the *DON* JONES INDEX…
		GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 10/1/22... 14,934.42 9/24/22... 14,944.25
	6/27/13… 15,000.00
(*THE DOW* JONES INDEX: 10/1/22… 29,131.57; 9/24/22… 29,431.73; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)**

LESSON for October 1, 2022 – “AS the WORLD TURNS (FASCIST)!”

Everybody’s turning Fascist.

President Joe and Hillary Doe say Republicans are Fascists (Biden sort of qualified that on August 25th by appending a “semi” qualifier... the former First Lady served up the poison straight.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden told Democratic donors in the Washington suburb of Rockville. (Politico 8/25, Attachment One) Calling out those he labeled as “extreme” Republicans, Biden said: “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

"I remember as a young student, you know, trying to figure out, how people get basically brought in by Hitler. How did that happen? I'd watch newsreels and I'd see this guy standing up there ranting and raving and people shouting and raising their arms,” Clinton said at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin. (New York Post, 9/24, Attachment Two) “I thought, 'What's happened to these people?'".

Those people (Republicans) responded that liberals and Democrats were (and still are) the real fascists... as well as cruel and unusual creatures to slander their Leader so viciously… witness the jackboot home invasion of (the never defeated, much-cheated President Trump in Florida, as well as the harassment of his blameless minions. Hillary, Fox News reported, has rounded up a mixed salad of disgruntled liberals, deep-state darklings and the law enforcement terrorists of blue states, like the New York Nazis disputing Djonald’s brilliant financial acumen... cretinous critics like New York state Sen. Anna Kaplan, a Democrat who represents parts of Long Island, calling on Americans to join her "in sharply denouncing the use of Nazi symbolism and imagery anywhere in our political process."

"Last night at a rally held by the former President, and today at a political rally held by a candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, supporters were urged to hold up their right hands in a unified salute that should shock the conscience of every American for its remarkable similarity to the 'Heil Hitler' salute used by the Nazis," Kaplan said on Sunday. (Fox News, Attachment Three)

Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, accused Clinton’s Texas Talk of "using some of the most disgusting smears imaginable." (N.Y. Post, above)

"It seems like perpetual-failed-candidate Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables has run stale, not unlike herself," Budowich told Fox News Digital in a statement. "It’s pathetic, it’s divisive, and it is further cementing her legacy of cringe."

To hear their partisan enemies, everybody… we mean everybody… is donning their swastika t-shirts (like the Russian school shooter), polishing their guns and their jackboots, practicing their Nazi salutes. It’s the new normal.

Discouraging words, heard at QE2’s funeral, condemned the Crown and Commonwealth as fascists (as well as racists, looters and colonial butchers). The Russians and Iranians, of course, are ur-Fascists... maybe out and out Nazis (see discrimination, below) and the Chinese, while allegedly Communists, are really capitalist Fascist Fu-Manchivians, waiting for the right moment to conquer Taiwan, then Korea, Japan, India and... mwah hah hah!... then turn Eastward to subjugate America while the paleo-Soviets, abetted by Fascist fifth columns in the Old World, nuke Ukraine, polish off the Polish democrats then march east across the decadent EU, cut a deal with Charles to occupy England, then cross the Atlantic to... America. Where Xi and Putin will throw down in the final face-off before the winner creates a One World Government and everybody sings the “Horst-Wessel-Lied”.

What could be simpler!

Less simple is applying discrimination to the actual historical episodes and objectives of the acknowledged Fascists (like Mussolini’s mobs in Italy or... to note a less-unanimously vilified and longer-lived Francisco Franco in Spain before, during and after the Second World War) as opposed to the official National Socialist Party, as exerted dominion over Germany until 1945.

It could be argued that Fascism, which predated Naziism but came later, if not at all, to the atrocity table as regards aspects like the persecution of Jews, is differentiated in being a sort of Nazi-lite (semi-Nazis making, by President Joe’s charge, Republicans and... in particular... MAGApublicans semi semi-Nazis) rather as the semioticians of the rightist persuasion might adjudicate Socialists to be nothing more, nor less, than watered-down Communists and (small-l) liberals to be watered-down Socialists.

There are other examples of diminution among the divisions of the depraved... “authoritarians” (a favorite meme of the Left) being watered-down or semi-“totalitarians” or, to note another comparison, “strongmen” to “dictators”).

Webster’s Dictionary describes the Italian fascisti as…

‘One: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition…

“Two: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control…”

As opposed to Naziism, which is…

“…the body of political and economic doctrines held and put into effect by the Nazis in Germany from 1933 to 1945 including the totalitarian principle of government, predominance of especially Germanic groups assumed to be racially superior, and supremacy of the führer…’

Some also contend that Spain, under Francisco Franco, was a nazi or, at least, fascist state. Wikipedia alleges that the Francoist dictatorship originally took a form described as "fascistized dictatorship",or "semi-fascist regime" (per President Joe) showing ‘clear influence of fascism in fields such as labor relations, the autarkic economic policy, aesthetics, and the single-party system.” At the end of World War II, with Spain sitting and watching from the sidelines, the regime opened up and became closer to developmental dictatorships, although it always preserved residual fascist trappings. “During the 1950s the regime also changed from being openly totalitarian and using severe repression to an authoritarian system with limited pluralism. As a result of these reforms, Spain was allowed to join the United Nations in 1955.’

One week and one century ago, England’s old-guard Guardians published two dispatches from Rome and Florence (Attachment Four) centering upon the love and homage Italians… including the achingly avant-garde Futurists showered upon Mussolini.

Futurism, according to literaryschools compiler Hosein Haghighi was an international art movement founded in Italy in 1909 and, he contends, was “a refreshing contrast to the weepy sentimentalism of Romanticism.” Futurist promulgator Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Portrait of Mussolini” depicts “Physiological patriotism… designed by inspired and brutal hands; forged, carved to the model of the mighty rocks of our peninsula. Square crushing jaws. Scornful jutting lips that spit with defiance and swagger on everything slow, pedantic, and finicking. Massive rock-like head, but the ultradynamic eyes dart with the speed of automobiles racing on the Lombard plains. To right and left flashes the gleaming cornea of a wolf.”

Like that certain other dictator, he often appeared shirtless and/or on a horse.

So – are Republicans fascists?

President Joe and Hillary say so. (Well, Biden admits that the party of Lincoln, T.R. and Eisenhower... and Richard Nixon... are only “semi”, but the intent is clear.)

Dana Milbank, a WashPost columnist and author of “The Destructionists (see review as Attachment Five), says so. He does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgments to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted,” says G.U.K. reviewer Charles Kaiser; rather: “(h)e comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.

Citing “white grievance and fear”, “tribalism and dysfunction”, that have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – “and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”, Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.

By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” and naming names... lots of names past and present... the Kaiser concludes that Milbank “makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.”

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” said President Joe in reference to the “semis”. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.” (Politico, Attachment One above)

Wading into the impact of his climate and health care legislation, Biden said that “the survival of our planet is on the ballot.” If Republicans win control of Congress, he noted, “it won’t matter where you live: Women won’t have the right to choose anywhere. Anywhere.” Adding that the MAGAnauts are no longer “real Republicans anymore,” he also shook the voodoo stick at his audience, alleging that the elephant boys want to sunset federal programs every five years, including Medicare and Social Security, and reminding them “how much damage the previous four years had done in terms of America’s reputation in the world.”

As if to prove his point, Republicans then unanimously rejected a bill requiring government officials to report instances of white supremacy and neo-Nazi activity in uniformed services and federal law enforcement (Washington Informer, 7/18: Attachment Six). The amendment was approved in the House on a party-line 218-208 vote and the amendment (262) passed the Senate Armed Services Committee 14-12, again a party line vote.

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, as did all other House Republicans, voted against the measure. He argued, “This amendment attempts to create a problem where none exists by requesting investigations into law enforcement and the armed services for alleged rampant white supremacists or white national sympathies.”

Despite their minority status, Republicans are also drafting legislation too and, according to former Senator Russ Feingold, as of a week ago, their cornerstone is a whopper… amending (actually overturning, replacing it with something else… or nothing) the Constitution through the State legislatures.

The Convention of States Project, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) and other rightwing organizations have spent more than a decade working to persuade state legislators to pass applications for an Article V convention (wherein “two-thirds of all state legislatures (34 states or more) apply for a constitutional convention” and then “have three-quarters of all state legislatures or state ratifying conventions ratify any amendments proposed by the convention.”)

“This effort has recently attracted a who’s-who roster of far-right supporters, including the Trumpist attorneys John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, and financial support from conservative megadonors,” Feingold wrote in the liberal G.U.K. (Attachment Eight)

As legislatures continue to trend conservative in many states, due in no small part to partisan and racial gerrymandering, factions of the right see an increasingly viable and potentially imminent path to securing the 34 applications necessary to call a convention. In recent months, some congresspeople have even claimed that the constitutional threshold has been satisfied and that Congress must call a convention. While their counting is dubious, the momentum that they could nonetheless achieve is deeply worrying.

Those involved in this effort have made their radical aims quite clear: to disassemble modern government and the century-old New Deal consensus, returning the country to the troubling, splintered times when the federal government could do little to provide for national welfare or defense.

A convention would also be an opportunity for the right to try to ban abortion in this country, to further whittle down voting rights and to enshrine their interpretation of the second amendment. Put simply, the opportunities for radical rewriting could be nearly endless, given the complete lack of restraint that the constitution puts on an Article V convention.

“… (A)ny conversation about how to go about amending the constitution needs to be transparent, inclusive and informed. What factions of the right are pursuing is anything but. They are pursuing exclusively partisan outcomes and have sought to keep their efforts opaque. They do not seem interested in a representative, democratic process.”

Can you roar “sig heil”?

And, if that doesn’t scare you enough, Newsweek reported (Attachment Nine) that Q-Anon icon Marjorie Taylor Greene has been meeting with persons famous and/or mysterious to advance her war against reptiles and Jewish space lasers.

Her latest catch… game show host Pat Sajak.

Sajak, a well known starboard-side player who was called out by BET News host Marc Lamont Hill, comparing Sajak to his predecessor on Wheel of Fortune, Chuck Woolery, an avowed conservative who, at one point in 2020, denounced the COVID-19 pandemic (though he subsequently) walked back those views.

"First Chuck Woolery. Now Pat Sajak," Hill tweeted. "Are all game show hosts trash?"

Give me a vowel... and an AK-47. Be afraid, snowflakes, be very afraid!

But conservatice mudflaps should have cause to tremble too… and not just only those implicated in the suppurating Mar-a-Lago Inquisition. In the sme issue as above, Newsweek reported that videos of right wing namecallers namecalling democrats and liberals fascist, too, have been circulating. (Attachment Ten) The perpetrators are not only the irrepressible Tuck, but “high-profile conservatives like Jeanine Pirro, Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw (and) former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.”

In response to Biden's Thursday evening comments that Trump-allied Republicans embraced violence and hatred, and edged toward "semi-fascism," the Republican National Committee called the remarks "despicable."

"Biden forced Americans out of their jobs, transferred money from working families to Harvard lawyers, and sent our country into a recession while families can't afford gas and groceries," spokesperson Nathan Brand said.

More incidents of fascist-shaming of Democrats… remember Jackson and Jefferson were slaveholders, George Wallace was a Democrat as were Woodrow Wilson, Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, Bob Byrd and, originally, Strom Thurmond

Democrats like Biden have been falsely calling Republicans fascists for almost 60 years, wrote Christopher Tremoglie in the Washington Examiner. “No one should take it seriously any time a Democrat calls a Republican a fascist, Joe Biden included. Such accusations are insulting and offensive. The only people who believe such outlandish nonsense are unhinged fanatics. There's no legitimacy to these claims and certainly no realistic fascist threat — and anyone who says otherwise is not a serious person.”

Derailed by Ian, the One Sixers hope to regroup and reconvene soon, and to seek out more Nazis in the woodpile. Bullets may not have yet replaced the ballots (although Mad Vlad has shown Americas authoritarians that shining path; rigged elections with voters making their choices at gunpoint) but.

For the time being, partisans are fighting proxy wars in the American culture cauldrons.

They’re aiming their stones and bricks at libraries… school or public.

The outrage and trauma exhibited by the decent people against Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and dozens of other racist, sexist, violent, opporessive and offensive books from potty-mouthed comedians to Harry Potter has engendered a “purity spiral” which a contributor to Frappessndfiction.com (Attachment Eleven) attributes to an element of status-seeking and competition. “Overall, I think the main driving factor behind cancel culture seems to be a sort of competition as to who is the most “woke”… (c)alling out a “problematic” author or book gives you social status online, it makes you virtuous, it shows how much you care about advancing social justice and holding people accountable. And whoever finds the most “problematic” things in a book is the most devoted to the cause.”

The MAGAcancelliers, on the other hand, have demanded the removal of tomes that allegedly celebrate the evils of racial and gender minorities or venture into that demonic wasteland which is Sex. (GUK, Attachment Twelve) They are protecting Americans from themselves.

When a law criminalizing anybody “who makes visually explicit materials available at a school went into effect last month in Missouri, librarians decided to corral their bookmobiles while they inevitable appeals process works its way through the courts away from schools.

The statute began as an amendment to Senate Bill 775, an anti-child trafficking and sexual exploitation measure. Using the bill to target books was the innovation of Republican state senator Rick Brattin, an opponent of gay rights and welfare recipients using government aid to buy cookies. When asked to provide examples of sexually explicit materials, Brattin’s team named All Boys Aren’t Blue, George M Johnson’s critically acclaimed account of growing up a queer Black man in Virginia and New Jersey, and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir of her own and her father’s homosexuality. Violators of the new, nebulously worded law face up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,000 (£1,754).

Jason Kuhl has learned in the 23 years since he earned his degree in library sciences, it’s that the reality of being a librarian hardly squares with the storybook fantasy. More than two-thirds of respondents to the 2022 Urban Library Trauma Study said they had encountered violent or aggressive behavior from patrons at their library. Elsewhere, Proud Boys have stormed gay and trans library presentations, beating performers and audiences and, said Natalie Brant, a reference librarian at the state library in Salem, Oregon: “We recently had active shooter trainings.”

The cancellers have proscribed low hanging fruit like “Lolita”, but also works by mainstream authors like Jesmyn Ward, Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike as well as a Michelle Obama biography for young readers, and a book called Between Shades of Gray, a middle-grade historical novel that some people are confusing with EL James’s racy Fifty Shades of Grey.

“This is a brand new law and it hasn’t been tested,” said. “It’s not worth it. We are unsure on what someone can interpret as sexually explicit, and, to be blunt, it feels like we’ve moved backwards in time. We’re in a culture of fear.”

One wonders whether the only gathering that can bring Americans together again is a bonfire.

Of course, the fact that people tend to consume only the media with which they already agree has to be a contributing factor. Editorials by liberals like Robert Reich, the former SecLabor currently opining for GUK stand as both j’accusé and proof of the pudding. (Attachment Thirteen)

Declaiming that “It is not “partisan” to explain what Trump and his anti-democracy movement are seeking; not “taking sides” to point out that the Trump Republicans are trying to establish an authoritarian government in America, or “violating journalistic standards” to tell the unvarnished truth about what America is facing today.

In fact, a failure to call out the Trump Republicans for what they are – liars, enablers, and accessories to crimes against the constitution – itself violates the most basic canons of journalistic ethics.

“Balanced journalism” does not exist halfway between facts and lies.

Given the power to declare what is truth and what is not, authoritarians from Trump to Putin to the Washington Post all celebrate their own righteousness… rather as one of those sophomores at a high-priced liberal university gets that warm feeling in pressuring the administrators to cancel some evil comedian.

