Who will Trump's cultists blame when they finally understand they've been conned?

(Be aware: NAC is going away soon)

Donald Trump's entire "career" in and out of politics has been one long, sustained confidence trick. The owners of capital "get it," and shill with enthusiasm because they can only gain from the con man's game.

Generally speaking, when the victims of a con game realize they've been duped, they're angry. It may or may not be the con man's fault, but it's not theirs; no one likes looking in the mirror and confronting their own gullibility.

Politically, it's never been about Trump's narcissistic grifting. Rather, it's about wealth consolidating its power and enhancing its vampiric capital accumulation as the populace is distracted by the grift; and, it's about those Americans, primarily white, who've embraced Trump's con game with open arms.


When they realize they've been had, as inevitably they will, who's up to be blamed? It won't be Trump himself, as rejecting a deity is hard work, and he'll be exonerated by having been "stabbed in the back" or some such nonsense.

It won't be the con man's disappointed victims, swindled and left to founder, because the mirror's cracked by the weight of the dominant caste racism and gibberish.

I think most of us already have a suspicion about the answer to this question, and it's not a pleasant one. In a collective sense, why do humans cherish being conned? Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pitchfork to sharpen.

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This "Never Trumper" is hilarious. She cannot countenance the grift, but on the other hand, because providing health care and other basic public services would be both unAmerican and unfair to the accumulators of capital, she just might change her mind. 

Yawn.   

Sorry, I don’t mean to make a pro or con statement about what should happen with health care. I’m saying that some version of socialized medicine exists in most European countries, and I think we would agree that they’re all democracies.

I didn’t suggest that the imposition of socialized medicine was somehow going to end our democracy. I merely said that it was going to usher in things that were irreversible that were not going to be good for our country.

"The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started."

I suspect the Jeopardy! category would be "Most Unsurprising Things in American History."

There are no grounds for argument in anything Mystal says, and that's depressing.

The Inevitable Whitelash Against Racial Justice Has Started, by Elie Mystal (The Nation)

As Black people fight for our lives, white supremacists reach for their guns—and white allies go soft.

 ... And so here we are, barely three months after George Floyd was choked to death, and already white allyship is waning. Derek Chauvin stared right into a camera phone and forced white America to look at itself in a mirror, and for a few minutes, white people were horrified with what they saw.

But that moment has passed now. White people could only look at themselves for so long before looking away. A majority of white folks could only contemplate the system of brutality and oppression they tacitly support for a brief time before concluding, as they always do, that Black people deserve it, that killing Black people is self-defense, that even a paralyzed Black man is still a threat who needs to be shackled.

Essentially, the months after Floyd’s murder have been a summer fling for a majority of white people. It’s like they went on safari in Ghana, saw some lions, had sex with a Black person who works there, and learned a lot about the transatlantic slave trade. But now playtime’s over, and the white majority has to get back to the serious work of enforcing white supremacy and privilege and reelecting a bigoted president.

If you thought Floyd’s murder was going to lead to structural change, then you don’t know white people as well as I do.

BOOKS: George Yancy's Backlash.

Let's take a brief break from music to mention recent reading.

I've made reference to George Yancy's Backlash on more than one occasion of late. Following is a link to coverage from 2018, when the book was published.

Is white America ready to confront its racism? Philosopher George Yancy says we need a 'crisis', by Alex Blasdel (The Guardian)

In his new book, philosopher George Yancy uncovers just how unprepared even well-meaning whites are for a courageous conversation about race

George Yancy’s new book, Backlash, grew out of Dear White America, a piece on the pervasiveness of white racism that he wrote for the New York Times’ philosophy column, The Stone. After the piece was published on Christmas Eve 2015, Yancy received an extraordinary number of responses from white readers, many of whom were aggressively defensive and included racist epithets and threats of physical violence. Backlash extends the argument made in Dear White America, and turns personal and philosophic lenses on the vile responses it received.

This is a key passage.

When you talk about “whiteness” in the letter and book, what do you mean?

Whiteness is a structural, ideological, embodied, epistemological and phenomenological mode of being – and it is predicated upon its distance from and negation of blackness. This is what so many white people forget or refuse to see: their being racialized as white and socially and psychologically marked as privileged has problematic implications for my being black.

Whiteness is what I call the “transcendental norm”, which means that whiteness goes unmarked. As unmarked, white people are able to live their identities as unraced, as simply human, as persons. And this obfuscates the ways in which their lives depend upon various affordances that black people and people of color don’t possess.

White racism is thus a continuum, one that includes the KKK, the loving white Christian and the antiracist white. Even good, moral white people, those who have black friends, friends of color, married to people of color, fight for racial justice and so on, don’t escape white racist injustice against black people and people of color; they all continue to be implicated within structures of white privilege and to embody, whether they realize it or not, society’s racist sensibilities. White people possess white privilege or white immunity from racial disease. And because of this, others of us, black people and people of color, reap the social, political and existential pains of that racialized social skin.

As yet, I'm at a stage of listening, studying and thinking. Epiphanies are rare, and it strikes me as acceptable to take my time and absorb these many lessons. Bear with me.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Douchebag, or the white man's new burden.

This piece is brilliant, so just read it and be rewarded.

Speaking locally, the key indicators can't be stated any more clearly than this:

Follow the money.

And this, from the article:

"The douchebag is the demanding 1%, and the far more numerically significant class of heterosexist men who ape and aspire to be them."

Yep. As litmus tests go, this one is well nigh perfect.

Douchebag: The White Racial Slur We’ve All Been Waiting For, by Michael Mark Cohen (Medium)

 ... This is about when I run out of time and have to end class. As I am unplugging, a few of those white kids creep up to ask a good question: so what should we do? If we want to be more than just not racist, if we want to be actually anti-racist, then how should we act? How do we deal with the burden of a privilege we did not earn?

Now I gotta get to another class half-way across campus, so I don’t have time to tell them that so-called “liberal guilt” is not the answer and that empathy and solidarity are. I don’t have time to explain that learning to share anger at injustice is the start of a common conversation, and that they can learn how to recognize where privilege resides in their own lives by reading about and listening to the experiences of others who do not have it. But I gotta run, so I just say to them: “It’s a long argument, and an endless series of principled choices, but the short version is simply: don’t be a douchebag.”

The heart of the matter:

 ... The precise race, class and gender position of the douchebag marks this identity as a specific subset of the asshole, another identity on the rise in the twenty-first century. The asshole — as brilliantly defined by Ta-Nehisi Coates — is someone who insists that all social encounters occur on their terms, as in, “hey that person over there with the google glass is an asshole!” (Glasshole! Get it?) But anyone can be an asshole, after all we all have one.

The douchebag is always a white guy. But he is more than that. The douchebag is the demanding 1%, and the far more numerically significant class of heterosexist men who ape and aspire to be them. Wall Street guys are douchebags to be sure, but so is anyone looking to cash in on his white privilege.

This means that non-white people can be - or worse yet - can aspire to be douchebags by claiming wealthy white male privileges for themselves. Whiteness, like the douchebag, has a form that is not dependent upon biological notions of race, but is rather shaped by our history and by our actions. And if men of color can strive to live as douchebags, then it is also true that white men can choose not to be douchebags. We can refuse to insist. It is a choice that all men, but especially white men, have to make.

This narrowness of categorization — perhaps unique in America’s rich history of racial and sexual slurs — is what makes the word douchebag such a potentially useful political tool.