If you have an interest in doing a thing, but you know people will call you out on it, one tactic that you can take is to start a years-long campaign to make complaining about the thing you’re doing seem silly. Any time someone says something about anyone doing that thing, you shake your head sadly and point out that they’re exaggerating, they have nothing better to do, and what they’re saying is ridiculous. If you do this long enough, then you can actually do the thing right in front of people, and no one will believe you’re doing it. Because anyone pointing out to people that you are doing exactly what you’re doing will be ridiculed as being hyperbolic and just trying to grab attention. Meanwhile, you’re getting away scot-free.
Just to take a random example, say you wanted to dismantle a democracy the same way Hitler did in the 1930s. You might start by adopting some of Hitler’s views, progress to actually quoting Hitler in your political speeches, and finally just straight up doing what Hitler did, once you had advanced to the point of having sufficient power to do so. At each stage, people will inevitably try to compare you to Hitler. So just make Hitler comparison seem like a joke. People who can’t come up with anything better that “he’s like Hitler!” are obviously just grasping at straws. Really: that’s the best you can come up with? that I’m like Hitler? Oh, please. Pretty soon you’re totally doing a Hitler and no one believes it, because comparisons to Hitler have been devalued sufficiently that no one can even bring them up any more. This is where we high five: stick your arm straight out, palm down, at about a 45° angle down from vertical. No need to worry about anyone thinking you’re doing a Nazi salute: just say you’re “throwing your heart out” and act like those people are dumb.
Of course, one needn’t only use Hitler as a model. In an interview with Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo this week, British journalist Owen Jones suggested another blueprint:
Owen: Hungary is the playbook for these people. ... you know they had a political party, Fidesz, ... Orbán ... this guy who runs it, used to call himself a liberal, he used to be Vice Chair of the Liberal International, don’t you know, and then it radicalized in power, and what it did is, ... it didn’t put ... firing squads shooting people, three people in prison, it just got rid of democracy by attrition, behind closed doors.
Mehdi: Yep, erosion.
Owen: Exactly.
Still, Owen Jones is a young punk journo (although not as young as he looks). It’s not like he’s a historian, like, say ... oh, I don’t know, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whom Wikipedia might describe as “a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders.” It’s not like Ruth went on America Unhinged, where she was asked by Francesca Fiorentini about aspiring autocrats dressing up their actions in the language of democracy, to which she replied:
In part, that’s ... just to kind of mislead people, ... So one of the main things people will say to justify their coup, besides, you know, getting rid of Marxists and saving the nation, is saving the freedoms. And even the fascists used to say that, you know, they were bringing real Freedom ... In communist China they say that’s a democracy: it’s the People’s Republic. And think about Viktor Orbán who is like, you know, he calls his system an “illiberal democracy”! There is nothing Democratic about Orbán’s Hungary any more, but he still clings to that word, to confuse people. So ... authoritarians are expert at confusing people, at using language, and then, you know, the Orwellian stuff, like ... it’s the opposite: so the the Department of Government Efficiency is the Department of Corruption and Plundering. And that’s how authoritarians always operate: they invert, they pervert meaning, and then they want to confuse people, and it works for a lot of people.
And then Wajahat Ali responded “Steve Bannon, about a decade ago, Ruth, said that Orbán was Trump before Trump.”
Oh, wait ... I guess all that did happen.
And, while you know I mostly agree with Jon Stewar
So I am very cautious about when to know— like, yeah, hopefully I won’t do it the night after Kristallnacht ...
Man, Jon, I hope not too. But I worry that that may be where we’re headed.
As the ladies of Strict Scrutiny pointed out, the Trump regime almost immediately fired the first woman leader of any branch of the Armed Services, citing DEI. To echo Brian Tyler Cohen this week, do we just have to wait for the worst to happen? Or, to echo someone else (possibly also BTC): what, 8 plane crashes isn’t the worst???
The former director of the CFPB (fired by Trump, naturally), pointed on this week’s Coffe Klatch:
Every single day, I think, we averaged over $4 million in refunds back to people. Why is it efficient to cut that work? The return on investment was huge for the taxpayer.
