Tag: authoritarianism
Kinzinger Blasts Trump As ‘Worst President Ever’ In Wide-Ranging Interview

Kinzinger Blasts Trump As ‘Worst President Ever’ In Wide-Ranging Interview

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois has already said he will not seek another term in the House—though he has left open the possibility of returning to political office at some point in the future. A big part of this play is that Kinzinger, along with neo-conservatives like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), are battling to regain control over a political party now inundated with more flagrantly corrupt, more flagrantly authoritarian, and more flagrantly incompetent officials like Sen. Josh Hawley and Reps. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) ascending to prominence. There was a time when people who acted and spoke like Louie Gohmert weren’t the majority.

As a result, Kinzinger and Cheney have been censured by the Republican Party for their participation in the single most important investigation of an attempted coup d’etat in recent memory. Kinzinger has hit the media circuit to make the case for democracy. Speaking on CNN and MSNBC in interviews on Monday, Kinzinger slammed everyone from Donald Trump to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Unlike other anti-MAGA, anti-Big Lie conservatives, Kinzinger isn’t running for office and has decided he is going to hit his fellow Republicans where it hurts: with the truth.

On CNN, Kinzinger spoke about having a newborn son at home and the world he hopes his son grows up in, and whether or not his son would be proud of his decisions in the past year. Asked what he will tell his son about Donald Trump when he’s older, Kinzinger was simple but to the point: ”I will tell him he is the worst president the United States ever had. He was a liar and a charlatan, and he was the most fragile ego I ever met.“ The truth meter is pretty high on that statement. Whether or not Trump is the worst president in U.S. history is definitely debatable, but he is easily one of the worst presidents in our country’s history.

But Kinzinger’s continued appeal to the decency of his fellow Republicans has fallen on deaf ears, it seems. Kinzinger lamented this while also trying to remind everyone of how important a moment in our history as a country this all is. As such, Kinzinger hopes and believes there will be a reckoning. “I want them to know how they voted on January 6. In five or 10 years, it will be hard to explain if you're not on the side of the truth.”

On Sunday Morning Joe over at MSNBC, Kinzinger was asked about his off-the-record conversations with Republicans who claim to agree with him that Trump and others pushing the Big Lie are wrong. Kinzinger’s response was telling. He first said that the GOP officials he imagined he was being asked about weren’t the people he’s spoken to in his party that are “crazy.”

From there he said he hears a lot of rationalizing over campaign fears. “I just have to win my primary because trust me, the guy I'm running against is really bad.” Kinzinger points out that this isn’t much of an excuse, saying: “At some point you have to stand up.” Kinzinger says he sometimes receives pushback from officials telling him that they know how to do their job and that they’re more of “the local person,” whatever that bit of BS is supposed to mean to them. Kinzinger says when he hears this kind of thing, he realizes that his “friends” don’t have a “red line they won’t cross,” and that this isn’t sufficient in a fight for our democracy. “Silence is complicity.”

When McCarthy and his censure of Cheney and Kinzinger is brought up, the Illinois representative is withering in his description of the minority leader: “He is the weakest leader, frankly, that has ever existed in that position.”

After taking a shot at the Donald’s fragility, Kinzinger goes on: "I don't get the hurt feelings that Donald Trump gets on a daily basis.” He then made one of his most important points: The January 6 committee is nonpartisan by nature of what it is investigating, and any attack on the committee as simply partisan is disrespectful to what a working democracy should look like.

REP. ADAM KINZINGER: This is not the left wing against the right wing. This is authoritarianism—you can call it even moments of fascism—against democracy. And even as bad as the violence was over the summer during the riots, that at no point threatened the self-governance of the United States like the self-governance of the United States was threatened on January 6. There is no false equivalence, no matter how much the victim and hurt feelings king Donald Trump likes to say.

On the one hand, Cheney and Kinzinger are 100 percent right in the pursuit of the truth of what happened, who knew what, and who was planning what on that day. Rightly, Cheney and Kinzinger have pointed to the need for the Republican Party writ large to take a stance against the tyranny people like Donald Trump represent. On the other hand, considering their moves against things like voting rights, it is hard not to look at some of their animosity towards their fellow Republicans with a healthy amount of cynicism. But the stakes are so high at this point it is a good thing that they are on the side of punishing January 6 conspirators.