Biden gave a rare primetime address on the most important challenge facing America, Reich complained, but the major networks didn’t broadcast the speech. Realistically, why should they have? You get in trouble if you cut off the President of the United States to run a few commercials for tampons and dog treats and ambulance chasing attorneys… not to mention all those sleazy political ads we will have to endure until November. If none dare call it conspiracy, other say it’s “just business”.

Reich’s tweet on perhaps Djonald Un-unopposed’s most dangerous primary foe was...

Aug 23, 2022 — Just wondering if “DeSantis” is now officially a synonym for “fascist.”

This post drew a few re-posts, a riposte from the WashXaminer and a re-riposte from the Minnesota Post; the alt-right Xaminer’s Christopher Tremoglie, dismissing Reich (and Old White Joe) for being “old, foolish, and completely untrue...” the latest “disgusting practice” in a long line of Democrats falsely accusing Republicans of being fascists, “that began in 1964.”

The media, some of them, did pay attention when Giorgia Meloni, oxymoronic standardbearer for the Brothers of Italy party… which may not be a neo-Fascist gang but has all the trappings of a neo-semi-Fascist movement, garnered 44 percent of the vote and then joined up with even more rabid swastika soldiers to form a new government, once the new Parliament meets on Oct. 13 – which day, the WashPost reminds us, will be “the centenary of the March on Rome, the coup that brought Benito Mussolini to power in October 1922.”

Giorgia told the Post that she “isn’t a fascist anymore” but there is that whole truthiness thing… that what the definition of “is” is… and, if President Joe had to trot round Europe to mend fences that The Donald had shredded, Meloni will be soliciting support for her cause (whatever that is) from the likes of Vox, the Spanish neofascist party, whom she brought to its feet with an impassioned speech in which she called for protecting the traditional family from liberals and stopping migration from Africa.

“Meloni’s government is shaping up as Italy’s most far-right in the history of the republic formed after the demise of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator she once praised,” reported Politico (9/29, Attachment Fourteen)

As to the question of whether Republicans are semi- or demi-Fascists, the lady “Brother” has plenty of brothers in Texas. “Global elites are crying in their granola because yet another conservative populist was elected,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who praised Meloni’s “spectacular” victory speech. “And across the globe, we see battles between the socialist left — the arrogant elites who want to control people’s lives — and the populist uprising pressing back against it.”

Politico found plenty of Meloni-balls among Congressional Republicans, but also a few Worried Waldos; while establishment RINOs aren’t speaking up as yet, there have been private fears… publically expressed if on conditions of anonymity… that Meloni’s win “could embolden more pro-Trump colleagues to push to cut off funding for Ukraine.” Leaving Mad Vlad is free to firebomb Kyev, annex the country, then press west through Poland and the Baltics to Germany, France and the newly Trumptastic Truss maching in Great Britain before moving into our neighborhood.

And the Donald himself... he may be balancing on the high wire with Georgia indictments, convictions and prison on one end, New York State on the other and the Federal pit of bloody doom beneath, but he still can jerk President Joe’s supply chain, just by showing up here and there, speaking his mind (such as it is) - promising pardons and apologies for those who participated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol if he were elected to the White House again.

“I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he told Wendy Bell, a conservative radio host according to the ever-vigilant Guardian U.K.’s designated hitter, Reich (Attachment Fifteen), adding, to the trepidation of liberals and the delight of MAGAnauts (and, especially, those accused of or convicted for violent crimes related to their stormy sojourn at the Capitol): “I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons, full pardons.”

President Joe responded by railing against the semi-fascists, proclaiming that American democracy is under grave threat...

“Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Biden said in remarks delivered at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.

Biden emphasized that not all, not even most, Republicans are “Maga extremists” but there was not a question, he said, that the party was “dominated, driven and intimidated” by his White House predecessor – and perhaps would-be successor.

These Trump Republicans, he said, “thrive on chaos” and “don’t respect the constitution” or the rule of law. They “promote authoritarian leaders and they fan the flames of political violence”, he continued, adding that they believe there are only two possible outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated. “Maga forces are determined to take this country backwards,” he told cheering supporters in the City of Brotherly (and Sisterly) Love. “Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”

Reich did allow that the President did not regard all Trump supporters as threats to the US.

But, Joe added: “Anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge an election that’s been won, insists upon changing the rules upon which you count votes – that is a threat to democracy.”

Up the road a ways, Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader and a staunch Trump ally, delivered a “pre-buttal” to the president’s address from Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Pennsylvania. In his remarks, McCarthy accused Biden of “doing everything in his power to crush America’s soul”, pimped for Doctor Senator Oz and... more or less endorsing Trump (and Lindsay Graham’s) endorsement of violence as a means to the ending of all ends... demanded an apology from the president for accusing Republicans of being beholden to a philosophy of “semi-fascism”.

“Our nation can flourish again and under a new historic Republican majority, it will. For the past two years have been a time of trial for Americans everywhere.” (CNN 9/1/22, Attachment Sixteen)

He added: “In the past two years, Joe Biden has launched an assault on the soul of America, on its people, on its laws, on its most sacred values. He has launched an assault on our democracy. His policies have severely wounded America’s soul, diminished America’s spirit and betrayed America’s trust.”

With the midterm elections barely a month away, Democrats (as well as MAGAnauts) are ready to cut off heads and exterminate their enemies. Mad Vlad’s new electoral tactic of having the public vote publicly... as assorted men with assault rifles stand a foot away... may not be coming to America (not this year, not yet) but the barrage of filth oozing out of television sets, mailboxes and social media outposts is sufficient to churn stomachs (and, as the partisans in their select bailiwicks hope) depress turnout.

Since 2016, the hate quotient in America... concomitant with the pivot of the traditional “class war” to a neo-paleo “race war” meme has spiked. Even the defenders of America (or oppressors of the oppressed), the military, are warning that the divisions are growing too wide, the venom too potent.

Thirteen former defense leaders, for example, have warned that political polarization is straining the relationship between civilians and the military.

In an open letter, signed by eight former Defense secretaries and five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warns of an “an exceptionally challenging civil-military environment” exacerbated by geopolitical, social and political issues.

“Politically, military professionals confront an extremely adverse environment characterized by the divisiveness of affective polarization that culminated in the first election in over a century when the peaceful transfer of political power was disrupted and in doubt,” reads the letter, published on the national security website War on the Rocks and reported upon by The Hill (9/6, Attachment Seventeen).

“Looking ahead,” predicted the lucky thirteen Generals, Admirals and DefSecs, “all of these factors could well get worse before they get better.”

So – who exactly will be forcing factors to fare worse? Fingers snap to attention and point.

On Bill Maher’s “Real Time” gabfest, donkey operative Donna Brazile’s fickle finger was up the rebuttal of Ohio Senate candidate and grifter-author JD Vance, who once upon a time was a serious critic of Trump who once referred to Trump, some would say accurately, as possibly “America’s Hitler.” But now he’s one of Trump’s most prominent defenders. (Ross Lincoln in The Wrap, 5/20, Attachent Eighteen)

“You mentioned JD Vance? He says last week, ‘if you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters, how better to target them and their kids than with deadly fentanyl. It does look intentional.’ So he’s saying the democrats are intentionally poisoning people with fentanyl. Elise Stefanik, she’s number 3 Republican. Former normal person. She had a statement on Twitter that started ‘The White House, house dems, and the usual pedo grifters.’ Pedo. So, like it’s routine to call the Dems [pedophiles]. I’m sorry, the Republicans are talking like Nazis. I know we’re not supposed to make the Nazi comparison, but when you’re [saying] ‘pedophiles,’ when you’re scum, when you’re the enemies of America, ‘people are trying to replace you,’ this is Nazi kind of talk.”

Maher himself brought up Elon Musk’s transparently distractive claim this week that he is going to start voting Republican. (The gentleman from South Africa, Canada and Austin, TX... who, just today, announced that he has invented a humanlike (if not humanistic) automaton to take all our jobs... is a voting American citizen; can’t run for President himself, but he can vote for the critter.

“When (Musk) said ‘now I’m gonna vote Republican,’ I gotta part company there. Come on Elon… I can’t go there with him. Because of what I just said, because of where the big issues are. But it’s troubling to me that a guy like that, who said ‘I voted mostly for Democrats for the longest time, and now I’m switching’? I’m not gonna say he’s a stupid man. So the fact that he can be taken over by the Republicans, what does that tell you about the Democrats? What do they have to do to stop that from happening?”

Predictably the uber-woke Mister Lincoln called out Bad Bill for calling Musk a genius, scoffing “He isn’t.”

The Democrats, according to the Wall Street Journal have that “fascist” business all wrong.

“Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term,” spake the (presently reeling) Wall Street analysts and experts. “Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”

Opportunists! Bank robbers? Roy Cohn...

When even the millionaires and billionaires whom Ol’ 45 enriched (with, it must be added, aid and comfort from all the forty-somethings, including 44 and 46) turn their bespoke clothed backs on their enabler, loyalty doesn’t mean quite what it did in 2017.

But the ‘Pubs still have an ace up their sleeve (next to their derringer)... their sense of victimization. Copping a feel from the alt-left’s adoration of the losers, the violated and the just plain left behind of America, the Party of Reagan now seems like the Party of Mondale – howling pitifully in the snowy woodlands. President Joe attacked Republicans, plain and simple,” Republican political operative Alice Stewart told CNN anchor Don Lemon after Biden’s Philadelphia speech. “That was a dark, depressing and very divisive speech. He just vilified half of this country.”

Wah! Waaahh!

“Consider the history of Democrats,” the aforementioned WashXaminer’s Tremoglie asks us to ponder. (Attachment Nineteen) “After their history of promoting slavery and segregation, Democrats began to describe Republicans as “fascists” in 1964. While campaigning for president, Barry Goldwater was targeted by Pat Brown, then California's left-wing governor. Of Goldwater's candidacy, Brown said, "The stench of fascism is in the air."

A few years after that, the Xaminer’s political time-travel Chataqaua (or Chappaquiddick, if you will), targets the targeting of Richard Nixon. “Nixon's reputation is forever tarnished in history because of the Watergate scandal. Yet, until then, he was viewed as a political force.” In December 1973, theCall published an article titled "Dump Nixon! Stop the fascist tide." One does not have to go into great detail about its contents to describe the editorial. Then, after Nixon won the presidency in 1968, late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) said Nixon "was a fascist pig."

Gerald Ford followed Nixon as president and as a Republican who was called a fascist. In 1974, a member of the ACLU criticized Ford for his lack of punitive action against Richard Nixon.

"If [President] Ford's principle had been the rule in Nuremberg," he said, "the Nazi leaders would have been let off and only the people, who carried out their schemes would have been tried," the ACLU said at the time.

Tremoglie moseys on and upwards through history... the despicable Ronald Reagan, the deep-stating Bush Senior and hapless W. Junior. (John McCain, however, earns no eulogies.)

“No one should take it seriously any time a Democrat calls a Republican a fascist, Joe Biden included. Such accusations are insulting and offensive. The only people who believe such outlandish nonsense are unhinged fanatics. There's no legitimacy to these claims and certainly no realistic fascist threat — and anyone who says otherwise is not a serious person.”

So, against such stalwart and relentless enemies, what can good, hard-working Americans do but veer right, embrace the Iron Cross and warble “Trumpland Uber Alles”. Fortunately there are still plenty of them... and they have plenty of guns. With QE2, like Winston Churchill, gone to a noisier place along with the likes of Generals Patton, Gavin and Eisenhower, with no more Studebakers or Walter Cronkite, no more John Waynes nor Mickey Mantles, who will step up to the plate and save us from the Fascists in Russia and China (and Hungary, Italy, Brazil, the rest of the immigrant generating narco-states, starving Africans and feckless Brits), who are we gonna call...

Superheroes? Pillow-men? Ghostbusters?

It’ll have to be our own homegrown, corn-fed, hard-working, Roger Watery don’t-need-no-education Fascists, of course. If we can’t beat Mad Vlad, Xi, Orban, Meloni, MTG, Truss and Trump, at least we can join and collaborate with them as lackeys, minions, Rudies, and do as we’re told. Defund Ukraine and Social Security, not the police. Spin the “Wall of Fortune” and put all your bricks on the red... red’s not Communist anymore, tho’ MAGAdreams still retain the jackboots and voting at gunpoint aspects of Marx and Lenin.

A closing note from Haghighi (above)...

“The Futurists loved speed, noise, machines, pollution, and cities; they embraced the exciting new world that was then upon them rather than hypocritically enjoying the modern world’s comforts while loudly denouncing the forces that made them possible. Fearing and attacking technology has become almost second nature to many people today; the Futurist manifestos show us an alternative philosophy.

“Too bad,” Haghighi veritably sighs, “they were all Fascists.”

September 24^th – September 30^th, 2022

Saturday, September 24, 2022

Dow: 29,590.41

Fiona curves northwest and becomes a rare and record Canadian “post-tropical” hurricane. Ian on track for landfall on or around Tampa as Floridians empty stores, hoarding essentials – NASA cancels its proposed Artemis launch. A super typhoon ravages the Philippines... Manila threatened.

Inflation striking Halloween pumpkins, Thanksgiving turkey prices and Christmas holiday postage rates; gas prices wobbling but a barrel of oil in the U.S. drops below $80. Polls are showing that midterm voters view inflation as a graver problem than abortion, war or climate change. Bad news for Democrats.

Killer cops on the rampage. Police give a “sketchy” black man Super K to “quiet” him which it does... permanently. Colorado police arrest a woman for suspected road rage and put her in handcuffs in their patrol car... parked on railroad tracks. Train comes... smash!

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Dow: Closed

The law and the outlaws step up. An Arizona judge greenlights revival of a 1901 law that mandates jail for abortion criminals... “If you don’t like our state abortion laws,” a woman on the street scoffs, “move!” Perhaps to Indiana where another judge overturns what most say is an “extreme” anti-abortion law... next stop will be SCOTUS.

Gunfire resonates in Pennsylvania as a mass shooter kills two, wounds more at a Pittsburgh amusement park while a random shooter shoots a man at random on a Philadelphia sidewalk. Across town, four more are downed in what is called a “domestic” shooting. Over the river, a New Jersey highschool football player dies of onfield injury.

Civil unrest continues in Russia over the draft for Putin’s war while the sham gunpoint referenca are being held in the Ukraine. 76 reported killed during Iranian street protests over the “morality police” murder of a woman who wore her headscarf immorally. Rogue drones from unknown sources force postponement of Washington State NCAA and Seattle NFL games.

Monday, September 26, 2022

Dow: 29,260.87

School shootings migrate to Russia where a man wearing a swastika t-shirt kills 17 (11 children) and wounds dozens more. Draftees are shooting up and torching military recruitment offices; videos of torture and police brutality circulate. Vlad’s marching murderers and the day to day grind of Putin’s war is wearing down spectators to the point that some in Washington are tired of the Ukrainians and their tin cup, begging for more relief and more weapons – even to the extent of President Zelenskyy’s wife, Olenya, having to warn the West of Mad Vlad’s ambitions should he conquer Ukraine,

More riots in Iran, but government sponsored anti-female anti-West mobs burn American flags. New U.K. P.M. delivers tax cuts for the rich. NoKo fires off more missiles. And Giorgia Meloni of the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy party joins the Club as a elected P.M. on a platform of hatred of immigrants and gays who fear she is going to “delete” them. Worried Jews ask: “will we be next?”

Domestically, the One Six inquisitors to resume their hearings on Wednesday... leaking dirt on an unknown person in the White House “co-ordinated” with Capitol rioters. Trump accuses FBI of planting contraband among his Mar-a-Lago documents, Special Master Dearie gives him until Friday to prove it or shut up.

