"Ultimately, right-wing populism is a tool that is used by cynical elites for their own political advantage. However, right-wing rage is not something that can be controlled."

History: An inconvenient record suggesting it regularly repeats itself.

The on-line radicalization of Pittsburgh synagogue shooter George Bowers is discussed, and as I embark on a new book ...

Ian Kershaw’s ‘To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949’

 ... Why did Europe go mad? The four horsemen of the apocalypse Kershaw identifies in his nightmare history are a dramatic rise of ethnic-racist nationalism; angry, conflicting demands for territorial revisionism; acute class conflict that took on sharper focus by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and a prolonged crisis of capitalism that many thought terminal.

 ... I can't help but observe that those prattling on about how a "good" economy alone is sufficient reason to ignore sheer lunacy is pretty far over the lunatic boundary line themselves.

The problem comes when the economy turns bad. Who'll be blamed? My advice is tear yourselves away from comic book movies and read a bit of history.

The Fascist Creep: How Conspiracy Theories and an Unhinged President Created an Anti-Semitic Terrorist, by Joseph Flatley (CounterPunch)

 ... “Much of Bowers’ online profile resembles those of countless other extremist users,” according to a Southern Poverty Law Center analysis of the shooter’s social media. “As with other alt-right killers, it’s likely that Bowers was radicalized entirely online.” His social media activity revolved around several common obsessions of the racist right. He feared “white genocide,” an antisemitic conspiracy theory which holds that everything from immigration and multiculturalism to low birth rates and abortion are being promoted by the “globalists” (that’s an antisemitic code word for “Jews”) to drive the white race to extinction. In Bowers’ virtual reality, the white men have no power—undoubtedly resonant to a white man who seemed to have little in his own life worth living for—while George Soros is personally overseeing the extinction of the white race.

“Lone wolf terror” (sometimes called “leaderless resistance”) describes terrorist attacks conducted by a single person, or perhaps a very small, unaffiliated group. As terrorism expert George Michael writes in his book Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance, it is commonly understood among right-wing populists that “they are part of a relatively small and marginalized movement,” and that to take up arms “would almost certainly lead to organizational suicide,” not to mention actual suicide. This has led to the strategy, favored by the more conservative members of the right-wing populist movement, to concentrate on winning the masses over through propaganda.

The more extreme elements of right-wing populism, not willing to abandon armed struggle, have encouraged “lone wolves” to pick up arms. The idea is that individuals like Bowers and MAGA mail bomber Cesar Sayoc are the vanguard of a new movement that’s paving the way for a right-wing takeover of the United States. Now, this might be the case—but probably not in the way that the extremists like to imagine.

“Under specific conditions,” writes journalist and activist Chip Berlet, “virulent demonization and scapegoating can—and does—create milieus in which the potential for violence is increased.” While you can’t predict which individual will turn to violence, it can pretty much guarantee that someone will, “upon hearing the rhetoric of clear or coded incitement,” strike out at the perceived enemy.

Right-wing populism is a continuum. The extreme right (which Berlet also refers to as “the ultra-right”) is the revolutionary arm of right-wing populism in America. This includes the Klan, neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations, and anyone willing to pick up a gun or a baseball bat or make a pipe bomb for the struggle. Among the more conservative elements of right-wing populism are “reformist political movements.” These include the Republican Party, FOX News, and conservative think tanks. In between these two poles—the revolutionaries and the reformers—are the dissidents. This includes patriot and militia groups, right-wing talk radio, tea partiers, and anti-semitic conspiracy theorists. There is a lot of movement along this continuum: people might be drawn into right-wing talk radio, for instance, which becomes a conduit to a more extreme right-wing ideology.

Quite possibly, this is what happened to Robert Bowers ...

Scott County's HIV crisis "may reveal a terrifying future for public health in America."

Earlier today:

"State Representative Ed Clere will be a featured guest speaker at the Southern Indiana PRIDE Launch Event next Thursday October 11th, 2018."

Last year:

Mike Pence minced in The New Yorker: "(Ed) Clere remains bitter about Pence."

And a year before that:

Prayer, needles and Pence. Radical Christian extremists, be gone.