Kinzinger's statement to Republican voters and Republican officials is something I think everyone can support: “This is a defining moment in American politics and the RNC’s future. Are you for authoritarianism, are you against democracy, or are you going to wake up to that slide and come back to actual democracy again?”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Over 100 Ultra-Right Midterm Candidates Highlight GOP’s Ugly Extremism

Over 100 Ultra-Right Midterm Candidates Highlight GOP’s Ugly Extremism

The radicalization of the Grand Old Party into a far-right political entity is now a fait accompli, manifested in the extraordinary incoming tide of Republican candidates who openly embrace extremist conspiracism and Trumpian authoritarianism. What makes the transformation complete is that not only has the GOP establishment refused to oppose this extremism and denounce the rising tide, but it is actively punishing any Republicans who do.

A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found more than 100 such “problematic” candidates running for office in 2022 under the Republican banner. The extremism they embrace runs the gamut, from authoritarian QAnon cultists to insurrection-friendly “Patriots” to COVID denialists to white nationalists.

Additionally, the GOP currently boasts 207 elected officials who aided Donald Trump in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the voting rights organization Public Wise, which lists them all in its Insurrection Index.

“The real danger is not just the wave of extreme candidates, it’s their embrace, their mainstreaming by the Republican party,” Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, the co-author of How Democracies Die, told Sergio Olmos of The Guardian. “The United States has always had nutty, extremist, authoritarian politicians around the fringe. What is new and really dangerous for democracy is that they’re increasingly running as Republican candidates.”

As Olmos observes, some of these extremists—particularly Idaho gubernatorial candidate Ammon Bundy, infamous for leading the 2016 armed standoff at Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge—have been using their GOP campaigns to expand their already existing networks of far-right activists.

Bundy, who only moved to the state in 2015 but is campaigning around the slogan “Keep Idaho Idaho,” has been able to expand the membership of his far-right “People’s Network,” which has primarily been advancing the cause of COVID denialism in the state. The network currently has some 33,000 members with 398 activist leaders in 39 states. (Bundy is also competing for the GOP governor’s nomination with another far-right extremist, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin.)

The ADL’s list includes candidates who have no direct links to extremist organizations, but who promote far-right views, openly associate with radical ideologues, or embrace extremist conspiracy theories. It tracked at least 45 candidates seeking office in 2020 who promote QAnon conspiracy theories. A number of them—including Darren Aquino, a Florida candidate for the U.S. House; Melissa Carone, Rudy Giuliani’s “election-fraud witness,” seeking a seat in the Michigan House; and Alison Hayden, running for a congressional seat in California—have tweeted out QAnon’s “#WWG1WGA” hashtag slogan.

There are also at least a dozen Republican candidates included on the list who have “explicit connections to extremist groups or movements including white supremacists, anti-government extremists, and members of the far-right Proud Boys”:

At least two dozen candidates have expressed admiration for or appeared in public alongside extremists. In September 2021, during a “Justice for J6 rally,” Arizona State Rep. Walter Blackman, U.S. congressional candidate (R-AZ), reportedly told the crowd, "The Proud Boys came to one of my events and that was one of the proudest moments of my life.” In March 2021, former Texas GOP chair and 2022 Texas gubernatorial candidate Allen West appeared on the same stage as Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes during an anti-immigration rally in Laredo, Texas.

In June 2021, Nick Taurus, U.S. congressional candidate (R-CA), took to social media to boast about meeting with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist leader and organizer. Sharing a photo of himself posing with Fuentes he tweeted “A legend and inspiration to us all!” On Facebook Taurus shared the same photo with the caption, “This guy is the truth and it was an absolute honor to meet him! AMERICA FIRST IS INEVITABLE! #AMERICAFIRST #NICKFUENTES.” On January 6, 2022, Taurus tweeted, “A great night honoring the J6 Heroes!”

The radicalization of the Republican Party has been a decades-long process, reaching its seeming apotheosis in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump extremists. But rather than reeling back from the violence and radicalism, the GOP establishment instead has embraced the “Patriot” movement that led the insurrection, even as those forces have hardened into an anti-democratic insurgency intent on overthrowing liberal democratic rule.