Failing Hollywood turns to releasing old hits like “Avatar” and “Hocus Pocus” in advance of long-planned (and much panned) sequels. James Earl Jones retires as the voice of Darth Vader... all of the remakes will henceforth be voiced by machines. Machine-drivin’ man Jimmy Johnson also announces he will retire from NASCAR. And TV talk show hosts James Cordon and Trevor Noah are leaving the building to “find themselves” (and in Trevor’s case, Dua Lipa).

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Dow: 29,244.71

NASA Artemis launch still on hold as Ian strengthens to a Cat. 4 storm but they can celebrate their successful mission to hit a distant asteroid and perhaps knock it off course in a test of technology that can save the world perhaps.

Thousands of Russians emigrating, either to avoid the draft or because they just don’t like Putin, although he has been holding Trumpish rallies with crowds of cheering imperialists. The leader of the big, ugly bear proposes setting up roadblocks at all the borders with “hostile” countries like Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Baltics, Finland, Poland and, of course, Ukraine itself.

The Dow, falling below 30,000 and losing 20% of its value over the year officially enters a bear market itself, joining NASDAQ and the SP index. Fed chair Powell snarls that he’ll have to keep raising the interest rates until inflation is whipped – someday. The Bern (not the bear) goes on TV to defend President Joe’s student loan forgiveness scheme (e-con-mystics say it will ultimately cost $400B as opposed to $457M in aid to Ukraine. “What crime did (the student borrowers) commit?” asks Sanders.

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Dow: 29,683.74

Ian fakes out the weatherpeople, making landfall south of Tampa at 3:20 PM but demolishing seaside and island homes in the Naples/Ft. Myers area, with 150 mph winds only 2 mph short of a Cat. 5. Unconfirmed reporters report gusts up to 188. A storm surge twice as high as expected sweeps homes, boats and people out to sea. At noon, Gov. deSantis warns Ianistic refuseniks (perhaps copping a Putin’s pitch to cowardly draft dodgers): “Your time for evacuation is at an end.”

In New York, cowardly pitchers intentionally walk Aaron Judge four times after he swats 61^st, ties Maris. In Chicago, 103 year old Sister Jean throws out the first pitch in a Cubs’ game.

Russia “celebrates” sham Ukrainian referenda by more draft-related emigrations, more nuke threats and forced rallies in Red Square, more losses on the battlefield and sabotage on the main gas pipeline to Germany, for which they blame the West. U.S. and the EU call it another false flag due to the near total cessation of Europurchases of Russian gas. The explosion belches more methane into the ocean than a billion cow farts.

Congress authorizes more money for veterans’ mental health and fighting opioids like the fentanyl being sold to kids as candy. Doctors proclaim victory in race to discover Alzheimers’ treatment by “manipulating a protein”, while the European Journal of Preventive cardiology reiterates that tidal waves of coffee will help hearts, but too many bedbugs will shut Amazon courtesy center.

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Dow: 29,225.61

Ian departs Florida, after crossing the mainland and leaving streets and homes covered in “slick filth”, wheels up the coast towards Jacksonville, Charleston and Savannah, leaving two million powerless and residents interviewed by ace reporters saying: “Our community has been somewhat decimated.” Flash flooding at DisneyWorld has swimmers swimming for their lives and FEMA declaiming: “Water is dangerous!” Sun follows storm, allowing the grim task of search and rescue to begin.

Active shooters strike Arkansas hospital, school shooters hit six in Oakland and Philadelphia increases its record gunfire toll with random murder and mayhem. Former warden executes two migrants in Texas and a noted Nine Eleven cop stabbed to death in Gotham. Overseas, an Afghan school bomber kills 19, while QE2’s coroner states that the Queen died of “old age”.

Washington DC, in the path of Ian in a few days, chills out when Lizzo plays a crystal flute that belonged to President James Madison. Shakira is also touched by the law - but it’s the tax police in Spain who want to lock her up.

Friday, September 30, 2022

Dow: 29,131.57

Ursine stocks growl, hibernate, wake and growl again, all in one week as Congress votes to kick the budget can down the road. Canny gamblers get rich, ordinary Joes get skint. President Joe... he’s going off to Florida and Puerto Rico (but not until next week so as not to hinder rescue and recovery efforts with political posturing).

Said R&R workers get down to business, saving 700 people (plus a cat and an American flag) from flooded Florida. As wind and rain batters Charleston, the death toll rises to 33 and a Weatherperson declares that: “Everybody is getting a piece of Ian.”

In the week-ending “happy news”, McDonald’s will be rolling out an Adult Happy Meal with a toy and a new cartoon character based on cactus. (Unfortunately, not tequila.) And Ketanji Brown-Jackson sworn in to join the Supremes on Monday as the first black woman, making a record four femals on the bench (if you count Amy Coney Barrett).

Wall Street kids finally came to the conclusion that higher interests and higher unemployment are not good things, and that they will not put the brakes on inflation, at least until the Fed launches those rates into the double figures. So those who had stocks to sell sold them, and those still with money to buy them hunted bargains. Down went the Dow... a lot. Down went the Don... somewhat less (at least it appears that the Federal Government is solvent, unless something weird happens over the budget next week).

THE DON JONES INDEX

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

See a further explanation of categories here…

ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)

CATEGORY

VALUE

BASE

RESULTS

SCORE

OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS

INCOME

(24%)

6/17/13 & 1/1/22

LAST

CHANGE

NEXT

SOURCE

Wages (hrly. per cap)

1350 points

9/24/22

616.25

10/8/22

1,387.14

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages 27.45

Median Inc. (yearly)

600

9/24/22

+0.28

10/8/22

603.96

605.62

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 35,941 952 36,041

Unempl. (BLS – in mi)

600

9/24/22

10/8/22

616.25

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/ 3.6% nc

Official (DC – in mi)

300

9/24/22

+0.19

10/8/22

315.8605

316.45

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 5,897 886

Unofficl. (DC – in mi)

300

9/24/22

+0.11

10/8/22

286.44

286.75

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 10,929 917

Workforce Particip.

Number

Percent

300

9/24/22

+0.07

10/8/22

299.76

299.78

In 158,713 Out 99,337 Total: 258,050

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 61.50

WP % (ycharts)*

150

9/22

10/8/22

150.48

https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.20

OUTGO

15%

Total Inflation

1050

9/22

+1.3%

10/8/22

1010.64

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +1.3

Food

300

9/22

+1.0%

10/8/22

286.15

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +1.0

Gasoline

300

9/22

+11.2%

10/8/22

238.50

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +11.2

Medical Costs

300

9/22

+0.7%

10/8/22

292.28

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.7

Shelter

300

9/22

+0.6%

10/8/22

291.99

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.6

WEALTH

Dow Jones Index

300

9/24/22

-8.68%

10/8/22

254.26

232.11

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/ 31,899.29 29,131.57

Home (Sales)

(Valuation)

150

9/24/22

-3.57% +2.06%

10/8/22

154.06

309.58

154.06

309.58

https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics

Sales (M): 5.12 Valuations (K): 416.0

Debt (Personal)

300

9/24/22

+0.14%

10/8/22

289.99

289.59

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 70,292 388

NATIONAL

(10%)

Revenue (trilns.)

300

9/24/22

+0.20%

10/8/22

352.89

353.61

debtclock.org/ 4,398 407

Expenditures (tr.)

300

9/24/22

+1.43%

10/8/22

337.77

342.60

debtclock.org/ 6,098 012

National Debt tr.)

450

9/24/22

+0.06%

10/8/22

441.01

440.77

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 30,598 615

Aggregate Debt (tr.)

450

9/24/22

-0.18%

10/8/22

435.47

434.70

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 91,563 725

GLOBAL

(5%)

Foreign Debt (tr.)

300

9/24/22

-0.12%

10/8/22

325.76

325.37

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,541 550

Exports (in billions)

150

9/24/22

+1.31%

10/22

163.02

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 255.9

Imports (bl.)

150

9/24/22

+0.59%

10/22

158.89

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 341.4

Trade Deficit (bl.)

150

9/24/22

-1.87%

10/22

237.64

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 85.5

ACTS of MAN

12%

World Affairs

450

9/24/22

-0.1%

10/8/22

458.53

458.07

Queen of Denmark de-royalizes four of her naughtiest grandkids and says they’ll have to live like common people do. Putin says Russian nuke attack is greenlighted because America did it first in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Terrorism

300

9/24/22

+0.2%

10/8/22

296.31

296.90

Russia strafes humanitarian convoy and guns down survivors in Ukraine but, at home, terrorists in Russia and Iran, too, get a taste of homegrown People’s Terrorism. NoKo test fires missiles during US/SoKo military exercises.

Politics

450

9/24/22

10/8/22

470.18

Early voting begins with American authoritarians jealous at the Russian gunpoint referenda. Midterm polls say abortion is important but inflation is more important.

Economics

450

9/24/22

-0.2%

10/8/22

436.20

435.33

Dow down by 20% and is officially a bear market. Oil prices level off may start rising and Biden warns domestic oil and gas companies against gouging. Amazon offers to fight inflation by giving workers a $1/hr. raise – and bedbugs.

Crime

150

9/24/22

-0.3%

10/8/22

285.41

284.55

Radio anchorman gunned down in the Philippines. Gun fun American style in Philadelphia, Arkansas, New York. Accused Navy arsonist, a rejected SEAL, acquitted.

ACTS of GOD

(6%)

Environment/Weather

450

9/24/22

+0.2%

10/8/22

439.83

440.71

Ian follows on the heels of Fiona, drenching American yards and streets with yards of rain. East Africa could use the water; their drought driving 22M to brink of starvation.

Disasters

450

9/24/22

-0.2%

10/8/22

438.74

437.86

New Jersey high school football player dies of on-field injury. Rogue drones stop Washington state college and NFL games. Russo-German gas pipeline breached, sabotage suspected... but by whom?

LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX

(15%)

Science, Tech, Educ.

600

9/24/22

+0.3%

10/8/22

616.05

617.90

NASA sends rocket to smash asteroid and knock it off course. It smashes – but they won’t know if it’s off course for 2 months. NOAA using more and more drones to fly into the center of hurricans and poke around.

Equality (econ/social)

600

9/24/22

+0.2%

10/8/22

589.61

590.79

KBJ officially joins SCOTUS and will help hear opening day cases on Monday. “Stranger Things’ star Caleb McLaughlin says that fans of the show are racist because he has fewer social media followers than the white actors.

Health

600

9/24/22

+0.2%

10/8/22

486.96

487.93

FDA revises list of what foods are healthy and what are not. Alzheimers gene manipulation cure shows promise. Cancer deaths also down - doctors credit medical advances and cuts in smoking. But Kids gobbling “rainbow” fentayl, 50x stronger than heroin are a new concern while NFL doctors are revising their concussion protocols.

Freedom and Justice

450

9/24/22

+0.2%

10/8/22

451.74

452.64

President Joe calls for laws to increase transparency on airline “hidden fees”. One Six rioter Kyle Young gets 7 years for hitting a policeman; next up 5 Oath Keepers facing 20 years (unless Trump is elected and pardons them).

MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX

(7%)

Cultural incidents

450

9/24/22

+0.2%

10/8/22

467.49

468.42

Home Run Derby as MLB season winds down... Aaron Judge hits 71^st and reaps a garden of intentional walks; Albert Pujols (Cardinals) hits 700^th career. Apple deposes Pepsi as Superbowl Halftime Sponsor... names Rihanna as headliner. “Avatar” re-release garners 30M BO. RIP mountain climber Hilarie Nelson, rapper Coolio, soft-porn director Just Jaeckin (we’ll refrain from the jokes about how theater patrons amused themselves watching his “Emmanuel”), NFL’s Gavin Escorbar and MLB’s Hector Lopez.

Misc. incidents

450

9/24/22

+0.2%

10/8/22

463.28

464.21

Rassler John Cena gets Guinness award for granting wishes to 650 sick Make A Wish kids. Florida man gets fine, jail and ban on possessing fish (except crabs) for “fish trafficking”. Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship (and a gun and uniform).

The Don Jones Index for the week of September 24th through September 30th, 2022 was DOWN 9.83 points

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator. The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.

ATTACHMENT ONE – From Politico

BIDEN CALLS TRUMP'S PHILOSOPHY 'SEMI-FASCISM'

At a Democratic fundraising event in Maryland, the president denounced his predecessor and followers he labeled as "extreme" Republicans.

By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO and OLIVIA OLANDER 08/25/2022 06:45 PM EDT Updated: 08/25/2022 10:01 PM EDT

Exuberant over a string of recent legislative victories, and launching his midterm campaigning in earnest, President Joe Biden swaggered into Maryland on Thursday and excoriated his predecessor’s philosophy as “semi-fascism,” in what constituted an unusually pointed and highly charged denunciation of Republicans.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden told Democratic donors in the Washington suburb of Rockville. Calling out those he labeled as “extreme” Republicans, Biden said: “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Later, at a national Democratic Party event before a few thousand people packed into a nearby high school gym, Biden added: “I respect conservative Republicans. I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.”

“There are not many real Republicans anymore,” Biden added.

No president in recent memory has had a better month of August, lifting the mood inside the White House and injecting fresh hope across the party ahead of what long looked like a bleak midterm election. In recent weeks, Democrats have passed a slew of marquee bills filled with deliverables that Biden ticked through in his speeches. The president painted the last year-plus as something of an American comeback — and a recovery from the depths of the pandemic and economic turmoil: “We’ve come a long way,” he said.

And after a recent stretch of self-isolation as he recovered from Covid, Biden appeared to relish the opportunity to close out the night by wading into the audience and spending several minutes grinning for selfies.

Republicans called the president’s comment about fascism “despicable,” with a spokesperson for the GOP saying Americans are still “suffering” from high inflation.

For Biden, spending the evening in a blue state with few competitive elections pointed to the careful calculation the White House faces in deploying him over the next 75 days. While the president’s approval numbers have ticked up of late, he still hovers around the low- to mid-40s, and many Democrats remain reluctant to appear with him.

Onstage in Rockville, Biden highlighted his administration’s recent cancellation of student loan debt, as well as Democrats’ ongoing fight for abortion rights. He listed other campaign promises yet unfulfilled, including universal pre-K. At one point, he presided over a slideshow presentation that highlighted the plan of Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the head of the Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm, to sunset federal programs every five years. Biden said that includes Medicare and Social Security.

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” the president said. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

Earlier, he criticized the impact the Trump administration had on the United States’ stature in global politics, referring to Russian President Vladmir Putin’s recent aggression in Ukraine.

“I underestimated how much damage the previous four years had done in terms of America’s reputation in the world,” Biden said.

Biden’s rally brought in more than 3,600 people in a gym and two overflow rooms. The Democratic National Committee has reported record midterm fundraising for this point in the year, at $255 million for this cycle and $92 million for the year.

ATTACHMENT TWO – From the New York Post

Hillary Clinton likens Trump supporters to Nazis

By Jon Levine September 24, 2022 9:38am

First it was deplorables, now it’s Nazis.

Hillary Clinton offered a sharp rebuke of former President Trump’s most recent campaign event in Ohio, saying it reminded her of a Nazi rally.

“I remember as a young student, you know, trying to figure out, how people get basically drawn in by Hitler. How did that happen? I’d watch newsreels and I’d see this guy standing up there ranting and raving, and people shouting and raising their arms. I thought, ‘What’s happened to these people?'” Clinton said Friday at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.

“You saw the rally in Ohio the other night, Trump is there ranting and raving for more than an hour, and you have these rows of young men with their arms raised. I thought, ‘What is going on?'”

Clinton was alluding to a Sept. 17 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, for GOP senate candidate J.D. Vance, which Trump attended.

Video from the event shows a number of his supporters raising their arms with the index finger pointing upward — which some took as a reference to a salute associated with the Qanon conspiracy theory. Others wondered if they might have simply been signaling “No. 1” to punctuate a point Trump made in his speech.