I've said it before and will say it again: As a lifelong Hoosier, I'm compelled to warn those of you currently existing on an steady diet of "Impeach Trump" that waiting in the wings is someone far worse, primarily because Mike Pence actually believes the religious mumbo-jumbo to which The Donald pays only bored lip service.

Mike Pence Is Still to Blame for an HIV Outbreak in Indiana—but for New Reasons, by Steven W. Thrasher (The Nation)

The avoidable Scott County epidemic may reveal a terrifying future for public health in America.

 ... The disaster in Scott County was not just a failure of clean needles or even just Indiana’s long-time “abstinence stressed” sexual education. It was a disaster born of a total abdication of Indiana’s public-health responsibility—and it’s the kind of health disaster we could see nationally. Pence is now vice president in an administration that is gutting HIV/AIDS resources and further criminalizing drug use—two paths that will increase HIV prevalence across the country. Meanwhile, the twin crises of deindustrialization and rising opioid usage mean that the conditions for localized HIV epidemics are not unique to Scott County. Indeed, Gonsalves and Crawford write that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes there are “220 counties across the USA at risk of outbreaks of HIV” and hepatitis C ...

... Gonsalves and Crawford’s study of Scott County shows that preventable epidemics can happen anywhere where austerity is combined with theocratic, anti-science policies. As public-health approaches are abandoned throughout the United States, that applies to increasingly large swaths of the country.

"Whenever something big happens, we sprint immediately to the partisan barricades."

Photo credit.

Sifting through the social media bilge in search of shelter from the storm, I've come across three articles that stand out. Am I being partisan?

Probably. According to The Nation ...

The real reason we can’t have gun control is that "the paranoid right-wing fringe believes it needs guns to overthrow the government — and even so-called GOP moderates are pandering to them."

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship aren't mincing words.

The GOP on the Eve of Destruction, by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship (Moyers & Company)

... All of these sad examples are but symptoms of a deeper disease – the corruption and debasement of society, government and politics. It is a disease that eats away at the root and heart of what democracy is all about. Remember the opening phrase of the Preamble to the Constitution committing “We, the People” to the most remarkable compact of self-government ever – for the good of all? The Republicans are shredding that vision as they make a bonfire of the hopes that inspired it and, in the process, reduce the United States to a third-rate, sorry excuse for a nation.

Perhaps it's just exhaustion. From the City Journal.

MATTHEW HENNESSEY

American Exhaustion

We are having a political nervous breakdown.

... One thing is clear, however: politically, we are a paranoid-schizophrenic nation. Maybe it’s the fault of social media and cable news, or maybe we’re just wired to expect the worst from one another, but whenever something big happens, we sprint immediately to the partisan barricades. Unrelated events and phenomena seem part of a larger plot—launched and directed, of course, by the other guys. It feels—to borrow the title of Charles Murray’s 2012 book—as if we are coming apart at the political seams. Maybe not since Watergate has America been this mentally and emotionally exhausted.

Them angry white folks in the GOP are doing that shutdown thing again.

Anyone seen Mark Seabrook and Steve Bush lately, or have they already retreated to the command bunker?

This Week in ‘Nation’ History: Government Shutdown as Coup d’État, by Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation)

... Dramatizing the supposed precariousness of public services by forcing their arbitrary cessation makes it easier for conservatives to argue that the market alone should determine the proper distribution of wealth, goods, and services in American society. There is no smaller government than none at all. As the radical political philosopher Sheldon Wolin argued in a remarkable 1996 essay in The Nation, “Democracy and the Counterrevolution,” the effort “to stop or reconstitute government in order to extract sweeping policy concessions amounts to an attempted coup d’état.” Wolin’s brilliant essay reminds us how shutdowns and austerity economics fit within the broader Republican philosophy of governance—or lack thereof—and how that philosophy is antithetical to the defining principle of democracy: rule by the people.

Meanwhile, back home again in Indiana, the state Republican apparatus prepares to filibuster Obamacare to the ultimate detriment of its own people. That's leadership.

