This was not the first time that Barr has trafficked in social-media racism or directed a simian comparison at an African-American closely connected to the Obama Administration. She has also directed anti-Semitic barbs at George Soros and promoted conspiracy theories pushed by the far left and the far right.
.. Donald Trump, who congratulated Roseanne for her high ratings, said nothing about the egregious racism that led to the show’s cancellation. He did, however, deploy his own hallucinatory sense of victimization. Why, he asked, had ABC not apologized for the “HORRIBLE” things it has said about him? That statement functioned on two levels: first, in implying that the network had tolerated equivalent offenses when directed at him, he deflected the idea that Roseanne had done anything beyond bounds.
.. The second level of Trump’s remark was that, in pointing to his own wounds, he resorted to the aged, reactionary cliché that the real racists are not bigoted whites but, rather, black people who point out said bigotry.
.. She had initially told her more than eight hundred thousand followers not to defend her, but they seem to have persuaded her after all that she had been wronged. “You guys,” she told them, “make me feel like fighting back.”
.. Bee apologized, conceding that her joke had “crossed a line.” Her apology, though, served to highlight the chasm between her contrition and the complete absence of the concept in Trump’s public behavior.
.. Has his antagonism toward norms freed his opponents to flout those same rules, or is it more important than ever that they be upheld?
.. whether Al Franken should have been pushed to resign, given that Trump himself has been accused of far worse behavior
.. Michelle Obama famously noted that “when they go low, we go high,”
.. The question, among hundreds that arose in response to the 2016 election, is, How does that work out in real life?
.. Emily Nussbaum has pointed out, Trump’s insult-comic persona allowed him to portray the groups and the individuals whom he was attacking as dour, humorless marks, who were so fixated on his demise that they treated his jokes as policy statements.
.. The flip side of this has been Trump’s own gossamer-skinned inclinations, the way that he consistently complains about “unfairness” in his Twitter rhetoric. To the outsider, he appears as the classic bully, capable of dishing it out, incapable of taking it.
.. To the truest of his believers, however, he is cast in heroic terms, pointing out his wounds to show how deeply he has suffered on their behalf—a vulgar Jesus showing off his stigmata at the golf club.
.. It has become common to cast Trump as hostile toward democracy, but his hostilities, like his appetites, are far more basic. They are not aimed at undermining democracy but the norms of decency and accountability that make democracy possible.
.. That Roseanne Barr seems to have decided that maybe she was wronged only affirms the wisdom of ABC’s decision. The threat is not that Trumpism will destroy our sense of decency but rather that it may goad Americans into doing it for him.
Obama was right: He came too early
Former Obama White House official Ben Rhodes, in his forthcoming memoir, tells of a moment of doubt the first African American president had after the election of Donald Trump on a campaign dominated by white grievance.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” President Barack Obama said in the passage, first reported thisweek by Peter Baker in the New York Times.
I hate to say it, but I think the former president was correct.
Ten or 20 years from now, America will be much closer to the majority-minority nation it is forecast to become in 2045. A racist backlash to a black president wouldn’t matter as much.
But what was naively proclaimed in 2008 as post-racial America was instead kindling for white insecurity, and Trump cunningly exploited and stoked racial grievance with his subtle and overt nods to white nationalism. He is now leading the backlash to the Obama years and is seeking to extend white dominion as long as possible, with attempts to stem immigration, to suppress minority voting and to deter minority census participation.
.. ● Trump had no criticism for Roseanne Barr after her rebooted ABC show was canned because she called former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett a cross between the Muslim Brotherhood and “Planet of the Apes.” Instead, Trump used the occasion to demand an apology of his own from ABC for unrelated slights.● Trump rallied supporters in Nashville with many of the race-based themes of his campaign, saying Mexico is “going to pay for the wall and they’re going to enjoy it.” He led the crowd in denouncing Latino “animals” who join the MS-13 gang, and repeated his message to black people: “What the hell do you have to lose?”● Trump pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, the Indian American provocateur who had called Obama a “boy” from the “ghetto” and a “grown up Trayvon,” had dismissed Rosa Parks, and was prolific in his use of the n-word. This follows Trump’s previous pardon of anti-immigrant provocateur Joe Arpaio.
● Trump’s new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, hosted the previously shunned Hungarian foreign minister, following his government’s reelection on a campaign of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim demagoguery. The ruling party won by demonizing the Jewish Hungarian American George Soros, a Holocaust survivor.
.. And, finally, a new study by academic researchers in California found that opposition to welfare — another Trump fixation — has grown among white Americans. The researchers concluded that “whites’ perceptions that minorities’ standing is rising can produce periods of ‘welfare backlash’ ” — but only if they believe the programs primarily benefit minorities.
