Slick wrote: Tue Jul 16, 2024 11:09 am
sockwithaticket wrote: Tue Jul 16, 2024 10:28 am
inactionman wrote: Tue Jul 16, 2024 9:11 am
That islamist Church of England/Church of Scotland.
It's always interesting to try to reverse-engineer what a US politician is getting at, assuming there's ulterior motive to most of what they say, but I'm really struggling here.
We can't forget that the dark money of the American political right is increasingly spreading it's tendrils to the UK and there's more and more an attempt to build a trans-Atlantic right beyond the mutual adoption of neo-liberalism. It behooves the spenders and their ideology to undermine and discredit parties in all countries who would resist their attempts to realise their worldview. Whether it's abortion rights, net zero targets, workers rights, clamping down on parasite capitalism (water companies!) and so on even this fairly non-radical version of the Labour party is at the very least perceived to be a threat rather than an ally in the way that the loony version of the Tory party was.
The whole Khan has turned London into Islamistan thing was basic sow dischord and division in the west stuff, but it's a mere hop, skip and a jump from identifying him as a Labour politician to then tarring all of Labour with being Islamists.
You might also be able to broadly tie it in with strong man dictator stuff - 'look even the UK has been taken over, Trump is the only hope to protect the US' - and the evangelical christo-fascists who actively want the end times to come so that the second coming occurs. The idea that bastions of Western civilisation are falling certainly fuels that narrative. Such people are wierdly reminiscent of the millenarianists that was so prominent during the Reformation, a period of great, bloody sectarian violence. America's political divisions are showing every sign of being as deep-seated and irreconcilable as sectarian divisions have been through histroy.
Good post, without resorting to some of the hyperbole that’s fueling a lot of this nonsense whilst thinking it’s fighting it.
I’ve had a bit of reflection over the last couple of days on this. My immediate reaction to Republicans coming out and saying “the left are causing this” was just to laugh. But actually a lot of the language used across the media and by commentators (and on here) is just fuelling the fire.
That’s of course not to say that the right are clean, in reality they are worse, probably quite a bit so. But words like facist, Nazi, Hitler etc are thrown about and it just ends up diluting the actual message. Just this morning I read in the Guardian that MTG was “far right”, and that’s another phrase that has lost its real, deplorable meaning. She’s an utter cunt, but she’s not far right in the historical sense that was meant to demonise and scare us all, rightly.
To be honest I'm one of those on the left who thinks the American right represents a genuine threat to democracy over there* and the left response is inspired by the not unfounded fear that they're living through 1930s Germany and many understandably take a pretty staunch position on wanting to combat that. Those terms you highlight may well get tossed around a bit liberally, but with stuff like Project 25 and oh so many utterances down the years now from Trump and his supporters that attack and undermine democratic institutions, threaten worryingly authoritarian treatment for anyone that opposes them, demonisation of and refusal to engage with any but the friendliest of media, it's tough to view them as anything but a fascist threat.
There are genuine neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements that have attached themselves to the Trumpist Republican party and that's no accident. The FBI has long registered such groups as the US's primary domestic threat and they've been fully emboldened over the last several years, much more visible than they were before Trump initially ran for president. There was a march of people in Swastika tshirts through Nashville just this weekend. A lot of the current Republican party at best pander to those sorts of elements if not are actively part of them.
I think you're a bit charitable towards MTG. Like a few others, she gave tours of the Capitol to those who would end up being insurrectionists in 2020 just days beforehand. She's at the very least indulged in enabling and encouraging the erosion of trust in the judiciary and in elections, of pushing conspiracy theories and using inflammatory rhetoric in a way that makes her complicit with the far right elements. Maybe she's just power hungry and ignorant, seeing this all as her meal ticket, but at a certain point that becomes indistinguishable from active support.
*And I watch the spread of rhetoric and methodology employed over there with great nervousness.
Shame Joe isn't cut from the same cloth, it's just what they need right now
