“Who ever saw this coming? Apart from all of us, I mean. The Right has been taking notes.”
Mob rushes Nancy Pelosi on her way into a campaign stop calling her a "F**king communist!"
Security had to hold back the anti-communism protesters as a frightened Pelosi was rushed into a doorway.
Mob chanted "Communism sucks!" while beating on the doorhttps://t.co/5EAgqOq3Ma pic.twitter.com/SqMlPKYKfx
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) October 19, 2018
Early reports were that this took place in a restaurant (see right below), but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, Pelosi was entering a venue to campaign for the congressional seat sought by Democrat Donna Shalala.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is the latest politician to be harassed by angry protesters who insisted he doesn’t f*cking “belong here.”
On Wednesday, video was captured of Pelosi entering a restaurant in Florida for a campaign stop as a swarm of people being described as “Trump supporting Cuban Americans” confronted her.
“Look at Nancy Pelosi right here, look at this piece of sh*t right here. Look at this piece of sh*t Pelosi right here,” a protester is heard yelling. “F***ing communist! You don’t belong here you fucking communist! Get the f**k out of here! Get the f**k out of here! F**k you and your f**king Democrats!”
After she entered the building, the protesters then began pounding on the door. The mob can be seen holding several anti-communism signs.
They then chanted “Socialism sucks!”
Here’s the full video:
This isn’t your run-of-the-mill political protest, but personal harassment. It’s legal, but it’s uncivil and reprehensible. This group, at least, is a small basket of deplorables. And, I claim, this tactic was adopted by Republicans who took it from the Democratic playbook. It reflects, of course, the increasingly nasty and apparently irreconcilable gap between the Left and the Right. Journalist Benny Johnson, now on the Right, has it pretty well right:
When I posted this on my Facebook page, with an indictment of the Left for “normalizing” this behavior, one person, eager to defend the Left at all costs, wrote this:
I’m now suspicious that these are paid left wing activists acting as if they are right wingers heckling.
This shows how eager some are to demonize the other side and “angel-ize” their own. Face it, folks, we’re polarized, and Lefties can act as bad as Righties. In fact, this tactic was popularized by the Left: at colleges, by Antifa, and by all those determined to shut down free speech. And the bulk of deplatforming of speakers at U.S. colleges in the past four years has come from the Left.
Well, the Facebook conspiracy theorist was wrong: the Washington Post (click on screenshot below) identifies these people not as disguised Leftists, but as diehard right-wingers, many of them members of an extreme-Right group called The Proud Boys.
An excerpt:
The video shows a small group of protesters cursing at Pelosi (D-Calif.), and calling her a communist in English and Spanish, as she enters an event on Wednesday in Coral Gables, Fla., to campaign for Democrat Donna Shalala, who is running to fill the seat vacated by the retiring Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) in Miami.
“You don’t belong here,” one says. “Afuera!”
After Pelosi calmly walks by them and enters the building, people bang on the door.
“Open up! It’s the Proud Boys in here,” one says, referencing the far-right group that was implicated in a street brawl in New York last weekend.
“Socialism sucks,” others chant.
Photographs taken of the protest around the event, which appears to have been organized by Nelson Diaz, the chairman of the Republican Party in Miami-Dade County, according to emails posted online by radio host Grant Stern, show some protesters with Proud Boys gear.
. . . “I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi’s agenda, but this is absolutely the wrong way to express those disagreements,” Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, who was wounded in a shooting at a congressional baseball team practice in 2017, wrote on Twitter. “If you want to stop her policies, don’t threaten her, VOTE! That’s how we settle our differences.”
In a statement Pelosi’s spokesman Drew Hammill said President Trump and Republicans were to blame for stoking the flames of “incivility, intolerance and aggression.”
And, as if to confirm Grania’s correct diagnosis, there’s this (my emphasis):
The video did not appear to have traveled widely on YouTube, but it was seized on by fringe right-wing sites as a sign of the retribution Democrats face in the wake of other high-profile incidents where Republicans have been confronted by protesters in public at places such as restaurants.
“Nancy Pelosi was heckled at a Miami Restaurant by Trump Supporting Cuban Americans,” reported one.