.. the main predictor of support for Trump is racial anxiety — far more than economic anxiety... he tax cut, in the first quarter, contributed toan 8 percent increase in corporate earnings but only a 1 percent increase in consumer spending — the lowest increase in five years — and even though coal jobs are disappearing faster than before, wages remain stuck and the promised return of manufacturing hasn’t happened.
Goldberg: Seeking Tolerance and Reprieve from Culture Wars
.. the Offended Wars are a kind of Potemkin conflict for the true battle over double standards.
The assumption is that liberals’ hearts are in the right place, thus, when they stray off the path rhetorically or in some other way, it’s not seen as revelatory of something darker or more sinister. Of course, conservatives do the same thing. We assume the best of our own tribe and can dismiss a joke or errant tweet quite easily from one of our own.
.. I think one of the reasons we got here is that liberals were truly blind to the double standard they benefit from and the norms they were happy to see violated when the people violating them were “the good guys.”
.. the principle of religious tolerance was a last resort, an utterly utilitarian practical compromise, after the combatants in Europe’s religious wars recognized what C. V. Wedgwood called “the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgment of the sword.”
.. First, we need to return to the idea of ideological and theological pluralism but moral consensus. People are free to believe whatever they like, and they are free to act on those beliefs so long as they don’t harm others. Second, we need a lot less nationalism (for want of a better term). What I mean by that is that the federal government and various national elites need to stop thinking that the whole country needs to think and act in one way.
.. Fox News likes to do stories that boil down to “Can you believe someone in San Francisco believes X!?” MSNBC likes stories that boil down to “We have troubling reports that someone in Wyoming believes Y!” The underlying assumption is that in America everyone is supposed to think alike. Well, unless someone is actually being harmed — and I don’t mean in the terminally asinine construction, “words hurt”
.. Lastly, we need to get as much power out of Washington as conceivably possible.
.. As long as we think that the federal government, especially the executive branch, has monarchical power to impose a vision on the whole country, we will turn political contests into cultural warfare. The Whigs couldn’t abide a Catholic on the throne because they believed the king would impose his vision on all of England. The Catholics felt the same way about the prospect of a Protestant crown. The solution is to restrain the power of the crown — so that the faith of the monarch doesn’t matter.
The Conspiracy Theory That Says Trump Is a Genius
The theory is fascinating as an artifact of our current political derangement, but more than that, it’s profoundly revealing about the lengths to which some Trump supporters will go to convince themselves that his presidency is going well.
.. In the QAnon reality, Trump only pretended to collude with Russia in order to create a pretext for the hiring of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, who is actually working with Trump to take down an inconceivably evil and powerful network of coup-plotters and child sex traffickers that includes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros.
.. “QAnon points out that this is the beginning of the end for the Clintons,” said Jerome Corsi — a prominent proponent of the lie that Obama was born in Kenya
.. the world would be forced to contend with “films of innocent children pleading for their lives while people are butchering them.” Once that happens, presumably, Trump will be revealed as a master of 12-dimensional chess who successfully distracted smirking elites with his buffoonery while he was quietly saving the world.
.. The creativity poured into QAnon is striking; it’s like something between a sprawling work of crowdsourced postmodern fiction and an immersive role-playing game.
.. But for many people, QAnon is very real. Barr has tried to make contact with Q on Twitter. InfoWars, the website run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — who has a close relationship with Trump confidant Roger Stone — has consistently promoted it.
.. Cheryl Sullenger, senior vice president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, posted an article on the group’s website about an “intel drop” from Q revealing a White House plan to end Planned Parenthood. Sean Hannity retweeted a post with the #QAnon hashtag.
.. Some elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory — secret elites, kidnapped children — are classic, even archetypical. “In all Western culture, you can argue that all conspiracy theories, no matter how diverse, come from the idea of the Jews abducting children,”
.. Stories about globalists stealing children for sex aren’t that far removed from stories about Jews stealing children to use their blood making matzo.
.. One twist, however, makes QAnon unusual. Conspiracy theories are usually about evil cabals manipulating world events. QAnon, by contrast, is a conspiracy theory in which the good guys — in this case, Trump and his allies — are in charge.
.. It’s a dream of power rather than a bitter alibi for victimhood. It seems designed to cope with the cognitive dissonance caused by the gap between Trump as his faithful followers like to imagine him, and Trump as he is.
.. legislation many on the right deplored, was shortsighted. In releasing funds to the military, it said, the bill would set off a climactic series of events: “Swamp drain begins, military seizes TRILLIONS in cabal assets, returning them to the people.”.. An inspector general report would then reveal the establishment’s unspeakable crimes, after which “the strings will be cut from the propaganda machine and people will stop falling for the garbage MSM,.. You don’t create a wild fantasy about your leader being a covert genius unless you understand that to most people, he looks like something quite different. You don’t need an occult story about how your side is secretly winning if it’s actually winning... Their desperate conviction that they will be proven right about Trump betrays a secret fear that they will be proven wrong.