HOWEY: Obamacare, propaganda and statesmanship, by Brian Howey (N and T)

But Congressional Republicans are using their offices like political candidates do during campaigns. They have become fonts of propaganda, declaring that Obamacare has “failed” and is a “trainwreck.” This isn't an effort to help their constituents understand the new law. There has been little effort to “tweak” or even revise troubling segments of the law. Instead, they play to that 10 or 15 percent of their constituents who pose a threat in a May primary.

"Raw abuse of power?" Why, that's the Republican way.

Isn't that right, Commissioners Bush and Seabrook?

I'd ask Keith Henderson what he thinks, except he's amid the cedars of Lebanon, up Boone County way, Groucho mask in hand, preparing to conduct the shadow prosecution in the Third Time Lucky case.

Not really. He's convening a grand jury in pursuit of missing information. It is unclear whether Dan Coffey will accept company in pursuit.

I'm sure powerhouse GOP chairman Dave Matthews much appreciates the Supreme Court's appeasement of Southerners perpetually re-fighting the Civil War a full 150 years after Gettysburg, with the ostensible topic this time being voting rights.

Todays SCOTUS rulings on same sex marriage cases have churchgoers nationwide biting their nails and contemplating flight to human rights sanctuaries like Belarus, where the gays aren't permitted.

Meanwhile, in Texas ...

Texas abortion bill defeated after missing deadline, by Helen Davidson (Guardian)

... Wearing pink trainers, (Senator Wendy) Davis rocked from hip to hip and slowly paced while she read testimony from doctors and women who would be affected by the bill if it were passed. "What purpose does this bill serve? And could it be, might it just be a desire to limit women's access to safe, healthy, legal, constitutionally protected abortions in the state of Texas?" she said.

Hmm, could be. What do you think, Steve? How 'bout you, Mark?

Texas Vote Passing Abortion Bill Is Rendered Moot, by Manny Fernandez and Erik Eckholm (NYT)

... The reversal served as an embarrassing episode for Mr. (David) Dewhurst and Republican senators on a divisive bill that was closely watched around the nation, both by anti-abortion activists and supporters of abortion rights.

“The G.O.P. Senate leadership comes out of this whole process looking somewhat disingenuous, deceptive and disorganized,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston.

Perhaps it isn't the appearance at all. That's the way it is here, too. It's what today's Republican reactionaries are, at root ... whether in DC, Texas, or right here at home.

Indiana legislature has a chance to do the right thing, but for the wrong reasons, and merely delaying an error.

In which the fascist fringe (Turner, Kruse, any number of greased conservative lobbyists) is well represented, forever lathering at their pieholes over topics that have no bearing on their lives.

Indiana ... we could be something, if not for the right-wing doltery prevailing hereabouts.

Do we have an opposition party yet?

Indiana legislature unlikely to vote on same-sex marriage in 2013, by Mary Beth Schneider (Indy Star)

Those who want to see Indiana’s constitution amended to ban same-sex marriage may have to wait another year for the legislature to take its final vote on the issue.

House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, and Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, R-Fort Wayne, said they will announce next week whether lawmakers will take up this issue now or wait until next year, after the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on the constitutionality of amendments passed in other states.

“No one’s said we’re not going to have a hearing,” Long said. “It’s when we’re going to have it.”

Said Bosma: “Personally, I think it’s inadvisable to move forward with the United States Supreme Court having the question before it, but I’m not making that decision by myself.”

Pierce: "This Week In The Laboratories Of Democracy."

From unconcealed weapons to weighted sex questionnaires, and from mandatory photos of fetuses on state web sites to John Birch Society research on property rights, madcap state legislators -- primarily Republican -- continue to insist: It's the ephemera, stupid. Pierce's looks at the nation's "laboratories" of right-wing social non-engineering are a regular feature of his politics blog.

This Week In The Laboratories Of Democracy, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire's politics blog)

Welcome back to our weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' really gets done, and where momma's in the kitchen and she ain't got no shoes ...

Franklin Graham foams at the mouth. Rabid theology the presumed cause.