“Nancy Pelosi shouted out of a restaurant — by Cuban Americans in Miami,” wrote another.
“RUN, NANCY, RUN!! PELOSI SHOUTED OUT OF RESTAURANT IN MIAMI!” wrote another.
The protest did not however take place at a restaurant. It occurred at Shalala’s headquarters, where protests during an event were widely reported earlier this week.
Well, this wasn’t at a restaurant, but it well could have been, and expect to see this kind of unruly and reprehensible behavior by both sides in the coming mobs. And yes, Trump and his insane behavior has grossly exacerbated the passions that divide Americans so sharply. But Pelosi’s spokesman doesn’t have it completely right. It’s not just Trump and the Republicans that are to blame here: it’s also the Left, which made it okay to confront political figures in public and scream abuse at them.
In my post on other incidents like this, with Republicans confronted in restaurants by angry and abusive Democrats, some readers said this kind of behavior was okay. “They deserve it”, said some, while others saw nothing wrong with disrupting people’s behavior in public by screaming abuse at them. Well, what’s sauce for the GOP goose is sauce for the Democratic gander. If you think this is okay, you’ll also have to also approve of shouting at people like Pelosi, or Barack Obama, or Joe Biden when they go out to eat. (It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re in office, of course.)
Do you want to live in a country like that? I don’t. The civility I expect on this website is the kind of civility we should exercise when politicians are in public. Listen: protest the actions of Republicans if you want, but don’t disrupt their lives or call them names. They are people and deserve some consideration; remember, many of them hold their views honestly, even if we think those views are wrong. Better yet, do what Representative Scalise said: VOTE!
When I put the video on Facebook, another person commented:
I agree we should call out awful behavior where we see it. But I’m very skeptical of claims that actions by one side or the other “make it okay” for the other side to respond in kind. Bad behavior always finds an excuse. You can probably imagine how many Trump supporters think he’s justified in calling for protesters to be beaten or say disgusting things about his opponents or one-night-stands because of some imagined offense by the left. Maybe all we can do is continue to stand for what’s right, regardless of party, and do all we can to maintain decent norms.
And I responded that the only point I really wanted to make was in his last sentence (I’ve put it in bold). I’m not so sure that “bad behavior always finds an excuse,” though. Sometimes it’s lubricated when you see others do it and those others aren’t criticized.
Seems unlikely to me that the Left invented this behavior. “Availability heuristic”, perhaps?
Well, I chalk it up to frustration since the Republicans control all three branches of government. What else is available?
Unfair control at that.
Voting, of course, but I don’t have much faith in that anymore. It almost seems as if it would take the coordinated establishment of blue enclaves in each small red state where voters are proportionately privileged. Maybe if the big tech firms would decide to establish large plants there, one in each & every one of the smallest red states.
Well, maybe not tech plants, but demographics are changing. I think the white middle American voter will very soon not be in the majority. As a matter of fact, that’s probably what is an important factor in the current cultural divide. Fear of change is a big driver in the current angst, but change is a-comin’ non the less.
Good point. Though I’ve read that Hispanics, for one growing minority, are more politically split than leftists like to think. But I don’t think the reddest, rural-ist states are immigrant magnets, anyway, except for ag workers, of course.
I suspect even CNN would agree this is mob behavior. Once again, this is in no sense protest, it’s an attempt to inflict a penalty.
Some regulars here approved of the mobbing of Ted Cruz; perhaps they will rethink.
I wondered when something like this would happen.
From here, things will escalate.
Pretty nasty stuff. I’m just wondering how long it will take after DT is gone to undo the corruption of norms of behavior. I heard one pundit claim that DT will not run for reelection in 2020. He never wanted or expected to win in 2016, so they say, and he’s already gotten the huge income stream coming from Putin and the Saudis once he steps down. So, maybe at that point we can unwind the rhetoric and resume or normal levels of vituperation.
I think there are some lines that may have been crossed for good. I recall how people were shocked during the 1988 Republican presidential primaries when Bob Dole accused Poppy Bush of lying about Dole’s record. Shocked, inasmuch as presidential candidates had never publicly accused each other of such conduct before. Can you imagine?