“My fellow citizens, this incredible journey we’re on together has only just begun, and it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious American nation,” Trump said as dramatic music played.

A rep for Trump called the Qanon speculation a “dopey conspiracy.”

“As usual, the media is working hand in hand with the Democrats weeks before an election,” said spokesman Taylor Budowich.

Clinton has frequently derided the billionaire and his supporters, most famously calling them a “basket of deplorables” during the campaign.

“It seems like perpetual-failed-candidate Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables has run stale, not unlike herself,” said Budowich “It’s pathetic, it’s divisive, and it is further cementing her legacy of cringe.”

ATTACHMENT THREE – From Fox News

Hillary Clinton compares Trump's Ohio event to a Nazi rally

A spokesperson for Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton's comments 'pathetic' and 'divisive'

By Paul Best Published September 24, 2022 12:22am EDT

AUSTIN, Texas — Hillary Clinton likened Donald Trump's rally in Ohio last weekend to Adolf Hitler courting Nazis, a comparison that drew a sharp rebuke from a spokesman for the former president.

"I remember as a young student, you know, trying to figure out, how people get basically brought in by Hitler. How did that happen? I'd watch newsreels and I'd see this guy standing up there ranting and raving, and people shouting and raising their arms. I thought, 'What's happened to these people?'" Clinton said at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.

"You saw the rally in Ohio the other night, Trump is there ranting and raving for more than an hour, and you have these rows of young men with their arms raised. I thought, what is going on?"

Trump hosted a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, last Saturday in support of US Senate candidate JD Vance, who is facing Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman.

Some Trump supporters in attendance raised one index finger in the air at the end of the former president's speech.

"My fellow citizens, this incredible journey we’re on together has only just begun, and it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious American nation," Trump told the crowd.

Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, accused Clinton of "using some of the most disgusting smears imaginable."

Other politicians also compared Trump's event to a Nazi rally.

New York state Sen. Anna Kaplan, a Democrat who represents parts of Long Island, called on Americans to join her "in sharply denouncing the use of Nazi symbolism and imagery anywhere in our political process."

Clinton also railed against Trump for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, saying that she's worried about the undermining of the rule of law.

"I think it is fair to say we're in a struggle between democracy and autocracy," she said Friday.

ATTACHMENT FOUR – From the Guardian U.K.

MUSSOLINI: THE MASTER OF ITALY – ARCHIVE, 1922

The Observer examines the fascist advance across Italy and Mussolini’s ability to dominate an audience ‘by sheer force of volcanic personality’

Compiled by Richard Nelsson Wed 21 Sep 2022 07.09 EDT

Fascist activities

From our own correspondent
The Observer, 24 September 1922

Rome
The Fascisti are continuing their activities all over Italy, and if they use despotic methods it must be admitted that their despotism is sometimes attended with good results. How far and how long an extra-state despotism can continue to exist side by side with the legal constitution is the problem that will have to be faced in the near future by both Italy and the Fascisti.

They are now preparing a campaign in the south of Italy where, so far, fascismo has penetrated very little. The National Congress of Fascisti takes places at Naples in October, and will be the signal for the “black shirts” to start their propaganda. They have already established National Syndicates to take the place of Communist Labour Chambers in the provinces of Bari and Foggia, formerly strongholds of socialism. These syndicates aim at federating workers of all classes, instead of separating the social strata and producing the harmful class strife which has hitherto been the hallmark of Italian socialism.

In Sicily fascismo has better ground to work on than in the Neapolitan provinces. As an article in the Popolo d’Italia truly observes, there is no real socialism in Sicily; there are only discontented people, who will gladly join any association that promises to ameliorate their lot. In Messina, fascism is already thriving. In Sicily, generally, memories still linger of Garibaldi and his band of heroes, and the tradition of the “red shirts” will pave the way for the new expedition of the “camicie nere.”

And, consider this insert from here...

ITALY’S CASAPOUND HAS BEEN CENTRAL TO NORMALISING FASCISM AGAIN IN THE COUNTRY OF ITS BIRTH. NOW THEY’RE TRYING TO ENTER PARLIAMENT.

by Tobias Jones Thu 22 Feb 2018 01.00 EST

On the night of 27 December 2003, five men broke into a huge, empty office complex in Rome, just south of the city’s main railway station, Roma Termini. A few days earlier, the men had put up fake fliers, appealing to the public for help to find a lost black cat called “Pound”. It was a way to avoid suspicion as they surveyed the building before breaking in.

Nothing was left to chance: the date, between Christmas and New Year, was chosen because there wouldn’t be many people around. Even the name and colour of the cat wasn’t casual: “Pound” was a nod to the American poet and fascist evangelist Ezra Pound. And black was the colour associated with their hero, Benito Mussolini. They planned to start a radio station from inside their new building called Radio Bandiera Nera – “Black Flag Radio”.

In central Italy, (the collection resumes a century ago), the Fascisti are championing ex-soldiers in the country districts by occupying the villas or these landowners who refuse to give them work. A few days ago 300 of them swarmed over the Villa Borghese in the Mugello, near Florence, and continued the pressure of their presence until the owner, the Duca di Bomarzo, consented to employ a reasonable number of ex-servicemen on his estate.

The village of Bacchereto, also in Tuscany, has just been occupied by Fascisti, who announce their intention of remaining on the spot until the parish priest has been removed. The obnoxious cleric is accused of uttering libels against fascismo from the pulpit, and of being generally guilty of anti-national feeling. His parishioners are, it seems, thoroughly in agreement with the Fascisti, and are grateful to them for their help. The priest declares that he is innocent of the sentiments attributed to him, but it is rumoured that he intends to resign the living of Bacchereto sooner than fight it out with the Fascisti.

THE MASTER OF ITALY: MUSSOLINI AND HIS PROGRAMME

From our own correspondent
The Observer, 1 October 1922

Florence
Last week both the nominal and the virtual leader of Italy made speeches and were honoured in different ways and in very different measure. The banquet given at Pinerolo, in Piedmont, to celebrate the completion of 30 years of the prime minister’s political life, was attended by numerous ministers, innumerable deputies and three Italian ambassadors, besides a crowd of other distinguished guests, who had come, not only because Facta is personally liked and much respected, but because an important speech was expected, given the gravity of the political situation. Delusion wits bitter. “Verba non Facta,” exclaimed one wag, and the phrase will serve as cenotaph for this amiably dignified and ineffectually upright minister who has failed to impress his countrymen, and is only used as a hyphen between one ministry and the other. He has purred about peace and order at home, and respect for Italy abroad, but has not known which card to play.

The subtle Italian mind adores a man of Teflon, a man of elemental force. Mussolini, “the Thunderer,” whose words became deeds as they drop from his mouth, has swept most of young Italy off their feet, and for the time being holds them in the hollow of his hand. He at any rate has no difficulty in finding cards to play; he shows them with tempestuous promptitude in answer to the stirred curiosity of his anxious countrymen, and no one can complain that his game lacks variety. His whole life, from a revolutionary socialist to a revolutionary fascist, is made of cinema shifts of stirring interest and significance.

At Udine on 20 September Mussolini made the most important of his speeches, which had for its watchword, “Rome”. “The march on Rome,” however symbolic as a term (and, given the necessity, Mussolini will turn symbols into deeds), means nothing less than that Italy is to be fascista and governed either by Mussolini or by those who will suit their policy to his. In the very near future we may see a Giolitti-Mussolini ministry – age and exuberance grappling with, perhaps, the most subtly difficult situation an Italian cabinet has ever had to deal with.

Discipline
In the Udine speech Mussolini made a vigorous call for discipline to be the mainspring of his army and of Italy. “We must subject ourselves,” he said, “to an iron discipline or else we would have no right to impose it upon the nation. Discipline alone will enable Italy to make her voice heard among other nations. Discipline should be accepted; if not accepted, it must be imposed … We are an army, and because we have chosen that special constitution, our life and our actions must be founded upon discipline … “Italy’s voice to be heard among other nations” – there you have another foundation stone of Mussolini’s programme.

“Black Shirts” at Cremona
The very day that the prime minister’s 3,000 distinguished guests were eating their excellent dinner and exchanging “bei complimenti,” Mussolini was taking peaceful possession of enemy country. The beautiful little city of Cremona, lying in the rich Lombard plain close to the gliding waters of the Po, awoke to find her population suddenly doubled by the advent of 30,000 fascists – youths in black shirts and black fezes, skull and crossbones as their emblem, their motto “Me ne frego” (“Je m’en fiche”); and young girls in short black skirts, white blouses, and jockey caps made of tricolour.

The “loggie” flanking the cathedral were soon crowded with people, boys sat astride on the grim medieval lions and heads looked out of the small windows above the giant sundial, while thousands of Black Shirts streamed into the piazza for an hour and half in well-ordered formation. With his habitual quiet rapidity, Mussolini suddenly appeared in the stone pulpit affixed high up against a pier of the Communal Palace whence demagogues of old had swayed the people of Cremona. There was a roar of welcome “Il nostro Duce,” and the banners were raised on high and waved above the crowd.

Mussolini as orator
“How like he is to a Roman tribune,” exclaimed one officer, as Mussolini stretched out his arm to the crowd, saluting the people in the Roman manner adopted by the fascists. His powerful head was thrown back, his stern eye fixed them all as one person. I was more impressed by the religious silence which fell upon the multitude when Mussolini began to speak than by the indescribable enthusiasm when cheering broke loose. He is a great speaker, not an orator. He dominates his audience more by sheer force of his volcanic personality, which is well under control, than by the force of his words. The young men in Italy, full of intense zest for life, and of truculent patriotism, would follow him anywhere at the lift of a finger. In this absorbing love for Italy and pride in her lies their strength, their virtue, and their danger.

This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.

ATTACHMENT FIVE – From G.U.K.

“The Destructionists” review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post does not fall victim to false equivalency. He knows the GOP is a threat to democracy

By Charles Kaiser Mon 5 Sep 2022 02.00 EDT

After Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press corps responded with another stream of fatuous false equivalencies.

“The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger”, was the headline in the New York Times. A Washington Post editorial declared the president was “wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called ‘the work of democracy’”.

In his brilliant new book, Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgments to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted.

He comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.

As America “approaches majority-minority status”, Milbank writes, “… white grievance and white fear” have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”.

Working as a political columnist for the last 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy”.

The book has four roughly equal sections: about the Clinton presidency (“defined by the slashing style of [Newt] Gingrich”), the George W Bush presidency (“defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove”), the Obama presidency and the era of Trump.

This is meticulous history, showing how the Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society”, conducting “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions … of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence”.

Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.

By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” Milbank makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.

There was nothing new about Donald Trump’s 30,573 documented lies as president. Gingrich’s Republicans were “saturated with wild, often unsubstantiated allegations. Whitewater. Troopergate. Travelgate. Filegate. Furnituregate. Fallen Clinton aide Webb Hubbell fathered Chelsea Clinton … commerce secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash … was a Clinton-arranged hit”. And so on.

It was Gingrich, the Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie”.

The crassness also started with Gingrich.

“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told college Republicans way back in 1978. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power.”

Eleven years later, Gingrich told the reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN after calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “grotesque”, “loony” and “stupid”.

Milbank is especially strong about Ralph Reed, “a crucial figure in the perversion of the religious right into an entity more ‘right’ than ‘religious’”. There is also a long recounting of the gigantic lobbying scandal centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former top aide to the House majority leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramoff “defrauded Indian tribes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also got Reed to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling projects that competed with his own gambling interests.

Another long section reminds us that the administration of George W Bush actually did even greater damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into the completely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war in Iraq.

Milbank’s book is in the fine tradition of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann which was the first to point out the uselessness of the Washington press corps’ attempts to be “fair” to both parties.

Milbank quotes from it: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Herein lies the tragedy of Washington journalism. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those astute observations, Milbank is one of just a handful of reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating the pronouncements of the Republican party with the contempt they invariably deserve.

As Ornstein tweeted on Saturday: “Tragically our mainstream media have shown that they are either AWOL in this battle or have opted on the side of the authoritarians by normalizing their behavior and minimizing their intentions.”

· The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is published in the US by Doubleday

ATTACHMENT SIX – From the Washington Informer

House Republicans Vote Against Fighting Nazis in U.S. Military and Law Enforcement

by Jamila Bey July 14, 2022

As part of the annual defense spending bill (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022), the House approved an amendment requiring government officials to report instances of white supremacy and neo-Nazi activity in uniformed services and federal law enforcement. The amendment was approved in a party-line 218-208 vote.

Chairman of the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Oversight, New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr., tweeted his disgust.

The measure calls for the FBI director, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the secretary of Defense to publish a report detailing white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity within their ranks. The report must disclose the number of people who were discharged from uniformed services or law enforcement because of situations involving white supremacy and neo-Nazi activity. They’re also required to present ways to combat such ideologies. The report would be submitted to congress, with unclassified portions made public.

Illinois Congressman Brad Schneider sponsored the amendment. Referencing domestic terrorist attacks including the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 that saw hundreds of neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Confederate and KKK groups turn their demonstration deadly, Schneider pointed out that these hate groups must be exposed. “Such behavior, such extremism is a threat to us in all segments of society. There is no reason to believe that our military is any different.”

Schneider also cited a presentation from the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, titled “The Insider Threat and Extremist Activity Within the DoD.” He reminded, “These are exceptions, they are rare, but we must do everything we can to identify them and to thwart them before risks become a reality.”

In late 2020, The Brennan Center published a report entitled Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism White Supremacy and Far Right Militancy in Law Enforcement. The paper lists no fewer than 121 footnotes documenting instances they call the government’s “strikingly insufficient” response to clear threat.

The full NDAA is expected to pass this week. The House then goes into conference with the Senate.

ATTACHMENT SEVEN – From G.U.K

Ruling the US supreme court isn’t enough. The right wants to amend the constitution

A conservative movement to rewrite the US constitution is gaining momentum – potentially plunging the US into a vast legal unknown

By Russ Feingold Mon 19 Sep 2022 06.17 EDT

In a recent primetime address, President Joe Biden spoke about “the soul of the nation” – calling out rightwing forces for their numerous efforts to undermine, if not overthrow, our democracy. Biden’s speech was prescient, in more ways than one. In addition to many Republicans promoting the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and working to fill elected offices with people ready to subvert the will of the people, there is a conservative movement underway to radically rewrite the US constitution.

The right has already packed the supreme court and is reaping the rewards, with decisions from Dobbs to Bruen that radically reinterpret the constitution in defiance of precedent and sound legal reasoning. But factions of the right are not satisfied to wait for the court to reinterpret the constitution. Instead, they have set their sights on literally rewriting our foundational document. Why bother with constitutional interpretation when you can change the actual text? This strategy by factions of the right could carry far graver consequences for our country and our democracy than even the right’s packing of the court or the Capitol attack on January 6.

Our founding fathers did not see the constitution as written in stone; they expected it to be revised and believed that revisions could help the document endure. As such, they included in Article V of the constitution two different mechanisms through which to amend the text.

All 27 amendments to the constitution have been achieved through only one of those mechanisms: by having two-thirds of both chambers of Congress propose an amendment to the constitution and then having that amendment ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures.

There is a second mechanism, however. The second option is to have two-thirds of all state legislatures (34 states or more) apply for a constitutional convention and then to have three-quarters of all state legislatures or state ratifying conventions ratify any amendments proposed by the convention.

To be clear, a constitutional convention under Article V has never before been held. Moreover, the constitution provides no rules on how a constitutional convention would actually be run in practice. There is nothing in the constitution about how delegates would be selected, how they would be apportioned, or how amendments would be proposed or agreed to by delegates. And there is little useful historical precedent that lends insight to these important questions. This means that nearly any amendment could be proposed at such a convention, giving delegates enormous power to engage in political and constitutional redrafting.

