Tag: conservatives

How the right wing fell for its own fables about the working class

Washington Post logoA conservative publication fell for a hoax by a fake construction worker, but the real fiction is much more widespread.

Archie Carter, a construction worker from Queens, is a self-described Marxist-Leninist. Not long ago, he joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), only to be repulsed by its overeducated, elitist members who cared more about “feminist procedures” and “fashionable intersectionality” than “real people” like him.

At least, this is what Archie claimed in an essay titled “DSA is Doomed,” published last week — and retracted soon after — by the commentary site Quillette. For the right-leaning pundits who deride today’s socialists as politically correct coastal posers, this narrative resonated. Archie Carter — a “real live worker (!)” as Sam Adler-Bell cheekily put it — had confirmed what they had long suspected.

There was just one problem. Archie Carter was neither real nor live, nevermind a worker. The essay was a hoax perpetrated by a 24-year-old “left populist” in Illinois, who later told me and other journalists that he intended to reveal the right-wing bias of Quillette, which brands itself as an unbiased, nonideological “platform for free thought.”

View the complete August 16 article by Aaron Freedman on The Washington Post website here.

The right-wing love affair with Ayn Rand ties conservatism to one of the most disturbing sociopathic killers

AlterNet logoThere’s a direct link between a sociopathic killer in 1927 and the GOP’s willingness to embrace a sociopathic president like Trump. That link runs through the work of Ayn Rand.

When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, The Fountainhead, was his favorite book.

It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

View the complete August 12 article by Thom Hartmann from the Independent Media Institute on the AlterNet website here.

Ex-Republican reveals how the conservative movement is a total scam — and GOP voters are ‘Trump’s willing marks’

Max Boot has left the Republican Party, and he has some harsh words for the conservative movement he left behind.

The whole ideology has become a “racket,” he argues in a new op-ed for the Washington Post, a development he dates to 1996 when Fox News was launched. The latest revelations about the NRA, from the vice president Wayne LaPierre’s profligate spending to the various self-dealing projects spearheaded by the organization’s top executives, only hammer the point home.

Of course, the most obvious sign of the hollowness of conservatism is its figurehead, President Donald Trump. His supposed business success has been exposed as a sham, a sham on which he built a presidential campaign that had no other justification. His supposed religiosity is an obvious hoax. And his policies, supposedly designed to help the “forgotten man,” have only helped the rich get richer. He has no problem letting countless supporters “fall victim to his trade wars,” as Boot puts it, for the sake of nationalist crusade.

View the complete May 13 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Trump veers off post-Mueller ‘no collusion’ victory message as conservatives worry

WSJ editorial board, others warn president to drop legal effort to nix Obamacare with no replacement

ANALYSIS — President Donald Trump spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning veering from topic to topic and enemy to enemy, again stepping on a victory with other messages.

He and his surrogates could have seized on a common message after Attorney General William Barr sent Congress a summary of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report that found no criminal-level conspiracy between his 2016 campaign and Russia. They could have used that messaging blitz to more forcefully counter Democrats who are loudly noting Mueller, according to Barr, opted against exonerating Trump on obstruction of justice.

Instead, as the president and his team — inside and outside government — have done repeatedly since he took office, they instead have veered from a major victory and brought up other controversial topics or made moves that have pushed wins off the cable news chyrons that clearly capture the president’s attention most days.

View the complete March 28 article by John T. Bennett on The Roll Call website here.

Conservatives wage assault on Mueller report

President Trump’s conservative allies are going on offense against special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, hoping to blunt any damning revelations that may emerge from the nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

A senior Justice Department official has told media outlets that Mueller will not recommend new indictments against Trump’s inner circle, which Trump’s defenders have seized on to argue that the investigation was the “witch hunt” that the president always claimed it to be.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and a staunch Trump ally, took to Twitter immediately to argue that the lack of additional indictments would reveal the investigation was a waste of time and taxpayers’ money.

View the complete March 23 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Paul Krugman argues that right-wing ‘rage explosions’ and ‘demented anger’ show the GOP is the real party of snowflakes

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is best known for his economic analysis and his advocacy for broadly left-wing policies. But in his time as a public thinker, he’s also become a trenchant critic of the right wing, and in a new column Monday, he skewered the conservative impulse to be outraged about the most trivial and absurd perceived affronts.

