Cole Younger wrote:John A Arkansawyer wrote:With DHS Position, Clarke Would Be the First ‘Patriot’ Leader to Hold a Federal Post
The apparent elevation of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke to a position within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would mark another “first” of sorts for the Trump administration: It’s the first time any known participant in the antigovernment Patriot movement, let alone one of its leading figures, has ever held a federal position of any significance.
Clarke told a radio talk-show host earlier this week that he was accepting the job as assistant secretary in the Office of Partnership and Engagement at DHS, serving as a kind of liaison between local law enforcement and the federal agency.
This would be a remarkable position for someone long affiliated with Richard Mack’s extremist Patriot organization, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, to hold. Among the core tenets of CSPOA dogma is the far-right “constitutionalist” belief that sheriffs represent the highest law of the land, and are capable of overturning or ignoring federal laws within their own jurisdictions. Moreover, Clarke's history of incendiary remarks includes his advocacy of "a second American revolution."
They would have to get up pretty early in the morning to be more extreme or violent than the resistance.
The resistance hasn't
shot anyone during a demonstration:
Barbosa added that they “created a situation designed to allow Elizabeth Hokoana to shoot the victim in the middle of an extremely crowded event under the guise of defending herself or her husband.”
In a probable-cause statement by a University of Washington police officer, Marc Hokoana messaged a friend on Facebook the day before Yiannopoulos was scheduled to talk and said he “can’t wait for tomorrow.” In the message, obtained by a search warrant, he wrote: “I’m going to the Milo event and if the snowflakes get out off hand I’m just going to wade through their ranks and start cracking skulls.”
I think the very few events that have escalated into violence have involved misjudgments by the leftists involved. The Brownshirts did exactly this in the early days of Hitler: They invaded peoples' neighborhoods with the intention of providing violence, which they got, and from which they made a guy named Horst Wessel a martyr. It was a mistake when the leftists rose to that bait in Germany and it was a mistake here, too.
That didn't make the Nazis right, and that doesn't make the new Fascists right, either, just good at violence. They aren't stupid, just Evil. As George Bernard Shaw once said, "Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you." That's not exactly on point, but it's still relevant, especially read with this article by Susan McWilliams, which is relevant, too:
This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson. If it comes to open violence against the radical right, even in legitimate self-defense, even if my side wins, it'll be a loss. The price will be too high, which won't stop it, and I guess shouldn't, if the alternative is living under actual fascism, because that price is also too high.
My thought is to do everything within reason to get in Trump's way and slow him down and stall for time and hope the next two elections are free and fair and that people stay angry enough to vote, because if this goes past 2020, it's not going to stop without making the Civil War look like a skirmish.
And if we win? I'm not sure how to make things better. I'm not sure the rot hasn't set in badly enough that the house can't be fixed, but I'm not up for burning it down, either. It's a rare time when I don't have some idea about how to go forward politically, but at this point, I'm stumped, because there's also this. From a writer I've been following for some time now:
Notes From an Emergency: Tech Feudalism
It's long and worth reading. Here's how it starts:
The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it.
The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.
Depending on where you live, the rise of this new right wing might be nothing new. In the United States, our moment of shock came last November, with the election of Donald Trump.
The final outcome of that election was:
65.8 million for Clinton
63.0 million for Trump
This was the second time in sixteen years that the candidate with fewer votes won the American Presidency. There is a bug in the operating system of our democracy, one of the many ways that slavery still casts its shadow over American politics.
But however tenuously elected, Trump is in the White House, and our crisis has become your crisis. Not just because America is a superpower, or because the forces that brought Trump to power are gaining ground in Europe, but because the Internet is an American Internet.
Facebook is the dominant social network in Europe, with 349 million monthly active users. Google has something like 94% of market share for search in Germany. The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and dying social media sites. The few holdouts that still exist, like Xing, are being crushed by their American rivals.
In their online life, Europeans have become completely dependent on companies headquartered in the United States.
And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all your data. This leaves you in a very exposed position. US residents enjoy some measure of legal protection against the American government. Even if you think our intelligence agencies are evil, they’re a lawful evil. They have to follow laws and procedures, and the people in those agencies take them seriously.
But there are no such protections for non-Americans outside the United States. The NSA would have to go to court to spy on me; they can spy on you anytime they feel like it.
This is an astonishing state of affairs. I can’t imagine a world where Europe would let itself become reliant on American cheese, or where Germans could only drink Coors Light.
In the past, Europe has shown that it’s capable of identifying a vital interest and moving to protect it. When American aerospace companies were on the point of driving foreign rivals out of business, European governments formed the Airbus consortium, which now successfully competes with Boeing.
A giant part of the EU budget goes to subsidize farming, not because farming is the best use of resources in a first-world economy, but because farms are important to national security, to the landscape, to national identity, social stability, and a shared sense of who we are.
But when it comes to the Internet, Europe doesn’t put up a fight. It has ceded the ground entirely to American corporations. And now those corporations have to deal with Trump. How hard do you think they’ll work to defend European interests?
I think she's too optimistic about the relative safety of Americans versus Europeans, but otherwise, well, as someone who once foolishly shared this belief in "online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom" and their ability to advance freedom and democracy, it's a hard picture to look at, yet one I recognize clearly.
I'm not thrilled with the state of the left just now. The analysis people are working from is very incomplete and outright wrong in a few places. Bad ideas take you to a bad place. I know you go to war with the army you have* and not the one you wish you had, but I'm not optimistic about this.
*I thought that quote from Donald Rumsfeld was quite intelligent, and I tried to rework it into "you fight a war with the opposition you have", meaning to fight
against war, but I never could phrase it the way I wanted to.