Republicans have done this by brazenly lying to cover their culpability for the insurrection, gaslighting the public about who was responsible with “bloody shirt” rhetoric that inverts the reality by making the perpetrators into victims and the victims into perpetrators. Congressmen and Fox News anchors have insisted that it “wasn’t an insurrection,” while GOP politicos have publicly valorized the insurrectionists.

Meanwhile, the very few Republicans who have refused to succumb to the extremist tide and have supported the January 6 investigation and the impeachment of Trump that shortly followed the insurrection have been severely punished for doing so by the party’s apparatchiks, with the apparent approval of GOP voters. Just this week, the two Republican Congress members who sit on the House Select Committee, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, were officially censured by the party, which also voted to support Cheney’s primary opponent.

It is apparent that the conservative movement, as Tucker Carlson and his guest Jesse Kelly suggested last year, is giving up on democracy and embracing right-wing authoritarianism, moving down the road to explicit fascism. Their strategy as they move down that path, demonstrated over the past year, has involved targeting local politics—school boards, county commissions, city councils—for far-right takeovers by extremist “Patriots” such as what we have recently seen in Shasta County, California, and elsewhere, fueled by the ugly proto-fascist politics of menace and intimidation.

As the ADL’s report observed: “Support for such candidates demonstrates a continuing shift of the so-called Overton Window—the parameters of what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ in political and social discourse. This ever-shifting window signals an expanding mainstream acceptance of extreme beliefs and ideologies.”

“At first you had a flirtation and tolerance with a handful of extremists at the fringes,” Levitsky told Olmos. “We’re now seeing an army of extremists embraced by the former president. They’re marching in and taking over the Republican Party at the state and local level.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Boston Dynamics' robotic dog

Trust Us, We’re Only Spying On You

Tick-tick-tick ... Big Tech's clock continues to move around and around nonstop to enhance corporate power and profits, but each sweep of its hands also captures more of our own privacy, labor and other civil rights.

At first, each new surge of artificial intelligence and robotic technologies can seem perfectly benign, beneficial ... even playful. Take "Spot," the robotic, four-legged "doggy" that actually has no spots, no endearing puppy eyes, can't bark, has no tail to wag and is very un-doggy despite its classic doggy name. In fact, this electronic critter is rather creepily nightmarish, but it's marketed by cute videos, including one of Spot mixing margaritas (admit it, that beats training your real dog to bring your slippers to you).

But you can't just adopt a Spot at your local animal shelter. Each artificial canine — manufactured by Boston Dynamics, which is owned by Korean auto giant Hyundai Motor Company — sells for about $75,000. So, who's for these pricey technetronic hounds? Mainly such big corporate outfits as oil refineries, mining operations and electric utilities that want an unblinking eye to monitor and record workers, visitors, intruders, protesters and all others who approach their facilities. Just one more layer of our cycloptic surveillance society.

But the point at which Spot loses all cuteness and turns into a menacing beast of authoritarianism is when it's turned into a police dog. There's been quite a public backlash, for example, against the Honolulu police department for deploying one of the robotic canines in a tent city for homeless people. In addition to outrage at the obvious class bias in siccing Spot on the homeless, the public outcry grew hotter when it was revealed that the police had used federal pandemic relief funds to buy their Spot!

As usual, corporate and government officials assure us that this latest tech marvel will be a good dog — it won't be used to spy on innocent people, be weaponized or otherwise bite us on the butt. Trust us, they say.

If you're a corporate employee, you know that something unpleasant is afoot when top executives are suddenly issuing statements about how committed they are to the dignity and respect of their employees.

For example, the public relations chief of a global outfit named Teleperformance, one of the world's largest call centers, was recently going on and on about how they're "committed to fair practices, equity ... ethics, and transparency" in the workplace. He practically pleaded for the world to "trust us," exclaiming that, "We value our people and their well-being, safety and happiness." Why did the corporation feel such a desperate need to proclaim its virtue? Because it's been caught in a nasty scheme to spy on its own workers.

Teleperformance — a $6.7 billion global behemoth that handles customer service calls for Amazon, Apple, Uber, etc. — saves money on overhead by making most of its 380,000 employees around the world work from their own homes. That can be a convenience for many workers, but a new corporate policy first imposed in March on thousands of its workers in Colombia puts an intolerable, "1984"-ish price on that convenience.

Teleperformance is pressuring their workers to sign an eight-page addendum to their employee contracts, allowing corporate-controlled video cameras, electronic audio devices and data collection tools to be put in their homes to monitor their actions. "I work in my bedroom," one employee noted. "I don't want to have a camera in my bedroom."

