken its place as the imperialism of our time. Globalization represents an attempt to do through peaceful means—the creation of transnational institutions, the erosion of borders, and the homogenization of intellectual, cultural, and economic products—what the Romans (and Cyrus and others) achieved through arms.

Globalism and transnationalism impose their highest costs on established powers (namely the United States) and award the greatest benefits to rising powers seeking to contest U.S. influence and leadership.

71. Schmitt defines sovereignty as the power to invoke the state of exception. He wrote, “The Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” See Quinta Jurecic, “Donald Trump’s State of Exception,” Lawfare, Dec. 14, 2016, www.lawfareblog.com/donald-trumps-state-exception.

Agamben argues that the whole of the Nazi era was a state of exception imposed by Hitler as the executive. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

72. Ed Pilkington and Martin Pengelly, “Trump Proposed Sending Migrants to Guantánamo, Claims Book by Anonymous Author,” The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2019.

73. Lauren Suken, “The United States Treats Migrants Worse Than Prisoners of War,” Foreign Policy, Jul. 26, 2019, foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/26/the-united-states-treats-migrants-worse-than-prisoners-of-war.

Today, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers have custody of approximately 54,000 refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants. An additional 20,000 are being held in the custody of Customs and Border Protection, with 11,000 more children held by the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s a higher number of detainees than there were U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) in the Gulf War, Vietnam War, Korean War, and the Pacific Front of World War II combined.

Suken illustrates numerous violations of the standards for detainees set by the Geneva Convention. She points out among other violations that “in some facilities, babies are being fed with unwashed bottles; there are no diapers, soap, or toothpaste. Showers are unavailable or too few, as are laundry facilities and clean changes of clothes”—all violations; and that among the consequences, “approximately 26 people have died in the centers—seven of whom were children.”

74. The text of the State of Emergency Declaration may be found at www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-proclamation-declaring-national-emergency-concerning-southern-border-united-states.

75. Julian De Medeiros, “The Wall Isn’t a State of Emergency but a State of Exception,” openDemocracy, Feb. 16, 2019.

76. James Vincent, “Watch Jordan Peele Use AI to Make Barack Obama Deliver a PSA About Fake News,” The Verge, Apr. 17, 2018, www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed. See also Hilke Schellmann, “The Dangerous New Technology That Will Make Us Question Our Basic Idea of Reality,” Quartz, Dec. 5, 2017, qz.com/1145657/the-dangerous-new-technology-that-will-make-us-question-our-basic-idea-of-reality.

77. This is from Schiff’s January 24 closing argument. For a transcript see https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/adam-schiff-closing-argument-transcript-thursday-impeachment-trial.

78. Mueller’s report disappointed Blue America because it effectively left legal action based upon it to either the Justice Department or Congress. According to a federal judge, William Barr purposely “distorted” and “misled” in his handling of the report, causing “the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump.” (Charlie Savage, “Judge Calls Barr’s Handling of Mueller Report ‘Distorted’ and ‘Misleading,’” New York Times, Mar. 5, 2020.)

Mueller had explained both his inclination to leave prosecution to others and his passively stated belief in Trump’s guilt as follows:

Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. [emphasis added]

From the Justice Department’s heavily blacked-out publication of the Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, Volume II of II, p 8 and p 182, https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf.

79. Michael Cohen was convicted of campaign finance violations for hush-money payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal. Cohen’s indictment in the Southern District of New York cited “Individual-1” (“who was elected President”) as his accomplice in the crime. (Glenn Fleishman, “Feds Accuse Individual-1—Also Known as Trump—of a Crime in Michael Cohen’s Sentencing Memo,” Fortune, Dec. 7, 2018, fortune.com/2018/12/07/feds-accuse-trump-crime-cohen-campaign-finance.)

As Cohen made clear at his sentencing:

I pled guilty in federal court to felonies for the benefit of, at the direction of, and in coordination with “Individual 1” … And for the record: “Individual 1” is Donald J. Trump.

Dara Lind, “Michael Cohen: ‘Individual 1 Is Donald J. Trump,’” Vox, Feb. 27, 2019, www.vox.com/2019/2/27/18243038/individual4-cohen-tmmp-mueller.

80. In its purest form, Trump’s tic was on display in one of his presidential debates with Hillary Clinton:

Clinton: That’s because he’d [Putin] rather have a puppet as president …

Trump: [interrupting] No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.

See www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaVWRetR4jg.

Charles Blow captured the central role of psychological projection in Trump’s “tic” when he wrote:

Trump is like the unfaithful spouse who constantly accuses the other of infidelity because the guilt of his or her own sins has hijacked their thinking and consumed their consciousness. The flaws he sees are the ones he possesses.

Charles M. Blow, “America’s Whiniest ‘Victim,’” New York Times, Aug. 7, 2017.

81. For Blue America, there was a bellwether in watching the Republican Party go Full Trump. In September 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. A Stanford research psychologist, Christine Blasey Ford, alleged that “a drunken young Mr. Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, tried to rip off her clothes and clapped his hand over her mouth to muffle her cries for help.”

Kavanaugh responded with seething fury. He followed Trump’s two-step formula of denial and projection. In addition, he appended a conspiracy theory alleging motivations based on avenging Trump’s election. Along with alleging “hoaxes,” conspiracy thinking was a commonplace in how projection played out in right-wing media and among Republican spokespersons. Kavanaugh:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

From Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement: Full transcript, New York Times, Sep. 26, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/us/politics/read-brett-kavanaughs-complete-opening-statement.html.