We've already glanced at a localized context of evangelistic outrage at this year's election results. Rather like Multichins McConnell's vow to devote all his energies to making Barack Obama a one-term president (epic fail), and resembling those super patriots now vowing to detach themselves from the object of their congenital chest-thumping, now the preachers all are going to be praying not for "god's" supposed bounty, but for mass destruction.

However, as is customary in cases of divine appeal, these catastrophic yearnings are redundant. Unaddressed climate change should do the trick quite nicely, and it's a man-made phenomenon.

Franklin Graham: God May Have to Cause "A Complete Economic Collapse" to Save Nation From Obama, by David Corn (Mother Jones)

... As Graham denounced the Obama years, Newsmax's Kathleen Walter asked, "So we've become too secular a nation? How do we bring God back into government?" Graham replied:

Maybe God will have to bring our nation down to our knees—to where you just have a complete economic collapse. And maybe at that point, maybe people will again begin to call upon the name of almighty God.

Economic calamity was the one option Graham mentioned—as if only such a disaster could move the United States in the right direction.

ON THE AVENUES: Idiot wind.

ON THE AVENUES: Idiot wind.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

America’s recently concluded election campaign proved yet again that we seem incapable of bipartisanship, but in one significant “absentee” sense we stand as one: Americans seldom pay the slightest attention to developments elsewhere on planet Earth – otherwise known as the place we all inhabit – until the moment our troops are headed to an isolated place stuck somewhere on the face of it.

Perhaps understandably, the campaign was ripe for fervent exclamations of American exceptionalism, birther lies, varied white male minority fictions, and numerous other USA-centric arguments about local matters on our own side of the planetary street. A discussion about the global economy and our place in it, contrasted with the advancing merits of localism and self-sufficiency, might have made an interesting topic for reflection. Unfortunately, apart from shared China bashing, it’s a discussion that didn’t occur.

It’s a given that we know almost nothing about emerging nations like Brazil, India and assorted locales in Asia. The African continent is just as mysterious to us now as it was when Kurtz sailed up the Congo, except for Libya’s current voguish usefulness as opportunistic right-wing propaganda, and who cares if a few tiny South Sea island sandbar principalities are swept away by rising tides?

Amid the political arm wrestling, we’ve missed plenty of noteworthy news items from abroad. Seeing as I’m a Europhile, I’ll focus there.

Most of what we’ve heard about Europe lately has been focused on the woebegone, profligate Greeks, and the pressing question of whether German taxpayers eventually will pay for recalibration even as the cradle of democracy emaciates itself back to fiscal rectitude. Paul Ryan will note that there is little interest on the continent as to Greece’s prospects for re-establishing an economy pushed back to the Stone Age by austerity – save for the unions and leftists marching as this column is being written.

Meanwhile, France elected a dangerous ideologue who genuinely is a socialist, as opposed to so many misbegotten right-wing caricatures of Barack Obama. François Hollande possesses a crazed tendency to speak about justice, workers’ rights and quality of life issues, and financial markets tremble in fear, lest the contagion spread from the Élysée Palace to a fast food chain outlet in the exurb outside Dubuque.

But give me Pere Hollande over Papa John, any day.

The former Soviet Union (now called “Russia” to everyone not named Mitt Romney, who evidently remains a devotee of hoary John le Carré novels) admittedly remains a cornucopia of governmental and societal dysfunction, with Vladimir Putin flipping job titles more often than Romney’s 2012 platform planks. Nowhere in the former USSR is everyday life worse than Belarus, where a one-party dictatorship has created its own super-majority by brutally suppressing dissenting voices, and enforcing political conformity the old-fashioned way: Job by job, block by block, school by school.

Any resemblances to beet-red Indiana, in the context of former Civil War states on the Union side gone Southern-fried totalitarian, are purely intentional.

---

These are small beer compared to a resurgence of European regionalism during these recent recessionary years, something we all might examine more closely, especially in the aftermath of Obama’s climactic re-election, as the tone of dispatches emanating from the American Right increasingly resembles those of South Carolinians following Abe Lincoln’s presidential victory in 1860.