A convention would be a watershed moment in American history. And this is exactly what factions of the right are banking on. Rather than a deterrent, they see the constitution’s lack of clarity on how a convention should be run as an opportunity to pursue new theories of constitutional power and change.

The Convention of States Project, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) and other rightwing organizations have spent more than a decade working to persuade state legislators to pass applications for an Article V convention. This effort has recently attracted a who’s-who roster of far-right supporters, including the Trumpist attorneys John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, and financial support from conservative megadonors.

Like recent attempts to overturn the 2020 election using anti-democratic theories, far-right activists are forging ahead into this vast constitutional unknown. They are already holding mock conventions with the aim of controlling the process and the outcome should an actual convention come to pass.

The US constitution is by no means perfect. The inclusion of Article V is evidence that even the framers expected amendments. George Washington famously remarked that the constitution was not “free from imperfections”, but he nonetheless encouraged his fellow citizens to ratify the document because those imperfections could be mended over time.

Constitutional amendment could be a legitimate method for addressing the founding failures of the constitution. That said, any conversation about how to go about amending the constitution needs to be transparent, inclusive and informed. What factions of the right are pursuing is anything but. They are pursuing exclusively partisan outcomes and have sought to keep their efforts opaque. They do not seem interested in a representative, democratic process.

Biden was right. The soul of our nation is under threat. This plan by the far right could send this country into a constitutional crisis, one much more damaging and far-reaching than January 6. Concerned citizens of all ideological stripes should speak out against this radical effort. The far right has benefited from having its efforts conducted mostly under wraps. That must change. A light must be shined on these efforts so they can be stopped and our constitutional democracy preserved.

· Russ Feingold served nearly two decades in the United States Senate and is president of the American Constitution Society

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – From Newsweek

Pat Sajak Accused of 'Posing With Nazis' After Photo With Rep. Greene

BY THOMAS KIKA ON 9/18/22 AT 11:29 AM EDT

Long-time Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak became the subject of online scrutiny this weekend after a photo of him with GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene began to circulate.

It is unclear when and where the photo was originally shared. The Twitter account PatriotTakes, which describes itself as "dedicated researchers monitoring and exposing right-wing extremism," shared the photo on Saturday evening, seemingly sparking a wave of negative reactions to Sajak.

"Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak with Marjorie Taylor Greene and [Right Side Broadcasting Network] reporter Bryan Glenn," the account wrote in the tweet that included the photo.

In his tweets criticizing Sajak, documentary filmmaker Jeremy Newberger said that Greene had, in late February, appeared at the America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, an event organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes previously took part in the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to a neo-Nazi killing a woman with his car.

Due to this association, Newberger accused Sajak of "posing with Nazis," even sharing a photo of the iconic Wheel of Fortune letter board with the phrase on it.

"It's only been 8 months since Marjorie Taylor Greene gave the keynote at a Nazi rally where the organizer praised Adolf Hitler," Newberger tweeted. "So by all means, Pat Sajak, take some selfies with her. Looks like the Wheel of Fortune is morally bankrupt."

"The company you keep is quite unfortunate [Pat Sajak]," retired journalist Diana Gonzalez tweeted in response to the PatriotTakes post. "Will be changing the channel when you spin the wheel."

Meanwhile, BET News host Marc Lamont Hill compared Sajak to his predecessor on Wheel of Fortune, Chuck Woolery, an avowed conservative who, at one point in 2020, denounced the COVID-19 pandemic, though he later walked back those views.

"First Chuck Woolery. Now Pat Sajak," Hill tweeted. "Are all game show hosts trash?"

Sajak took over hosting duties on Wheel of Fortune in 1981 and has remained on the show for a historic run of over 40 years, alongside co-host and presenter Vanna White. During his tenure, he has received 19 Primetime Emmy nominations for Best Game Show Host and won on three occasions.

While not as outspoken about his political beliefs as some modern right-wing figures, Sajak is a Republican and has in the past expressed some views that could be considered divisive by many. Notably, he has referred to himself as a skeptic of climate change and served on the board of a conservative publishing company that released titles from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter.

Newsweek attempted to reach Sajak's representation for comment. Newsweek also reached out to Greene's office for comment.

ATTACHMENT NINE – On the other hand, From Newsweek Too…

Video of Republicans Calling Democrats 'Fascist' Viewed Over 600K Times

BY NICK REYNOLDS ON 9/2/22 AT 2:55 PM EDT

Acompilation of Republicans describing Democrats as "fascists" has racked up more than 600,000 views after conservative commentators ripped President Joe Biden for slapping Republicans with similar criticism in a prime-time speech Thursday night.

While he never specifically used the term "fascist," Biden railed against the extreme reflexes of the far right during a speech in Philadelphia, arguing the modern Republican Party aimed to "promote authoritarian leaders, and they fanned the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country."

The comments came just one week after Biden labeled those same Republicans with the term "semi-fascism" in a speech in Rockville, Maryland, prompting some Republicans to equate Biden's speech to that of other totalitarian regimes who target their political rivals in state-sponsored broadcasts.

"What Joe Biden is saying right now is the official position of the entire executive branch of the U.S. government," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a monologue simulcast during Biden's address. "That would include the Justice Department, the various intel agencies and the world's most powerful standing military."

"Think about that," he added. "Does it make you nervous? You don't have to be a Trump voter to see a speech like this as a turning point in American history. For hundreds of years, the U.S. has had a political system comprised of two competing parties. If you were to declare one of those parties criminal and illegitimate, what would you be left with?"

To some degree, conservatives—including some who currently serve in office—already have.

Shortly after Biden's speech, liberal MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan posted a video late Thursday evening showing a rolling roster of high-profile conservatives like Jeanine Pirro, Texas Representative Dan Crenshaw, former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr and Carlson himself calling various Democratic initiatives and politicians fascist. As of this writing, the video already has 600,000 views and counting.

Moderate Republicans like Adam Kinzinger have openly questioned some of the accepted labels that far-right Republicans placed on their political opponents, including the labeling of teachers who share LGBTQ-friendly content as "groomers" and the chants of "let's go Brandon!"

Others, like Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson, described Biden's "divisive" and "not presidential" speech as a starting point for more productive and unifying discussions with the other side amid genuine disagreements over issues like border security and the economy, even as a large contingent of his party still denies the result of the 2020 election.

"We have issues within the Republican Party we need to resolve and work through," Hutchinson told CNN's New Day Friday morning. "That's what elections are about."

"I have a lot of confidence in where we're going and that we can overcome the challenges we see today," he later added. "But we need optimistic leaders that dwell upon the future and present answers, and problem solve, but not the past."

(See the video at https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-calling-democrats-fascist-video-social-media-1739564)

ATTACHMENT TEN – From the Washington Examiner

Democrats like Biden have been falsely calling Republicans fascists for almost 60 years

by Christopher Tremoglie, Commentary Writer August 29, 2022 09:54 AM

Last week, Robert Reich, former secretary of labor during the Clinton administration, tweeted, "Just wondering if 'DeSantis' is now officially a synonym for 'fascist.'" Later in the week, President Joe Biden, once touted as the great unifier, referred to former President Donald Trump and his supporters as "semi-fascist." These words are just the latest in a long line of Democrats falsely accusing Republicans of being fascists, a disgusting practice that began in 1964.

Aside from being old, foolish, and completely untrue, this trope is nothing new. Furthermore, this has nothing to do with President Trump or "MAGA." For nearly 60 years, Democratic politicians, pundits, and activists have compared Republican political leaders to fascists, Nazis, and even Adolf Hitler. It's nothing more than the latest production of Democratic political theater.

Consider the history of Democrats. After their history of promoting slavery and segregation, Democrats began to describe Republicans as “fascists” in 1964. While campaigning for president, Barry Goldwater was targeted by Pat Brown, then California's left-wing governor. Of Goldwater's candidacy, Brown said, "The stench of fascism is in the air."

A few years after that, the target was Richard Nixon. Nixon's reputation is forever tarnished in history because of the Watergate scandal. Yet, until then, he was viewed as a political force. In December 1973, theCall published an article titled "Dump Nixon! Stop the fascist tide." One does not have to go into great detail about its contents to describe the editorial. Then, after Nixon won the presidency in 1968, late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) said Nixon "was a fascist pig."

Gerald Ford followed Nixon as president and as a Republican who was called a fascist. In 1974, a member of the ACLU criticized Ford for his lack of punitive action against Richard Nixon.

Additionally, in the Gerald Ford Library museum, a document describes an interaction with a woman in 1975 in which Ford was harassed and repeatedly called a "fascist" and a "fascist pig."

On the other hand, former President Ronald Reagan was treated quite differently from Ford — and quite differently from any other president. Listening to some of the comments by Democrats about Reagan, one would have thought he was the Antichrist and another dreadful fascist. But just like the hyperbolic outrage over Goldwater and Nixon, Democrats were once again wrong about Reagan and any rise or link to fascism.

Consider some of the comments Democrats made about Reagan. In 2016, Larry Elder, called the "blackface of white supremacy" during his 2021 California gubernatorial campaign by some on the Left, wrote how former Rep. Willie Clay (D-MO) once said Reagan was "trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf."

Then, there was Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad. He featured artwork of Reagan devising a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Esquire magazine featured an article by Harry Stein, who claimed that people who supported Reagan were like the "good Germans" in "Hitler's Germany."

George W. Bush had numerous people call him a fascist or Nazi or compare him to Hitler. This started when he announced his candidacy for president and after winning a close election against Al Gore. After the invasion of Iraq, Bush might have had it worse than Reagan, comparatively speaking. Yet, still, there was never any rise of fascism. Maybe those who are really problematic are not Republican leaders but the ones using offensive, unsubstantiated hyperbole.

From Goldwater to Trump to DeSantis, each "fascist" was supposedly going to be worse than the "fascist" before. Yet each time these frivolous claims never came to fruition, Democrats would call the next Republican politician a fascist, with the caveat that they "really meant it this time." Yet, despite all these warnings and doomsday predictions about fascism, here we are, in 2022, still waiting for the advent of the Fourth Reich.

No one should take it seriously any time a Democrat calls a Republican a fascist, Joe Biden included. Such accusations are insulting and offensive. The only people who believe such outlandish nonsense are unhinged fanatics. There's no legitimacy to these claims and certainly no realistic fascist threat — and anyone who says otherwise is not a serious person.

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – From Frappes and Fiction

A Deep Dive Into The Book Community’s Toxic Cancel Culture

The rabbit hole of book and author cancellations at the hand of YA Twitter is a deep one– and it’s a symptom of a larger cultural problem in the book community that we would be remiss to ignore.

By Emily in Discussion on May 17, 2022

Twitter is notorious for its toxicity, mostly in the context of politics. But as it turns out, the site has a similarly brutal reputation in the world of books, specifically in the world of YA publishing. The rabbit hole of book and author cancellations at the hand of YA Twitter is a deep one– and it’s a symptom of a larger cultural problem in the book community that we would be remiss to ignore.

I’ll start with the history of cancel culture in the book community before moving on to why I believe this is the most toxic trend on the bookternet right now.

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions: The History of Book Community Cancel Culture

Let’s start by going through a sort of history of cancel culture in the book community, most notoriously on YA Twitter. I’ve only been on Book Twitter since 2021, and I started my blog in 2020, but I want to contextualize this cultural phenomenon within a larger timeframe.

In doing research for this post, the first year I really started to see articles about book cancellations and scandals popping up is 2016— but I think we should start by going back further than that. What was going on in the world of YA before this trend started, and how does it relate to the emergence of cancel culture?

2014-2015: The YA Publishing World Begins to Open Its Eyes to Diversity and Social Justice Issues

YA as a category has existed for decades, but it really rose to prominence in the 2000s and early 2010s with franchises like Twilight, The Hunger Games, and what I like to call the Age of John Green. With the newfound cultural prominence of YA, it began to draw criticism for its lack of diversity.

In the early days of YA, the vast majority of popular books featured white protagonists and had little in the way of representation for minority groups, leading to a push for YA literature that more accurately reflected the diverse reader base it was marketed to. There were also concerns about the disproportionately white demographics of publishing itself.

In 2014, the We Need Diverse Books nonprofit grew out of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag on Twitter with the goal to advocate for more diversity in children’s literature.

The #OwnVoices hashtag began in 2015, a way to denote books whose authors are writing from their own experiences to incorporate diverse representation. For example, a book with an autistic character written by an autistic author would be #OwnVoices, a book with a gay character written by a gay author would be #OwnVoices, etc. This was intended to help readers and publishers find books with accurate representation for marginalized groups.

2015 was also the year that Kirkus Reviews reportedly began noting the races of characters in the books they reviewed, and the year that The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas’s novel about the Black Lives Matter movement and the problem of police brutality against black Americans, was published, becoming one of the first major YA books to feature social justice activism.

This sort of consciousness shift in the publishing world seemed on the surface to be a win for diversity and giving every young person the opportunity to see themselves and their cultures represented in literature– and it was. The number of diverse YA books being published skyrocketed from 2013 to 2016, and in 2022, at the time of this article, the book community continues to champion diverse literature. Although there are still concerns about equity in publishing, we have clearly made progress since the early 2010s, and that is great. I do not at all intend to imply in this post that this movement was a negative thing. It has greatly improved the diversity in publishing and I believe greater consciousness about diversity is extremely necessary.

However, I believe that some of the applications of this movement for more diversity have had some unintended side effects, and the kind of hyper-focus on identity that was unwittingly created may have helped set the stage for the rise of cancel culture.

YA Twitter’s Notoriety Begins: A Timeline of Early Cancellations

With the newfound focus on diversity and positive representation, authors found themselves under greater scrutiny to accurately and inoffensively write about minority groups. It was around 2016 that cancel culture began to become more prevalent in the book community, and most of the incidents revolved around the purported mishandling of representation.

2016:

When We Was Fierce by E.E. Charlton-Trujillo is delayed publication for incorporating a pseudo-AAVE invented dialect for its cast of black characters, which readers deemed offensive

2017:

The Black Witch by Laurie Forest is met with a huge wave of backlash for “racism.” The fantasy novel features a protagonist who is raised in a sheltered environment and must overcome the bigotry she has been taught when she attends a university and is exposed to different people.

The publication of The Continent by Keira Drake, another fantasy novel, is delayed for accusations of racial insensitivity for alleged parallels between fantasy races described unfavorably and real life groups of people. One such complaint was that the name of the “savage” fantasy race, called the “Topi”, was too similar to that of the Hopi Native American tribe. It was also accused of having a “white savior narrative”

American Heart by Laura Moriarty is accused of Islamophobia. The novel is set in a dystopian future United States in which Muslim Americans are rounded up into internment camps. Its protagonist is a white teenager who must overcome her own Islamophobia to help a Muslim woman escape– and therein lies the problem according to the critics: another “white savior narrative.” The online backlash to American Heart was such that Kirkus Reviews, which had originally published a starred review written by a Muslim woman for the book, issued a public apology, revised the review to atone for the wrongthink, and removed the star.

2019:

Blood Heir by Amelie Wen Zhao is cancelled on Twitter, causing Zhao to delay its publication and issue an apology. The novel is yet another fantasy book, and yet again it was accused of racism. Zhao, a Chinese immigrant, intended to draw attention to the problem of human trafficking with a plot line involving slavery, but readers interpreted it as analogous to American chattel slavery and especially took issue with the line “oppression is blind to skin color.” (Don’t we love when Americans interpret everything through the lens of America only)

A Place for Wolves by Kosoko Jackson is cancelled for insensitive portrayal of the Kosovo war.

The State of Book Community Cancel Culture Now

If anything, things have gotten more volatile in the past few years. The scrutiny with regard to representation has continued, and the YA world’s increasing politicization has also intensified the climate.