Neither would I, and I doubt that Teleperformance's $20-million-a-year CEO would allow one in his mansion. Uglier yet, the privacy-obliterating contract mandates that even the children of employees can be spied on at home and any images or audio of children picked up by the surveillance devices can be kept by the corporation. Nonetheless, the Colombian worker signed, because her supervisor said she could lose her job if she refused.

Of course, Teleperformance assures us that the data it collects on children is not shared elsewhere, and Apple also rushed out to state that it treats all of its contract employees "with dignity and respect." But how do we know that? Trust us, they say. Do you?

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com

Giuliani Unmasked

Giuliani Unmasked

Eighteen years ago, on a terrible day every American then living remembers too well, Rudolph Giuliani earned respect for his calm, inspiring, and unifying leadership of a wounded New York City. Too much has happened since then to feel anything but disappointment in him — but on this year’s 9/11 anniversary, the man once known as “America’s Mayor” descended to a new and ominous low.

Mimicking the crude style of his client Donald Trump, Giuliani tweeted an angry video that purports to show a noble police officer arming for battle against a crowd of screaming, flag-burning protesters. Originally filmed as an advertisement for a right-wing T-shirt company, this clip was designed to incite fury against “leftists,” a term of abuse that evidently defines anyone who is not a Trump Republican.

The video’s scruffy villains brandish signs denouncing fascism and threatening to “burn it down,” an obvious reference to the Antifa activists demonized by the president and his media minions. Its hero is a police officer in riot gear who remembers 9/11 and loves America. Is that simple enough for you? It’s simple enough for Giuliani’s intended audience, including many who yearn for an excuse to assault and bloody their liberal opponents.

To justify political violence as a purifying act of nationalism is the very essence of fascist propaganda. To watch this filth promoted by a prominent Republican like Giuliani, once a presidential contender and now a close adviser to the president, is chilling indeed. It is a call to civil war.

No doubt Giuliani’s association with Trump in recent years has encouraged the most troubled aspects of his personality. His bizarre televised remarks and rants have provoked more than one observer to question his psychological condition. But it is a mistake to think that the former New York mayor suddenly curdled during this presidency, just as it is a mistake to blame Trump alone for the authoritarian streak in the Republican Party.

Giuliani’s nasty little video is a fantasy of punishing protesters who dare to burn the American flag — a form of speech, however much we may despise it, that is protected in this country by the First Amendment. As a former civil liberties lawyer, Rudy certainly understands the Constitution, and as a Justice Department official he swore to uphold it more than once. Yet his disregard for free speech became all too clear back when he was mayor. That was an important reason why Jack Newfield, the late, great journalist who knew Giuliani for two decades, shuddered at the idea that his former friend might someday enter the White House.

In The Full Rudy, his classic 2002 book examining Giuliani’s career, Newfield summarized more than two dozen “desecrations of the Bill of Rights” that had resulted in successful legal action against the city. Alarming in both volume and variety, Newfield warned, “Giuliani’s violations of the First Amendment suggest a fundamental deficit of commitment to pluralism, democracy, the rights of minorities to dissent, and ideological diversity.”

Newfield also reminded readers of an episode at the end of Giuliani’s mayoral reign that remains disturbingly relevant. In the late fall of 2001 he attempted to circumvent term limits and nullify the election of Michael Bloomberg so that he could remain in City Hall, using 9/11 as his rationale. That outrageous gambit echoes today whenever Donald Trump “jokes” about staying in the White House beyond eight years. It’s all too easy to imagine Giuliani encouraging him.

Authoritarian impulses are nothing new in the Republican Party. In the wake of 9/11, the George W. Bush administration tested the boundaries of the Constitution with the “unitary executive,” a dubious theory that conferred almost unlimited powers on the executive branch “in time of war.” Newfield believed that as Giuliani concluded his mayoralty, he had amped up the bullying to appeal to a national Republican audience.

More than a decade later, the party of Lincoln has strayed even further from his democratic legacy. Nobody who has observed a Trump rally can doubt that there is a constituency for fascism in his party.

So perhaps we should thank Giuliani for his demagogic tweet. By unmasking himself, he reminds us what we must defeat if we hope to preserve this republic.