As Exhibit A, Krugman pointed to the following bizarre outburst from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who has been one of President Donald Trump’s most vigorous protectors:

Devin Nunes

✔@DevinNunes

At restaurant tonight waitress asks if we want straws. Says she has to ask now in fear of “THE STRAW POLICE”. Welcome to Socialism in California!

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“If this seems like a weird aberration — he wasn’t even denied a straw, just asked if he wanted one — you need to realize that rage explosions over seemingly silly things are extremely common on the right,” wrote Krugman. “By all accounts, the biggest applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference — eliciting chants of ‘U-S-A, U-S-A!’ — was the claim that Democrats are coming for your hamburgers, just like Stalin.”

View the complete March 12 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Interview: Historian Rick Perlstein On The Conservative Roots Of Trumpism

This interview with historian and author Rick Perlstein originally appeared in the Berlin daily Neues Deutschland and is posted on the National Memo website.

After Trump won the election you published an essay titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” How did Trump’s election change your view of American conservatism?

The conservatives’ own story about their evolution has been that there were two streams of conservative political activity in the US: one that was extremist and conspiratorial, often viciously racist and even violent. And then there was a mainstream movement that policed those boundaries, associated with the figure of William F. Buckley and the magazine National Review. That mainstream conservatism, as the story goes, had largely prevailed, and the extremist elements were pretty much vestigial. What Trump demonstrates is that those much more feral streams in the movement never really went away. Knowing about Trump, it was a lot easier to see in retrospect how often that extremist underbrush was part of the story.

Is Trump even a conservative in the traditional sense?The National Review published an issue during the 2016 primaries titled “Against Trump,” in which various conservative intellectuals stated that a true conservative could not support Trump, because he violated conservative principles.

Yes, but if you look at the National Review website in the years before that, pretty much everything nasty and politically grotesque that we associate with Trump could be seen in National Review, too.

View the completeFebruary 2 post here.

NRA shows signs of decline, even in Trump’s America

<,em>Members of the Patriot Prayer Group sing the National Anthem during an “open carry” rally in Seattle on May 20. Credit: Karen Ducey, Getty Images)

But the group isn’t letting up on its adversarial and sometimes snarky tone

The influence of the National Rifle Association, the nation’s highest-profile Second Amendment-rights organization and a longtime powerhouse against gun-control laws, is showing signs of potential decline.

The NRA’s own tax forms show a dip in revenue. And even as the group, now under the leadership of new president Oliver North of Iran-Contra fame, continues to spend big money on federal lobbying and political campaigns, its opponents in the gun-control movement, after decades of ever more deadly mass shootings and seemingly random incidents of gun violence, have been on the rise.

During the 2018 midterm elections, for example, gun-rights groups spent some $9.9 million on outside political efforts, nearly all of that from the NRA, while gun-control groups invested a record high of $11.9 million, according to a tabulation from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics

View the complete February 1 article by Kate Ackley on The Roll Call website here.

Admitted Russian spy bragged about connecting Trump campaign to Putin

Maria Butina, Credit: Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, PA-EFE, Shutterstock

Maria Butina pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent years after she openly bragged about it.

Admitted agent of the Russian government Maria Butina previously bragged about connecting Trump’s presidential campaign to Russia.

Butina pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to act as a foreign agent on behalf of the Russian government.

In her plea the Russian admitted she was part of a conspiracy against the United States.

View the complete December 13 article by Oliver Willis on the ShareBlue.com website here.

Alleged Russian agent Butina pleads guilty to engaging in conspiracy against US

Maria Butina, the 30-year-old Russian woman arrested and charged earlier this year with acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government in the U.S., pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court after previously entering a plea of not guilty.

Butina admitted in the District Court for the District of Columbia that she and an American, known in court documents as “U.S. Person 1,” conspired with and acted under the direction of a Russian government official to establish unofficial lines of communications with people able to influence U.S. politics leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik Kenerson said Butina sought to use those unofficial lines of communication for the benefit of the Russian Federation.

View the complete December 13 article by Lydia Wheeler on The Hill website here.