For the sake of brevity, and because I wrote a separate post about the more recent attitude and author cancellations, I’ll just briefly describe the past two years in terms of major incidents.

In 2020, J.K. Rowling of course officially became Public Enemy No. 1 of the book community for her allegedly “anti-trans” sentiment. Impressively, she still hasn’t capitulated, and the outrage has reached rather extraordinary heights (Apparently now we’re equating Harry Potter tattoos to swastikas and praising authors for writing about Rowling dying in a fire– I’m not even kidding; someone has actually published a book in which J.K. Rowling is written into the story and dies in a fire)

The J.K. Rowling situation has migrated from the realm of book community drama into the realm of actual politics that normal people care about, so let’s quickly move back to the esoteric land of the YA/general sphere again.

The climate that began around 2016 in the book community seems to have continued through 2022. It’s become commonplace to witness people sharing lists of problematic authors and books that you simply must avoid and also make sure to dissuade others from reading. There are Instagram accounts and YouTube channels dedicated to “calling out” (their words) “problematic” people and recounting drama. When I was on bookstagram, it seemed that every day a new infographic would circulate about how problematic a certain author, book, influencer, or other figure in the community was.

(I’ve written more extensively about the rise in people calling things “problematic” in the book community in this post)

I’ve seen various threads and posts and whatnot about authors like Jay Kristoff, T.J. Klune, Casey McQuiston, Francina Simone, Sarah J. Maas, V.E. Schwaab, Lauren Hough, and plenty of others, for offenses of varying severity. Not all of the criticism of authors is due to the content of their books; some of these people were called out for rude behavior online. And it’s important to concede that in some instances criticism of an author is warranted, especially if there is proof of clear wrongdoing, harassment, or racism on their part.

However, the sins of the authors that have been called out vary dramatically, and oftentimes the reaction is disproportionate to the crime. I also believe in separating the art from the artist, and I don’t think that it is wrong to read books by an author even if they have been revealed as doing something wrong. The current obsession with purifying authors and only reading books from people you personally like has become a bit counterproductive. And it’s not great to shame other people for reading books by “problematic” authors.

One example of a major recent cancellation of a non-author on bookstagram: in August 2021, the book subscription box OwlCrate was met with a wave of backlash when they announced that they would start selling their Harry Potter mug collection again. The problem, of course, is because Harry Potter mugs –> Harry Potter –> J.K. Rowling –> How Dare You, Bigot. After being mobbed with angry comments about how harmful and violent and transphobic and disappointing this was, OwlCrate issued an apology and redacted the mug collection again.

I also witnessed a bookstagrammer get mobbed, called a racist and even receive death threats for posting that she was pro-life.

(These are some of the reasons I left bookstagram)

So cancel culture is alive and well on the bookish Internet. But why is that?

Why Is Cancel Culture So Prevalent in the Book Community

The Book Community’s Obsession With Identity Politics

It seems that there are several main factors contributing to this toxic climate on the bookish Internet. First is the community’s strong interest in social justice and the unfortunate side effect of hyper-fixation on identity and political correctness. I’m not one to say political correctness, or, as it’s now more colloquially termed, depending on who you’re talking to, “wokeness”, is necessarily negative, and obviously we don’t want books to be racist or offensive.

But the book community’s bigotry-detector, perhaps, has become slightly hypersensitive.

The Politically Progressive Homogeneity of the YA Book Community

A related factor is the relative political homogeneity of the YA book community (and of YA books themselves, for that matter) The majority of the people who write about books on the Internet, particularly YA books, seem to be women aged 15-35 who are politically progressive.

There is nothing wrong with this, but because everyone is surrounded in places like book Twitter and bookstagram by people with similar opinions, they begin to believe that theirs are the only acceptable ones. It also can lead to people being dog-piled for holding opinions outside of the progressive canon (e.g. pro-life, pro-Trump, and pro-Israel are each opinions I have seen used as evidence of an author or influencer’s impurity)

Again, important caveat: you don’t have to agree with people who have more “conservative” politics and it’s really important to stand up for what you believe. I think it’s important to say when you think someone is wrong, but there’s a difference between disagreeing with a person and calling for them to be cancelled and for no one to read their books or support them ever.

There’s An Element of Status-Seeking and Competition

Overall, I think the main driving factor behind cancel culture seems to be a sort of competition as to who is the most “woke”

Calling out a “problematic” author or book gives you social status online, it makes you virtuous, it shows how much you care about advancing social justice and holding people accountable. And whoever finds the most “problematic” things in a book is the most devoted to the cause.

The BBC actually has a podcast episode on this sort of pattern called “The Purity Spiral”, where they actually talk about YA Twitter:

“In its extremes, a purity spiral is how we tumble towards The Crucible, or Mao’s Red Guard, or Stalin’s show trials– yet, as you’re about to hear, they’re just as present in the world of online knitting, or in Young Adult fiction.“

In essence, a purity spiral is a phenomenon that occurs in isolated cultural groups, characterized by members of the group participating in a cycle of “moral outbidding”: attempting to prove their moral stature or devotion to an ideology, eventually turning inwards and purging their ranks of those presumed to be ideologically impure. It fits the Book Twitter situation perfectly, especially in cases of people like Kosoko Jackson, who participated in online pile-ons of other authors before they eventually turned on him.

What’s So Wrong With Cancel Culture in the Book Community?

Some would say that cancel culture isn’t really that big of a problem. Maybe it’s just holding people accountable and showing authors what behavior is socially unacceptable. However…

“Holding People Accountable” Is Moot When Standards Are Constantly Shifting

Supporters of cancel culture often refer to it as “call-out culture” and describe it as simply a means of “holding people accountable” for their “problematic views.”

But the question is: holding people accountable for what? The definition of what is or is not acceptable changes frequently when you’re going based off mob rule. People have been canceled in the book community for everything from harassing reviewers to being pro-life.

The victims of cancel culture range from people who have actually done harmful things (often unrelated to their books) to people who just happen to have an opinion unapproved by the majority of the chronically online reading obsessed public. It’s unreasonable to treat them the same way.

Also, the apologies of cancelled people never seem to be accepted, no matter how gratuitously they grovel about how they will “do the work” and are “deeply sorry for the harm they have caused.” I’ve never seen an apology lead to anything but gloating condescension– or even further criticism.

Cancel Culture is a Threat to Freedom of Speech

Another argument I see often is the “freedom of speech, not freedom from the consequences of that speech” or “freedom of speech only means that the government can’t censor or punish you for your speech, but other people can!” These people are correct: the Constitution has no power against cancel culture. But that doesn’t make cancel culture a good thing. Just because something is LEGAL doesn’t mean it’s POSITIVE. I hate when people conflate legality with absolute righteousness.

Saying something isn’t illegal is no argument as to whether or not it’s morally right or objectively beneficial. A lot of negative things aren’t illegal. And for that matter, no one is attempting to make cancel culture illegal, that would be totalitarian, ineffective, and stupid so this argument is pretty irrelevant.

(However, now that I think about it, some of the accusations lobbied at people on the bookternet could potentially constitute libel/slander, but that’s beside the point)

I also disagree with the “freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences” argument because it misses the point of free speech rights in general. Yes, the freedom of speech protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution is the prevents the government from prosecuting you for your speech, but consider the idea behind freedom of speech: it’s intended to preserve the right to speak against people in positions of power who would take the opportunity to censor your speech. Why do we have free speech as a principle? To protect unpopular opinions. When such opinions are being silenced by a mob of loud Twitter users, it’s the same end result as if the government was censoring it. Yeah, Twitter can’t put you in jail for your speech, but they can prevent you from speaking. Or writing.

And because we’re talking about books: Twitter has proven to have the capability to delay publication for books and to ruin authors’ reputations before their work has even been released.

The volatility and unpredictability of the online book world has rather disturbing potential for the censorship of authors. I know I would not want to be a YA writer right now. No matter how careful you are to tread lightly, there’s always some way your work could be construed as problematic.

On social media, there is a huge amount of power held by certain people who see it as their responsibility to punish others for what they consider unacceptable views or problematic writing. Cancel culture has caused people to lose their jobs, receive death threats and suffer social alienation as a result of their speech. In the book community, people have lost business opportunities, etc.

I think, when there is so much power in the hands of– for lack of a better word– “the mob”, it does become a free speech issue.

The reason freedom of speech is protected is to prevent a society in which one entity controls political/social discourse. With cancel culture, it’s not the government who’s trying to control said discourse: it’s other people. But that doesn’t make it any less of a threat to free society.

Cancel Culture is Glorified Bullying

Putting aside all the lofty free speech idealism: cancel culture is also just mean.

Do you remember middle school friendship drama? Because I sure do, and the whole cancel culture stuff makes me feel like I’m 13 again, pacing around my room in anticipation on FaceTime while my friend “spills the tea” about the latest stupid, petty he-said she-said nonsense.

The “tea”, reaction videos, screenshots and subtweets and name-calling is like being stuck on a loop in the most toxic, catty circles of tween girls, but they NEVER grow out of it.

It doesn’t at all feel like it’s about “social justice” or “holding people accountable” anymore.

Yes, I’m sure you may think going in someone’s DMs and telling them to kill themselves is an action of commendable heroism, but the rest of us realize you’re just a person capitalizing off the current political climate to go on a power trip and bully someone into obscurity in exchange for social capital.

In Conclusion: Book Community Cancel Culture is Toxic

I think cancel culture is one of the worst things about the”bookternet,” because of the ideological echo chamber and socially-enforced dogma of maligned social justice it perpetuates, and for its incompatibility with freedom of speech online. We should prioritize the rights of authors to write without fear of blown-up misinterpretation of their words or the enforcement of ideological purity. And while legitimate criticism is important, especially if an author is proven to have done something such as harassment, it’s important to distinguish those cases from situations in which allegations have been exaggerated via Twitter or are dubiously serious, such as a controversial joke in a novel.

And we shouldn’t forget the dangers of censorship.

To quote Oscar Wilde:

“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”

Sources

Reason Magazine | “Teen Fiction Twitter Is Eating Its Young”

Lithub | “Lamba Literary cuts Lauren Hough from award shortlist because of ‘Twitter disputes'”

New York Post | “Author canceled after defending literary classics, ‘attacking’ educator”

The Guardian | “Torn apart: the vicious war over YA books”

The Guardian | “Publisher delays YA novel amid row over invented black ‘street dialect'”

Slate | “The Decade in Young Adult Fiction”

Slate | “Wolves: a YA sensitivity reader watched his own community kill his debut novel before it was ever released”

Vulture | “The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter”

Vulture | “The Latest YA Twitter Pile On Forces a Rising Star to Self-Cancel”

Wikipedia | We Need Diverse Books

The Bibliocentrist | “Book Twitter is a Cancel Culture Nightmare”

YA Drama Llama | “The Continent Controversy”

Kirkus Reviews’ public apology for their starred review of American Heart

Vulture | “What the Job of a Sensitivity Reader Is Really Like”

Bustle | “There Are More Diverse Books Than Ever — But Too Few Are Being Written By People Of Color”

Book Riot | “Is YA Leading Diversity in Publishing?”

NPR | “Kirkus Changes Review After ‘American Heart’ Draws Outrage As ‘White Savior Narrative'”

The Orangutan Librarian | “Calling Out Call-Out Culture”

BBC | “The Purity Spiral”

I think this post has gotten long enough now.

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – From G.U.K

From active shooter trainings to cancelled bookmobiles, librarians are caught in the crossfire of a conservative censorship craze

by Lauren Mechling Tue 20 Sep 2022 01.00 EDT

If there’s one thing that Jason Kuhl has learned in the 23 years since he earned his degree in library sciences, it’s that the reality of being a librarian hardly squares with the storybook fantasy. “You tell people you’re a librarian and they think you spend your days reading and recommending books,” he said. Most of his time running the St Charles city county library in Missouri is instead spent tending to administrative duties and big-picture strategy. His library hosts quilting classes, mental health seminars and events where patrons can read aloud to a dog.

This summer, Kuhl and a group of colleagues planned to launch a bookmobile – a library in a bus that would visit various sites across town, including three schools. But when a law criminalizing anybody who makes visually explicit materials available at a school went into effect in late August, they decided to keep the bookmobile away from schools.

“This is a brand new law and it hasn’t been tested,” said a shaken-sounding Kuhl. “It’s not worth it.”

“We are unsure on what someone can interpret as sexually explicit,” Kuhl said. “To be blunt, it feels like we’ve moved backwards in time. We’re in a culture of fear.”

Conservative parent groups that formed to oppose masks during the pandemic, only to pivot to the fight against “critical race theory”, have now begun to focus on scrutinizing books, often by and about queer and Black people, and lobbying for their removal from library shelves. Politicians have hopped on the bandwagon, drafting legislation to supposedly protect children against indoctrination and predation, calling out books by name and making it impossible for the people who run schools and libraries to do their jobs. Fringe activists and government officials are taking to social media, holding meet ups, and riling up their bases with reports of indoctrination, propaganda and the supposedly pornographic materials that lurk on the bookshelves of public institutions.

For many librarians, the stress has become unbearable. Increasing numbers are complaining of sleepless nights, quitting their jobs and setting their social media accounts to private in order to protect themselves from the deluge of harassment and humiliation tactics. More than two-thirds of respondents to the 2022 Urban Library Trauma Study said they had encountered violent or aggressive behavior from patrons at their library.

In October 2021, Texas state representative Matt Krause released a list of about 850 books that he said “might make make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex”, and asked schools around the state to confirm whether they stocked any of the titles in their libraries. His list included John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, which features a doctor who performs abortions, as well as the Amnesty International book We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures.

In July, Oklahoma’s secretary of education, Ryan Walters, tweeted screenshots from Gender Queer and Flamer, two autobiographical graphic novels about growing up LGBTQ+ that he found in Memorial high school’s library catalogue. “This is disgusting,” he wrote.

In August, the South Carolina state senator Josh Kimbrell called a press conference across the street from a public library to demand that multiple books be taken out of the collection or else face defunding. Standing next to a leader of the Palmetto Family Council, a state division of the anti-LGBTQ+ group Focus on the Family, Kimbrell declared: “I’m not trying to ban any books. I’m trying to stop an indoctrination campaign against kids.”

The American Library Association documented 729 attempts to censor library materials in 2021, targeting 1,597 titles. While those figures were more than double the typical number in previous years, the group counted 681 challenges to 1,651 titles in just the first eight months of 2022, putting the US on track for an “unprecedented” year of censorship.

Since last fall, Tasslyn Magnusson has tried to track individual cases of book challenges through a spreadsheet. The aspiring young adult author’s elaborate document has multiple tabs that unfurl like sea scrolls. Works by authors Jesmyn Ward and John Updike appear in its columns, as does a Michelle Obama biography for young readers, and a book called Between Shades of Gray, a middle-grade historical novel that Magnusson imagines some people are confusing with EL James’s racy Fifty Shades of Grey.

Initially passed around privately among librarians, the document now lives on the website of EveryLibrary, a political action committee for libraries. “The information is coming at me faster and faster,” said Magnusson.

The proliferation of book challenges across the nation is partly because anti-book activists’ rallying cries are easier than ever to heed. Moms for Liberty, one of the conservative parent groups that arose during the pandemic to fight mask mandates, maintains a website with a step-by-step guide for challenging books, called its “Guide to Defending Your Child”.

Moms for Liberty member Emily Maikisch also started the website BookLooks.org, where parents can find reviews of supposedly offensive materials that can be copied and pasted into emails to school principals. The homepage features an illustration of a rosy-cheeked teenage girl levitating in a trancelike state as she reads a book. Titles that have received a mini-review include Slaughterhouse-Five (“This book contains explicit violence including animal cruelty; inexplicit sexual activities including beastiality [sic]; sexual nudity; profanity; and inflamatory [sic] religious commentary”) and Lolita (“contains sexual activities involving pedophilia; sexual nudity; and mild profanity”).