Donald Trump has coarsened and debased our public discourse in a way this nation will not easily recover from. And he has his sights set now on undermining every American institution that could hold him accountable for his unlawful and unethical conduct — from the Justice Department to the intelligence community to the courts to the media to congress.
I think I heard the same punditry. I don’t think that DT will walk away, unfortunately. But even if he does, or when he later leaves office, we can count on him continuing to be a continuous stream of horrid rhetoric and commentary, to which the press and late night talk show hosts will continue to use as their leading story.
Like a stream of bright yellow piss that just.. does.. not.. stop.
Ug! Not a very nice bright yellow mental image. But, it seems most past presidents don’t seem to have much visibility or influence. I’ll be watching for his quick fade into obscurity.
The same happened to Mitch McConnell yesterday……(It’s all over right-wing media, not left-wing media. Will be interesting to see how the Pelosi fracas is covered.)
https://www.dailywire.com/news/37392/watch-mitch-mcconnell-confronted-protesters-ashe-schow
Trumpism out of control?
Trumpism is getting out of control. Donald’s poorly educated mob need to be put back in their cages.
It’s not Trumpism. As Jerry noted, at length, this crap really got started on the Left, with Cruz et al.
No, it got started at Trump rallies before the election.
Also, there’s no equivalence between yelling at someone who does morally reprehensible things like separating toddlers from parents, like Kirstjen Nielsen has done, and yelling at Nancy Pelosi for liberal politics.
Yes, there is.
Why don’t you explain how they’re equivalent?
Yes, I’m also interested.
A violation of a right of privacy is la violation of a right of privacy is a violation of a right of privacy.
LOL, one doesn’t have a right to privacy in a public space. That’s what “public” means.
Sure you do. You have a right to be left alone and not be heckled or harassed. Laugh at yourself. That is what we are talking about.
Utter nonsense.
Read the post again. I do not believe you know what this whole post and conversation is all about.
My god, man, have you never watched the vulgar demagoguery and incitements to violence at a Trump rally? During the 2016 campaign, Trump actually urged people to punch protesters out (as some of them eventually did) and promised to pay any legal fees they incurred as a result. He said he wanted to punch some of them in the face himself and bragged how, in the old days, they would’ve had to take protesters out his rallies on a stretcher.
This from a flabby old draft-dodging huckster who loves to play a faux tough-guy on tv.
You’ve hit it on the nose 🙂
Nothing to do with copying the left – this behaviour has a more menacing touch to it then squeaking out protests in a restaurant & leaving the premises when told to.
Trump has explicitly, verbally authorised physical violence by his base against any opposition. Should it result in injury or death he’ll put his words down to WWE showmanship – the bully will complain that he’s been misunderstood.
“You started it.”
“No you started it.”
This is all getting a bit childish don’t you think?
Pointing to readily available evidence isn’t childish.
It is if your motive is just to put the blame on somebody else. In reality, it doesn’t matter who started it, but how do we stop it.
If you want to stop it, it helps to understand the causes.
I’ve no interest in getting into a “who started it?” back-and-forth. But I’m not going to sit by while someone claims inaccurately that this has nothing to do with Trumpism, either.
It cannot logically be trumpism unless Democrats are trumpists. Trump may well be a thug, but he’s not the only thug.
What I notice is no one is defending this crap. I did notice people defending the Cruz crap.
Trump has debased American public discourse. Once certain lines have been crossed, especially by a high-profile political figure like Trump, it becomes much easier for the rank-and-file citizenry on both sides to cross them repeatedly, moving in both directions.
That is the second use of the word debase in respond to the same post. We can do better.
So I’ve debased public discourse myself by making a second use of “debase,” OG? 🙂
I am not going to discuss who started it. But they did.
Other people were beaten for showing support for Trump.
There would seem to be a difference between individuals acting in this manner towards some politician and the head of a political party organizing people to do it.
There would be. Have you any evidence tat has been happening?
The ringleader of this harassment of Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats is the chairman of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party.