You’re probably already aware that Belgium’s Flemish and Wallonian cultural and linguistic halves have been teetering on the edge of divorce for many years. Northern Italians see themselves as productive, modern and superior to the Mafioso-ridden southern provinces, and periodically make noises about splitting.

Spain for the Spanish? Not exactly, because many Catalonians fancy Barcelona as the capital of a Catalan free state.

While these continental peoples speak different languages and remain obscure to Americans, who generally speak only wretched English, there exists an example of an independence movement far closer to home in terms of white cultural legacies.

It’s Scotland.

Surprised? Don’t be, because the Scots will be holding a referendum on independence in 2014, and this is not a cultural autonomy proposal, but one that could enable full blown status as a separate country, following in the footsteps of Ireland a century ago, sans violence (we certainly hope).

Yes, the devil remains firmly ensconced amid future details, and each of these cases is different from the others. A full inquiry would be merited, and perhaps some day I’ll have time to do the necessary research. The overarching point, at least to me, is this: As people living in these places actively contemplate the implications of possible independence, few if any are advocating migration out of the larger, inclusive European Union. Flanders, Wallonia, Catalonia, Northern Italy and now Scotland are proclaiming blessed freedom … and future membership for themselves in the EU.

Talk about hedging one’s bets: A Scotsman eager to retain more of what remains of his North Sea oil wealth, so as to shield it from the grasping claws of Westminster, is not proposing to abandon the dreaded redistribution of wealth made possible by the EU. He’ll have his haggis, and eat it, too.

---

Perhaps this is why my eyebrow keeps arching as I hear the embittered voices of GOP voters screaming the secession word as they plot vengeance on demographic trends they regularly reject. It’s been surreal from the very outset, all these presumably “real” Americans turning back to the Confederacy’s dubious business model after all these decades, and only a considerable degree of weird, post-modern karma helps to explain why after several hundred thousand males, most of them white, died to preserve the Union and free the slaves, their ancestors now insist they’d be happy in opting to re-marginalize – in effect, oddly, to enslave themselves in a new “homeland” that would be the dumbest, fattest and most superstition-ridden imaginable.

Me? I’m delighted to discuss the prospects for their departure, but only after today’s new breed of secessionist recognizes that because it is they who seek to exit the federal structure, they’re the ones who’ll be forfeiting onerous government “handouts” like social security.

Military installations? I’ll be needing those back, as well. You keep telling me you’re armed to the teeth, and that’s fine, because you’ll not be keeping the jets. Remember to take plenty of shotguns when you defend your subsidized oil in the Middle East; them Hummers, they’se guzzlers for sure.

How many new secessionists will persist in D-I-V-O-R-C-E proceedings when it becomes clear that their own pensions are dependent on the combined weight of a modern industrial nation – you know, the manifest American destiny they cited by rote whenever challenged, right up until November 6, 2012, when the all-powerful God formerly on their side instead endorsed a solid victory by the Kenyan Islamic, and now, belatedly, their fortress turns out to have been not so damned mighty in the first place?

Of course, today’s secessionists are bluffing, pure and simple, although their clamor causes me to wish the nation had more wind turbines.

Energy sufficiency. That’s the thing, eh?

Krugman: An economy "slowly healing," and a right-wing movement that "lives in an intellectual bubble."

Jack Welch being a prominent bubble inhabitant.

Truth About Jobs, by Paul Krugman (New York Times)

Is the U.S. employment picture getting better? Yes, it is ...

... None of this should be taken to imply that the situation is good, or to deny that we should be doing better — a shortfall largely due to the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans, who have blocked any and all efforts to accelerate the pace of recovery. (If the American Jobs Act, proposed by the Obama administration last year, had been passed, the unemployment rate would probably be below 7 percent.) The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment.

And that’s the truth that the right can’t handle.

Domestic vs. Muslim terrorism.

Food for the kitchen table.

The benefits of hindsight: The need for more monitoring of domestic terrorism, in The Economist

... since coming under Republican control in 2010, the House Homeland Security Committee has held five hearings on Muslim radicalisation, and none on right-wing threats. Yet America’s right-wing extremists commit a vastly greater number of murderous attacks (though leading to fewer deaths) than Muslims do.