Such materials enable conservative activists to submit multiple challenges to multiple institutions, sometimes across state lines. “Their infrastructure has grown exponentially,” Peter Bromberg, associate director of EveryLibrary, said of the cluster of conservative organizations behind the movement. “All it takes is three parents who connect on Facebook and say: ‘We’ll go to the library meeting and present a list of 325 books that need to be pulled immediately.’”

Conservative parent groups such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education aren’t the only ones invested in the fight against books by Black and LGBTQ+ authors. Rightwing extremist groups have also adopted the cause. Proud Boys have taken to storming into Drag Queen Story Hour events, for instance, causing serious fear for patrons and librarians.

“There’s all this pent-up anger, and it’s gotten scarier,” said Natalie Brant, a reference librarian at the state library in Salem, Oregon. Brant has seen an influx of visits from sovereign citizens, an anti-government movement rooted in conspiracy theories. Members frequently request enormous stacks of materials pertaining to the history of laws that they are looking to challenge. “They come with requests that can help them make up lawsuits or just clog up everyone’s time and energy and create chaos,” Brant said. “My anxiety is growing but I feel worse for my colleagues. We recently had active shooter trainings.”

“The stress level is at its apex,” said Jesse O’Dunne, a Seattle youth services librarian. “There’s a rise in rhetoric of librarians as villains. Conservatives are casting the profession as people who are out to promote critical race theory or the evils of transitioning.”

O’Dunne says his cohort was already under duress from working on the frontlines during the pandemic, putting their safety at risk and facing a rise in patrons who require help with substance abuse and mental health issues. “There’s a social work component folded into the job that we weren’t formally trained for,” said O’Dunne.

Nor were they trained to face the tide of anti-book activists. “At library science school, I learned about intellectual freedom and book policies and selection policies, but it’s all theory-based,” said Conrrado Saldivar, president of the Wyoming Library Association. “These classes don’t teach us how to deal with the emotional impact of being at a public meeting that is being recorded, or dealing with what happens [when] somebody will walk in with a list in their hands and go searching for the titles and take pictures of supposedly offensive or harmful materials.”

Some librarians are fighting back. Louisiana librarian Christopher Achee and his colleagues recently passed a policy banning the filming of anybody in the library without their permission. “There’s a very real possibility that it will all get worse before it gets better,” he said, pointing out conflict-stirring tactics of local activist group Citizens for a New Louisiana. “But I have no plans to start looking for work elsewhere.” Carey D Hartmann, the executive director for the Laramie county library system in Cheyenne, Wyoming, requires people wishing to challenge a book to request the form in person or via email. “An online form could be an invitation for chaos,” she said.

When Texas school librarian Carolyn Foote retired over her state’s lax Covid-19 protocols in March 2021, she expected she’d spend her time traveling with her husband. But the surge of book challenges across the state were difficult to ignore. “School districts were pulling books off the shelves by the hundreds,” Foote said. “In all my 29 years as a librarian, I’d only seen three books challenged.”

Foote teamed up with three other people to establish FReadom Fighters, a kind of support group for librarians in distress. “Book challenges are very isolating,” said Foote. “Most librarians are the only librarian in the building. It puts you in the spotlight and you don’t feel like you can speak in public about what’s happening.” The group’s Twitter account, which has 12,000 followers, shares links to news stories about assaults on libraries and librarians as well as resources such as advice on dealing with contentious board meetings. The tweets that receive the most likes, though, are FReadom Fighters’s spirit-buoying affirmations: “As our teacher and librarian friends head off to a Monday, sending you our support! ❤️ ❤️.”

“Librarians are feeling so much fear and sadness and stress,” Foote said. “We don’t want people to feel shamed.”

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – From GUK

Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’

By Robert Reich

Biden gave a rare primetime address on the most important challenge facing America – and the media coverage was just more he-said/she-said reaction

Joe Biden’s message on Thursday evening was clear. American democracy is under attack.

This was a rare primetime address on the most important challenge facing the nation.

But the media treated the speech as if it were just another in an endless series of partisan volleys instead of what it was – a declaration by the president of the United States that America must choose between democracy and authoritarianism.

The major networks didn’t broadcast the speech.

Friday’s media coverage of the speech was just more he-said/she-said reaction.

The New York Times quoted the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, as claiming Democrats are the ones “dismantling Americans’ democracy”.

The Times failed to point out that McCarthy’s claim is a lie. Nor did it state that McCarthy himself was one of 139 House Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election even after the attack on the Capitol.

The same Times article quoted Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, as calling Biden “the divider in chief” and accusing him of exhibiting “disgust and hostility towards half the country”. But there was no mention of McDaniel’s role in advancing Trump’s “big lie”.

The Times characterized a more general Republican objection to Biden’s speech – that he “was maligning the 74 million people” who voted for Trump in 2020. But the Times didn’t mention that Trump has illegally refused to concede the election.

It is dangerous to believe that “balanced journalism” gives equal weight to liars and to truth-tellers, to those intent on destroying democracy and those seeking to protect it, to the enablers of an ongoing attempted coup and those who are trying to prevent it.

Two Sundays ago, CNN’s Brian Stelter, host of the show Reliable Sources, put it well:

“It’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.”

Not incidentally, that was Stelter’s last show on CNN.

On Friday, CNN’s White House reporter, John Harwood, said:

“The core point [Biden] made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true. Now, that’s something that’s not easy for us, as journalists, to say. We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not honest disagreements. The Republican party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue.”

Harwood went on to say:

“Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election and other things as well. And a significant portion – or a sufficient portion – of the constituency that they’re leading attacked the Capitol on January 6. Violently.”

Shortly after making these remarks, Harwood announced he was no longer with CNN.

A source told Dan Froomkin of Press Watch that CNN had informed Harwood last month that he was being let go. That was despite his long-term contract with the network. The source also said that Harwood had used his last broadcast to “send a message”.

Why must we wait until some of America’s ablest journalists are sacked before they are willing and able to tell America the truth?

It is not “partisan” to explain what Trump and his anti-democracy movement are seeking.

It is not “taking sides” to point out that the Trump Republicans are trying to establish an authoritarian government in America.

It is not “violating journalistic standards” to tell the unvarnished truth about what America is facing today.

“Balanced journalism” does not exist halfway between facts and lies.

· Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – From Politico

‘Reason to worry’: Italy's Meloni holds a mirror to Trump's GOP

Rome's incoming prime minister is a darling of U.S. conservatives with a history of far-right rhetoric on immigration. And when it comes to Ukraine, she epitomizes the Republican Party's foreign policy push-pull.

By ANDREW DESIDERIO 09/29/2022 04:30 AM EDT

U.S. conservatives are rallying behind Italy’s newly elected far-right prime minister — praise that highlights the Trumpification of GOP foreign policy doctrines and the fragility of the Western coalition against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Giorgia Meloni’s deep ties to the American right are unusual for a foreign leader: She counts Steve Bannon as an ally and has spoken twice at U.S. conservatives’ premier annual gathering. Statements of support for Meloni’s victory have come almost exclusively from U.S. Republicans, while as of Wednesday President Joe Biden had yet to offer the far-right firebrand his congratulations.

Embracing Meloni, who hasn’t yet officially assumed the role, could be a risky play for Republicans. Her party, Brothers of Italy, espouses staunchly anti-immigration policies with a rallying cry against “globalists,” and its previous iteration has roots in neo-fascism. Meloni’s government is shaping up as Italy’s most far-right in the history of the republic formed after the demise of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator she once praised.

As Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy opens rifts among U.S. conservatives over continued aid to Ukraine, with the former president signaling a desire to stop funding Kyiv, the GOP boost for Meloni runs the risk of emboldening the party’s MAGA wing against more establishment voices who want to continue aiding Ukraine. Some of Meloni’s coalition partners have allied with Vladimir Putin in the past and, more recently, refused to condemn his brutal invasion.

But if GOP lawmakers are nervous about allying with a future prime minister who has said that immigration “deprives nations and people of their identity” — while opposing new mosques in Italy — they’re not showing it.

“Global elites are crying in their granola because yet another conservative populist was elected,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who praised Meloni’s “spectacular” victory speech. “And across the globe, we see battles between the socialist left — the arrogant elites who want to control people’s lives — and the populist uprising pressing back against it.”

Cruz then illustrated the tricky line that pro-Meloni conservatives must walk by underscoring the importance of Western unity on cutting off Russian energy sources. With winter fast approaching and fuel prices skyrocketing across Europe, keeping Italy and other nations on board with that may not be easy.

Meloni, 45, has sought to moderate her views recently, and this week she tweeted support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Yet as Europe teeters on the brink of a recession stemming at least partly from energy sanctions imposed on Russia, there are fears within the Biden administration and elsewhere that Meloni could slash what’s been a significant Italian contribution to Ukraine’s defense.

Such a move could have a domino effect and cause key Western allies to push for a negotiated end to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Trump backed that position Wednesday, one Ukraine’s leaders vehemently oppose because it would likely require giving up large swaths of their territory to Putin.

“Like anything with a new administration, you’ve got to see how they act, not what they say,” said Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who recently traveled to Italy for an economic conference. “You can be conservative in your country but not necessarily carry out a foreign policy that’s conservative. If she were to carry out the equivalent of Trump’s foreign policy, that’d be a reason for concern.”

The pandemic briefly halted the rise of far-right parties throughout Europe, Italy included, making Meloni’s victory the strongest evidence in years that the populist movements across the continent — many of which are allied with Trump — are alive and well. Those same populist parties are strengthening their ties to like-minded politicians across the Atlantic.

That at least partially explains Meloni’s celebrity status to some Republicans who’ve watched her espousal of traditional values and family-oriented social conservatism propel her past campaign messaging. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who favors what he calls the “nationalist” approach of Trump and other conservative foreign leaders, said in a brief interview that he’s read her recent speeches and found her “very intriguing.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who often aligns himself with the Trump wing of the GOP on foreign policy, said Meloni’s victory speech over the weekend “had me cheering.”

“To me, it was encouraging,” added Paul. “I think people probably reacted in an unfair way to her. For goodness’ sake, calling the woman Mussolini is a little bit over the top.”

Some of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress, like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), also cheered Meloni’s victory. Others, like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, simply offered their congratulations.

Establishment Republicans aren’t saying much — yet — but there are private fears that Meloni’s win could embolden more pro-Trump colleagues to push to cut off funding for Ukraine.

Democrats, meanwhile, had mixed reviews. They were reassured when Meloni tweeted her vow to continue Italy’s “loyal support for the cause of freedom of Ukrainian people.” But they vowed to stay clear-eyed about the new prime minister’s reaction to the economic headwinds on the horizon this winter as the effort to economically and diplomatically isolate Putin goes on.

Financial pressures on European governments have given oxygen to populist politicians more likely to redirect Ukraine funds to domestic causes — an acute worry for the Biden administration as it works to keep the Western coalition intact.

Some Democrats are more optimistic than others about Meloni.

“Until recently, the idea that a party with its roots in post-Second World War neo-fascism would be leading the government in Italy was unthinkable,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said. “But I don’t think it is the disaster for the EU or NATO coalitions that has been predicted in some settings.”

While Meloni has sought to reassure jittery allies, her record — and her pro-Trump alignment in the U.S. — affirms her potential willingness to reconsider Italy’s strong support for Ukraine. Some in Washington also fear that she could go the more authoritarian route of other far-right leaders in Europe, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said the Biden administration should have “reason to worry about the Italian government’s seriousness moving forward on Russia policy,” especially given Meloni’s alignment with Trump allies.

Then again, Murphy was equally skeptical about the U.S. maintaining its level of support for Ukraine if Republicans take control of one or both chambers of Congress in November, given Trump’s influence and efforts to defeat previous Ukraine aid packages.

ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN – From G.U.K.

BIDEN WARNS US DEMOCRACY IMPERILED BY TRUMP AND MAGA EXTREMISTS

In a primetime address, the president further said the Republican party was ‘dominated, driven and intimidated’ by Trump

By Lauren Gambino in Washington Fri 2 Sep 2022 07.26 EDT

Joe Biden warned that American democracy was in grave peril by Republican forces loyal to Donald Trump who “fan the flames” of political violence in pursuit of power at any cost.

In a primetime address from Philadelphia, the city where American democracy was born, the US president said the United States was in a continued battle for the “soul of the nation”.

It was reprising a theme that animated his campaign for the White House in 2020 to frame the stakes of the November elections as an existential choice between his party’s agenda and Republicans’ “extreme Maga ideology”.

Biden’s speech will deliver a hard truth: American democracy is under grave threat

“Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Biden said in remarks delivered at Independence Hall.

Maga is shorthand for “Make America great again” – a slogan from Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said to thundering applause.

The unsparing speech was part of a newly aggressive line of attack Biden has unleashed on Republicans ahead of the midterm elections, as his party enjoys a brightening political outlook helped by a string of significant legislative wins and building public backlash to the supreme court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.

It also comes as Trump, once again at the center of a criminal investigation – this one involving classified documents – lays the the groundwork for a potential 2024 presidential run.

“Maga forces are determined to take this country backwards,” he said. “Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”

On Friday afternoon, the president emphasized at an event at the White House that he did not regard all Trump supporters as threats to the US.

But he added: “Anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge an election that’s been won, insists upon changing the rules upon which you count votes – that is a threat to democracy.”

On Thursday night, Biden also lashed Republicans for amplifying violent political rhetoric, including language targeting federal agents after the FBI seized boxes of classified documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last month.

The protection of democracy has been a through line of Biden’s rise to the White House, which he has said was motivated by the racist violence in Charlottesville. Though he pledged to build national unity as president, the forces unleashed by Trump’s lie of a stolen 2020 election have only gained strength in the nearly two years that Biden has been in office.

Polls suggest that a majority of Republicans do not believe Biden is the legitimately elected president. Election deniers are running for office, securing the nominations for crucial posts with power over how future elections will be conducted. State and local elections officials have become targets of harassment and threats.

“History tells us blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy,” Biden said, vowing to defend the nation’s system of government with “every fiber of my being”.

Thursday’s primetime speech was the second of three visits by the president in less than a week to battleground Pennsylvania, which will play host to several consequential races this election season.

Among the most concerning, democracy experts warn, is the nomination of Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania who was a leading figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state and helped shuttle people to Trump’s rally in Washington on 6 January that preceded the attack on the US Capitol.

In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state, giving the next governor enormous sway over how the 2024 presidential election is conducted in the state.

Without mentioning any candidates by name, Biden said the election deniers running for office saw their failure to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 as “preparation” for future elections.

Biden sought to avoid casting this fight as partisan, but urged Americans not to be “bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy.

“For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed. But it is not,” Biden said. “We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it. Each and every one of us.”

Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader and a staunch Trump ally, delivered a “pre-buttal” to the president’s address from Biden’s birthplace of Scranton, Pennsylvania. In his remarks, McCarthy accused Biden of “doing everything in his power to crush America’s soul” and demanded an apology from the president for accusing Republicans of being beholden to a philosophy of “semi-fascism”.

McCarthy made no mention of the 6 January assault or the widespread election denialism embraced by most of his party’s supporters and many of their nominees for public office.

Rather it was Trump who addressed the events of 6 January on Thursday, promising pardons and apologies for those who participated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol if he were elected to the White House again.

“I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he told Wendy Bell, a conservative radio host on Thursday. “I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons, full pardons.”

Trump is scheduled to hold a rally in Scranton on Saturday.

Critics say the president’s combative rhetoric shows that he has failed in his promise to bring the nation together. Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, called Biden the “divider-in-chief” who has “pitted neighbors against each other” with his divisive agenda.