Senator Lindsey Graham followed Kavanaugh’s statement with a furious and snarling attack on the Democratic members of the committee: “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020.” Striking here is how blatant the psychological projection has become: Graham is accusing the Democrats of attempting to do precisely what the Republicans had done in 2016 with Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland—“hold[ing] the seat open and hop[ing] you win in 2016.” The illiberal mentality rejects professionalism and objectivity; at the heart of their projection is the conviction, judging from themselves, that all behavior is intrinsically self-interested.

See Ian Swartz, “Sen. Graham Explodes at Kavanaugh Hearing: ‘Most Despicable’ Thing in Politics, I Hope You Never Get This Seat,” Real Clear Politics, Sep. 27, 2018, which includes video of Graham’s outburst, www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/27/sen_graham_explodes_on_dems_at_kavanaugh_hearing_most_despicable_thing_ive_seen_in_politics.html.

82. See chapter 3, note 9.

83. See the following:

• McKay Coppins, “The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President,” The Atlantic, Mar. 2020, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530.

• Arthur Ituassu, “Digital Media and Public Opinion in Brazil After Trump 2016,” Open Democracy, Dec, 6, 2019, www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/public-opinion-in-brazil-after-the-campaigns-of-trump-and-bolsonaro.

• Philip N. Howard, “How Political Campaigns Weaponize Social Media Bots,” IEEE Spectrum, Oct. 18, 2018, spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/how-political-campaigns-weaponize-social-media-bots.

84. The anti-sheltering movement offered the contrast between Trumpian populist supporters out on the streets and the backing of right-wing money like Americans for Prosperity and the DeVos family. In this it raised the question much debated about the Tea Party: was it an Astroturf or a grass-roots movement? (See chapter 2, note 12; also see Adam Gabbatt, “Thousands of Americans Backed by Rightwing Donors Gear Up for Protests,” The Guardian, Apr. 18, 2020, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/18/coronavirus-americans-protest-stay-at-home.)

Trump gave his support to this movement in tweets that exhorted “Liberate Minnesota/Virginia/Michigan.” His Virginia tweet was particularly volatile since he included the suggestion that gun rights were at stake to a movement where individuals frequently appeared conspicuously carrying automatic weapons. (“LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” See Colby Itkowitz, “‘Liberate’: Trump Tweets Support of Protests Against Stay-at-Home Orders,” Washington Post, Apr. 17, 2020, washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/17/liberate-trump-tweets-support-protesting-against-stay-at-home-orders.) Trump’s implicit call to arms was particularly incendiary since it came at a time when “civil-war chatter” (the moment seemed ripe for the “boogaloo”—the militia uprising) was florid on militia blogs. See Devin Burghart, “Coronavirus and the Militia-Sphere,” IREHR, Mar. 20, 2020, www.irehr.org/2020/03/26/coronavirus-militia-sphere.

85. See chapter 2 on the Tea Party’s popular-originalist constitutional-ism—the view that interpretation of the Constitution must adhere word-for-word to its text, and that interpretation of the Constitution should not be left solely in the hands of judges and lawyers and trained professionals, but was best practiced by ordinary citizens. A relatively sober statement of the populist epidemiological case was offered by “ReOpen Maryland”:

Government mandating sick people to stay home is called quarantine. However, the government mandating healthy citizens to stay home, forcing businesses and churches to close is called tyranny.

(Quoted in Gabbatt, “Thousands of Americans Backed by Rightwing Donors Gear Up for Protests”.)

Populist epidemiology reached perhaps its high point in “Lysolgate” when Trump, who had taken to daily two-hour-long sessions with the press that often turned belligerent, mused that “injecting” disinfectant might be worth investigating as a way to wipe out coronavirus infections. See Katie Rogers et al., “Trump’s Suggestion That Disinfectants Could Be Used to Treat Coronavirus Prompts Aggressive Pushback,” New York Times, Apr. 24, 2020.

The anti-shutdown movement was rife with conspiracy theories. The usual suspects, the deep state and the globalists, were seen to be attempting to inculcate permanent mass dependency on government; plotting the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of socialism; trying to collapse the economy to bring down Trump. China was another candidate, seen as having tried to weaponize the virus in its Wuhan lab. Bill Gates, who foresaw the pandemic in a much-viewed Ted Talk, was another candidate. So was the World Health Organization.

86. See the earlier discussion in this chapter of an Enabling Act’s potential role as a kind of Rubicon to cross from illiberalism to institutionalizing the total shutdown of democracy that was effected in the historical fascist states of the twentieth century. For a report on this development in Hungary see Silvia Amaro, “Hungary’s Nationalist Leader Viktor Orban Is Ruling by Decree Indefinitely Amid Coronavirus,” CNBC, Mar. 31, 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/03/31/coronavirus-in-hungary-viktor-orban-rules-by-decree-indefinitely.html.

For a view indicating the gravity with which Europe viewed this development, see Renata Uitz, “The EU Needs to Stop Funding Viktor Orban’s Emergency Rule,” euronews, Apr. 7, 2020, www.euronews.com/2020/04/07/the-eu-needs-to-stop-funding-viktor-orban-s-emergency-rule-view.

87. “When somebody is president of the United States his authority is total.” “Total,” one is tempted to note in this context, is the root of “totalitarian.” This statement, plus a number of similar statements Trump made in his coronavirus sessions with the press, may be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3QXrQDTDYo.

For an overview of the broadly based pushback on Trump’s assertion of “total” power, see Charlie Savage, “Trump’s Claim of Total Authority in Crisis Is Rejected Across Ideological Lines,” New York Times, Apr. 14, 2020.

88. A strong late April statement of this point of view came from a sheltering-in-place Joe Biden, who had already established himself as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president: “Mark my words, I think [Trump] is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held.”

See Amanda Holpuch, “Joe Biden Warns That Donald Trump May Try to Delay November Election,” The Guardian, Apr. 24, 2020, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/24/joe-biden-donald-trump-delay-election.