But of course this just goes back to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s point that words mean nothing (unless they mean the opposite). Besides, that money didn’t come to the government, where President Musk and his sidekick Trump could figure out a way to divert it into their pockets. It went back to consumers. That’s not who this current regime is set up to benefit. It’s amazing to me that the concept of doublethink was identified (and forecast) in 1949; we’ve understood exactly how it works for over 75 years, and yet we still fall for it.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.
That’s from George Orwell’s 1984, if you didn’t recognize it, although if you thought it was a description of today’s Republican party, you could be forgiven for the easy mistake. Ben-Ghiat pegged this doublespeak quite accurately as “Orwellian” in the quote above, so the only thing that doesn’t track perfectly is that it took us an extra 40 years to get to where Orwell predicted. But maybe that’s just how long it took us to forget what he tried to teach us.
Also on Zeteo this week, Mehdi Hasan interviewed Ilhan Omar. It’s worth watching the whole interview; I thought her dismissal of Texas Representative Brandon Gill’s assertion that she should be deported (despite her being a US citizen for 25 years now) was actually pretty brave, considering how likely it could be under the Trump regime. (By the way, I didn’t know who Brandon Gill even was before this interview, but now I do. He’s the son-in-law of Dinesh D’Souza, and, if you don’t know who that is, Wikipedia describes him pretty well right in the first sentence: he’s “an American right-wing political commentator, conspiracy theorist, author, filmmaker, and convicted felon pardoned by Donald Trump.” One of his classic films is 2000 Mules, and if you don’t know what that is Wikipedia has you covered again (and again in its first sentence): it’s “a debunked 2022 American conspiracist political film which falsely claims paid ‘mules’ illegally collected and deposited ballots into drop boxes in swing states during the 2020 presidential election.” If you’ve ever wondered how so many people can hold on to the insane belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election, D’Souza is a big part of the reason. Anyway, we needn’t judge Gill by his associations: in addition to suggesting Omar be deported, he’s also been a big fan of Daniel Penny, the white “vigilante” who killed an unarmed black man named Jordan Neely on a New York City subway. Quoth Gill: “I think we need a lot more Daniel Penny’s in this country, because we have far too many Jordan Neely’s.” Get it? We need more white people, because we have too many black people. Not blatant enough for you? How about his comment when Penny was acquitted: “It’s still not illegal to be white.” So ... yeah. White supremacist. Big surprise.) I also appreciated Omar’s response to Mehdi’s question about whether she thought Harris’ stance on Gaza cost her the election:
Well, it’s not what I think: we’ve seen polls that say ... nearly 30% of the people who stayed home stayed home because of the bloodshed, the genocide that was televised on on their phones. And the fact that, you know, the the Biden administration, which Harris was part of, was complicit in that ...
She’s likely not wrong, but I would still texture her point by noting that Harris could have worked around that problem. She was just “part of” the Biden administration, as Omar notes; if she had only ignored her advisors and worked harder to put more distance between herself and Biden, she might have pulled it out. Or maybe that’s only wishful thinking; I don’t know.
A passing thought, relevant to the many strong women mentioned this week: in her second episode of half podcast / half stand-up routine Thought Box, Michelle Wolf noted:
This is why we need more women in charge, because— I’m not saying that women wouldn’t be assholes too, but people would be way more critical of them. People would, people would keep them in check.
The contrast she’s making, of course, is with the blind hero-worship that many heap onto President Musk, but the same can often be said for Trump as well. If you don’t recognize that the embrace of the “grab ’em by the pussy” guy by Evangelicals, of all people, involves a metric shit-ton of conveniently ignoring inconvenient truths, then I might have to suspect you were engaging in similar behavior yourself.
But, for the rare spot of good news, America Unhinged (Zeteo is on fire this week) highlighted former NFL player Chris Kluwe’s speech at a Huntingon Beach city council meeting. I cannot describe how glorious it is; you must watch it for yourself. In today’s day and age, it’s just nice to see a straight white man who isn’t a fucking Nazi for a change.