“We are still a democracy at our core,” Biden said, ending his speech with the rallying cry: “Democracy!”

This article was amended on 2 September 2022. An earlier version quoted Biden as saying: “You can’t love your country when only you win.” He actually said: “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN – From CNN

MCCARTHY CALLS ON BIDEN TO APOLOGIZE AFTER ‘SEMI-FASCISM’ REMARK

By Daniella Diaz and Jessica Dean, CNN Updated 9:59 PM EDT, Thu September 1, 2022

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday called on President Joe Biden to apologize for invoking fascism to describe the ideology of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

McCarthy made the remarks during a prebuttal speech ahead of the President’s prime-time address later in the evening. The speech from the House GOP leader marks an effort to counter the President’s message – ahead of the 2022 midterms as Republicans fight to win back control of the House of Representatives.

“President Biden has chosen to divide, demean, and disparage his fellow Americans – Why? simply because they disagree with his policies,” McCarthy said in his speech. “That is not leadership.”

“When the President speaks tonight at Independence Hall, the first lines out of his mouth should be to apologize for slandering tens of millions of Americans as ‘fascists,’” McCarthy said.

Biden has likened the philosophy that underpins Trump and those who have stood by him to “semi-facism” – comments that Republicans have seized on to criticize the President.

“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy,” Biden recently told a group of Democratic donors at a private home in Maryland.

“It’s not just Trump,” he went on, “it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the – I’m going to say something: It’s like semi-fascism.”

McCarthy also used his remarks to broadly criticize Democratic control of Congress and the Biden White House, arguing that Americans are struggling and that Democrats are not delivering.

The House minority leader said in his speech he’d spoken to Americans who felt Biden and Democrats’ policies were making their lives harder. He suggested a Republican majority in Congress could be the solution.

“What is clear to me and clear to you is that Washington and the White House aren’t listening. They just don’t get it,” he said. “Our best days are ahead of us not behind us. Our nation can flourish again and under a new historic Republican majority, it will. For the past two years have been a time of trial for Americans everywhere.”

McCarthy spoke about Republican stances on immigration, drug addiction, Covid-19 mandates, and education, among other issues.

At one point, McCarthy addressed democracy in the United States, an issue Democrats often bring up against Republicans in relation to Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.

McCarthy also suggested the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property was politically motivated, which the Department of Justice has repeatedly denied.

“Joe Biden often says our democracy is under threat. He’s right, but not for the reason he thinks,” McCarthy said. “Joe Biden and a politicized DOJ launched a raid on the home of his top political rival, Donald Trump. That is an assault on democracy.”

McCarthy concluded his speech offering Republicans’ messaging ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“Republicans have a plan for a new direction that will get our country back on track. Our plan is our commitment to America,” he said. “If Republicans are given the opportunity and honor to have a majority in the House, we will work day and night, hour after hour for you, the people.”

Biden is expected to use his speech to reinforce the offensive against extremism in the Republican Party that he has recently made a focus of his messaging as he seeks to tie GOP candidates to his White House predecessor, framing the midterms as a second round against Trump.

The key battleground state of Pennsylvania is serving as the backdrop for both speeches. McCarthy’s speech took place in Biden’s hometown of Scranton, while Biden will speak from Philadelphia.

ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN – From The Hill

Former Defense secretaries, retired generals warn of threats of political polarization

BY JULIA MUELLER - 09/06/22 10:42 AM ET

Thirteen former defense leaders on Tuesday warned that political polarization is straining the relationship between civilians and the military.

The open letter, signed by eight former Defense secretaries and five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warns of an “an exceptionally challenging civil-military environment” exacerbated by geopolitical, social and political issues.

The former secretaries, retired generals and retired admiral don’t mention a particular political party, but indirectly call out former President Trump’s resistance to the 2020 presidential election results and the transfer of power to now-President Biden.

The writers also note the social burdens of the pandemic and economic issues — as well as the geopolitical strains of the wind down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside “the ramping up of great power conflict.”

“Looking ahead, all of these factors could well get worse before they get better.”

The letter goes on to underscore the constitutional allocation of power between civilians and the military, emphasizing the importance of civilian control of the military.

“Civilian control of the military is part of the bedrock foundation of American democracy. The democratic project is not threatened by the existence of a powerful standing military so long as civilian and military leaders — and the rank-and-file they lead — embrace and implement effective civilian control.”

The signatories, which include Trump’s former Defense Secretaries James Mattis and Mark Esper, note that “military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office” and that civilian control is shared by all three government branches.

“There are significant limits on the public role of military personnel in partisan politics. … Members of the military accept limits on the public expression of their private views — limits that would be unconstitutional if imposed on other citizens. Military and civilian leaders must be diligent about keeping the military separate from partisan political activity.”

The letter also affirms that elected civilians “have the right to be wrong … even if other voices warn in advance that the proposed action is a mistake” and that military officials must carry out legal orders even if they doubt the action.

In closing, the letter highlights the military’s duty during presidential elections to serve the current commander in chief and prepare for the next one, as chosen by voters.

Russia purchasing military equipment from North Korea, US assessesIrish regulator fines Meta $400M for breaking data protection laws

Along with Mattis and Esper, the letter is signed by former Defense Secretaries Ashton Carter, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, William Perry and William Cohen.

Retired Gens. Martin Dempsey, Joseph Dunford Jr., Peter Pace and Richard Myers signed as former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with retired Adm. Mike Mullen.

ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN – From The Wrap

BILL MAHER WARNS ‘THE REPUBLICANS ARE TALKING LIKE NAZIS’

”This is Nazi kind of talk“ Maher says about eliminationist rhetoric deployed by several prominent Republicans

By Ross A. Lincoln | May 20, 2022 @ 8:09 PM

On “Real Time” Friday night, Bill Maher had a blunt assessment of the Republican Party in light of the rise in eliminationist rhetoric used by prominent members of the party: Republicans, Maher said, “are talking like Nazis.”

The bit came up while Maher and his panel guests, Donna Brazile and Adam Corolla, were discussing the numerous efforts across the country to nullify any elections by Republican officials. Brazile brought up Ohio Senate candidate and grifter-author JD Vance, who once upon a time was a serious critic of Trump who once referred to Trump, some would say accurately, as possibly “America’s Hitler.” But now he’s one of Trump’s most prominent defenders.

“Pedo Grifter was the name of my youth soccer team,” guest Corolla then joked.

Later during the talk, Maher brought up the indisputable fact that the overwhelming majority of terrorist violence in American is committed by right wingers. From there Maher also noted specific policy concerns he has that Republicans staunchly oppose, like doing something about climate change. This brought him to Elon Musk’s transparently distractive claim this week that he is going to start voting Republican.

“When He said ‘now I’m gonna vote Republican,’ I gotta part company there. Come on Elon… I can’t go there with him. Because of what I just said, because of where the big issues are. But it’s troubling to me that a guy like that, who said ‘I voted mostly for Democrats for the longest time, and now I’m switching’? I’m not gonna say he’s a stupid man. So the fact that he can be taken over by the Republicans, what does that tell you about the Democrats? What do they have to do to stop that from happening?”

Alas, Maher also called Musk a genius. Musk of course inherited significant wealth from his father and made some canny investments, eventually becoming a billionaire. But it’s worth noting he is not, actually, for instance, the founder of Tesla. He joined the company after it was founded, then sued the actual founders and for reasons that make little sense won a declaration in court that he can legally call himself the company founder. But he isn’t.

ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – From Washington Examiner

Democrats like Biden have been falsely calling Republicans fascists for almost 60 years

by Christopher Tremoglie, August 29, 2022 09:54 AM

Gerald Ford followed Nixon as president and as a Republican who was called a fascist. In 1974, a member of the ACLU criticized Ford for his lack of punitive action against Richard Nixon.

Additionally, in the Gerald Ford Library museum, a document describes an interaction with a woman in 1975 in which Ford was harassed and repeatedly called a "fascist" and a "fascist pig."

ATTACHMENT TWENTY – From Assorted Peanut Galleries

From Fox News...

Sort by

Best

· R

retireddist1b

16 hours ago

President Trump has great rallies that are fun, patriotic, and uniting. Biden and the Dems can't draw a crowd without paying them. Go Figure.

143

o F

fair&balanced678

6 minutes ago

EX-president Trump you mean. Most political leaders of both parties don't need to hold Gestapo-style Nuremburg rallies to excite admiration from cult zombies. Frenzied rallies do not equate to votes on election day as has been conclusively shown.

o T

turbo95

8 hours ago

The American woman could care less about the prices for food and fuel. They will vote Democrat regardless. We get what we deserve.

Show 12 more replies

· U

urwelcome

14 hours ago

The day before the 2016 election, Hillary was tweeting about the Russian collusion narrative knowing it was a lie. She remained quiet while tens of millions of tax dollars were wasted investigating the lie she created.

111

o W

whynotbefore

13 hours ago

And AG Barr let her get away with all of it. Including destroying all her devices with classified emails.

1 reply

· lynskyrd

14 hours ago

undermining the rule of law Hillary??? like, for instance, not enforcing southern border immigration law? - letting criminals free with no cash bail? - creating false hoaxes involving foreign entities? - using the FBI as political operatives? - establishing a private email server that transfers a...See more

o intotheabyss

6 hours ago

Or like creating a fake dossier to try and be the first woman President? Or have the FBI lying for you to throw the election? Or how about illegally flouting election finance laws to prop up your own election to the detriment of other Dems? The woman should be in prison, preferably in a horizont...See more

o O

ossie234

11 hours ago

Man the cult members need to take off their roses color glasses

Show 1 more reply

· C

cccollo

15 hours ago

hillary needs to drive her own car and stay in her own lane, we are in the drivers seat. She lost. She’s history and out of the game.

o figster

5 hours ago

She has the right to her opinion.

o U

usedtobeademocrat515

7 hours ago

Driver's seat-like you mean hot seat?

Show 8 more replies

· G

geraldo44

14 hours ago

Yes these trump rally’s are abhorrent. The nerve of these people supporting secure borders, low inflation, low unemployment, low energy costs, secure supply chains and zero wars. How do they live with themselves?

o figster

5 hours ago

They are worshipping a likely criminal and possible traitor.

o O

ossie234

11 hours ago

🥱🥱🥱🥱🥱🥱

Show 4 more replies

· T

truth~teller

14 hours ago

Norman Matoon Thomas Nov 20, 1884 – Dec 19, 1968 Six-time Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party of America. From a campaign speech: ...See more

o figster

5 hours ago

Where did you get that quote? I could not find it and wish to read more. Thank you.

o MJAC167

13 hours ago

Very true words…until these Midterms

· W

whynotbefore

13 hours ago

Make America Great Again. Which is exactly what Trump did for America. Yep, those were the good old days.

o A

aries22

3 hours ago

Trump let you down. Lost to Sleepy Joe. The good old days wasn't good enough for voters. MAGA is a code word white supremacy. We ain't going back to that era.

o O

ossie234

11 hours ago

How?

1 reply

· R

rumdnc

13 hours ago

The viciousness in politics that has strangled this country for much of this last decade has its roots in Hillary’s effort to become President. Members of her team are like termites that continue to chew away at our foundation.

o figster

5 hours ago

Not true. It has its roots in right wing propaganda and fear mongering.

· G

georgewagner

14 hours ago

Hillary Clinton has mental issues. She didn't understand how she lost the election to Donald Trump. When she found out that she had lost she threw a temper tantrum. I understand it was a complete hissy fit. That's not normal. There's a lot of good people who want our country back, along with a grea...See more

o O

ossie234

10 hours ago

What do you call what trump is doing then? He lost the popular vote twice.. lame duck, .. Cause an insurrection on our Capitol.. Stole Ts/TCI documents classified documents.. How incoherent are you cult members...See more

o R

rightnessprinciple

14 hours ago

Oh my gosh! I’m so glad you admitted that hills struggled to deal with her loss, because it opens the door to examining trump’s treasonous behavior for months after he was spanked by Biden. I mean, Biden! Hahahahahahaha! Only a major failure like trump could lose to someone like Biden.

Show 1 more reply

· M

MoreMajorum

14 hours ago

😂. Why, because no one shows up at a Clinton rally? I watched the whole thing on Newsmax. There were people laughing and cheering and President Trump was his usual humorous self. I mean, if you thought that was Nazi-like, then what was the blood red imagery of Joke Biden’s speech about?

· I

IH8TPPL

13 hours ago

You know people, this isn't sustainable. There is so much hate between political parties and it has spread to the entire population, many of whom don't even vote. There will be a revolution in this country. I have said for many years now, social media will be the destruction of the USA. I am no...See more

o C

commiekiller453

8 hours ago

Let's hope that you are wrong. I see the logic of your argument, but the last civil war killed 800,000 from a population of 24 million. That's 3.3% of the ENTIRE country. At today's population, with much more effective guns, that would be around 10.9 MILLION dead. It's too horrible to even think ab...See more

· T

truth~teller

14 hours ago

The Jan. 6 Charade was/is like a Grand Jury, no Defense or cross examination is allowed. They ask ambiguous questions then THEY decide what the answers mean. It is a self-serving Echo Chamber for LeftHeads, reasonable people know it was a sham. Nothing gleaned will ever stand up in a Court of Law. ...See more

· èñùfźñúf

16 hours ago

Happy Nachos Day Dems! It's been over 6 years now and Hillary is still Nacho President! Enjoy!

o S

Spotfox996

14 hours ago

Love it 🤣🤣🤣

o R

rightnessprinciple

14 hours ago

Amen! 2 years and trump’s still the biggest LOSER! Hills can always brag that she won the popular vote. Poor little trump will never know the joy of being loved by the majority.

2 replies

· CPTToget

13 hours ago

They’re all just jealous that Trump has such loyal, enthusiastic and patriotic followers who show up to see and hear him by the thousands. They can’t fill a 7-11 parking lot with a free performance by Beyoncé. Jealous and afraid that the MAGA movement will sweep them into the dustbin of history.😄

· U

urwelcome

14 hours ago

Twice failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton still claims the 2016 election was stolen from her and fueled the despicable lie that President Trump wasn't elected but installed by the Russian government.

o U

usa2008

13 hours ago

May be he stole!!

o J

jollyrancher.10

14 hours ago

hillary conceded that very day

1 reply

Show 1 more reply

· C

CommonSense166

13 hours ago

They are running scared and will say or do anything at this point to try and scare whatever voters will bite into voting blue. The fact of the matter is its obvious there are 2 sets of laws in this country, there is the law for the average Americans then theres the law for the rich and politicians.....See more

From L. A. Times

affable

2 weeks ago

They are an overly emotional and sensitive lot aren't they?

After awhile, most tune out the whines of children...

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Smooth Retsina

3 weeks ago

Notice the "fascist" tendencies of the LAT columnists all sounding as one voice against conservatives. If you as a liberal don't see the imbalance and continued hateful rhetoric and propaganda that the LAT, mainstream media, and this administration produces with Biden as the "Little Dictator" against conservatives you are either in denial or just plain blind. Colluding against Americans right to free speech, religious freedoms, dismissing almost half of this country as evil is unconstitutional, and you call conservatives fascist? If you don't like the truth, well boo hoo to you as well, because you just lost an independent voter.

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cvrinc

3 weeks ago

reply In reply to Smooth Retsina

You accurately described what has been going on with the majority of MSM for years and accelerated for the past 6 years.

Where are the true "journalists" that are not bias and just report the facts? They are long gone and true journalism is dead in this country.

The majority of MSM is on one team and we all know which team that is.

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DonnyPlumpSucks

3 weeks ago

reply In reply to cvrinc

my dude

you voted for a sleazy game show host who hates you

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cvrinc

3 weeks ago

reply In reply to DonnyPlumpSucks

Hey Donny, That kind of mind reading bias comment is unacceptable behavior.

I believe you are better than that.

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