He doesn’t seem to be the ringleader, or the organizer, that was the “Proud Boys” guy, but his participation is shameful. He should, at a minimum, be fired. It’s thuggery straight up.
+ 1. To me, his participation was the most worrying thing in the incident.
Yes. The leader of the Proud Boys (what a stupid name) Gavin McInnes was invited and recently spoke at NYC’s Metropolitan Republican club. If that’s not a political party organizing a hate-group, I don’t know what is. The speech was nothing short of a pro-violence scree against liberals. Among a litany of abusive quotes, one that stands out is: “We will kill you. That’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell.” He also argued that “violence is a very effective way to solve problems”. He wants the Proud Boys to be the GOP’s violent footsoldiers and insisted the GOP needs an organization like his. Gavin is basically making the claim that he and his group want to be the GOP’s “brown shirts”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump backs them. I will be surprised if Trump denounces them, even if they do end up killing people.
The “Proud Boys” (so-called) attacked a “foreigner” on the streets of New York following McInnes’s appearance at the Republican Club. Here’s the video of that incident the Proud Boys shared with their compadres:
https://youtu.be/2d3MRZC5FQI
I think the brown shirt analogy stands.
We’re so proud to have overcome twenty-to-one odds and beat up this mofo. Oh, wait.
I was going to add somewhere, might as well be here. The Proud Boys are a confederation that are especially well known as online harassers of women. You know, the kind that fill twitter feeds and facebook posts and you tube posts with rape threats and so on. The name refers to a vow they take to not masturbate since that is seen as a weakness.
Until now, maybe, no one even on the Republican side would want much to do with them.
But I see they are branching out.
I won’t be heckling anyone at restaurants, but I’m certainly going to vote.
Is there any reason to not just call the Proud Boys a gang? That is what the founder calls them.
Exactly. The Heritage Foundation is a “far right group”. The Proud Boys are a gang.
At his Nuremberg rally in Montana this week, in the wake of the murder of a WaPo journalist and while railing against “left-wing mobs,” Donald Trump drove his mindless crowd to near ecstasy by recounting how, during a special election last year, Montana congressman Greg Gianforte had body-slammed a reporter from The Gueardian for having the temerity to ask him a question about healthcare.
Gianforte, who was present at the rally, seemed awfully proud of the act while Trump was bragging about him, but acted a whole lot less proud of it back when he was lying to police about it immediately after the fact, and later when pleading guilty in court to assault.
It does rather puzzle me as to why liberals and the left are held to this relatively high standard; that we must not confront rival politicians in restaurants for fear that the right will soon behave even worse in response. And yet Trump and his fans can threaten journalists? Threaten the murder of Hillary? Threaten never to leave the post of POTUS? Threaten to torture and kill the families of terrorists? It’s odd that the liberal left hasn’t responded in kind and adopted such talking points isn’t it? Or is it perhaps that one side, for all its flaws, has retained a shred of moral fucking decency over the last three years?
I’ve seen very few articles on WEIT in that time that focus on the constant threats against journalists, against protesters, violent and otherwise, made by Trump and by his supporters on a near daily basis. The president himself actually applauds a member of his own party for beating the shit out of a Guardian journalist(days after another American resident journalist is chopped into pieces by Saudi Arabia, and he shrugs that off too). No articles about that at WEIT. Every now and then there are some reassurances that WEIT is not a fan of Trump but during a time in history where the right seems to be fighting a kind of cornered-rat battle of unrivalled ferocity, with a president who is hostile to every single value that this website holds dear, where there is a very real danger that America is sliding into dictatorship, it frustrates me to come here day after day and see almost nothing but attacks on the left for being obnoxious.
Surely priorities change? I was annoyed by illiberal leftists for years. But it’s like fiddling while Rome burns to still be focusing overwhelmingly on them right now. Surely, at the very least, there’s a recognition that Trump is as dangerous* as some students deplatforming people?
And I’ve heard the ‘other websites focus on Trump’ argument. But other websites focus on the left’s flaws too. Jesus, there’s a cottage industry of right-wing websites who do nothing but. There are endless websites whose only purpose is to catalogue the bad behaviour of the left. If anyone wants a highbrow version they can visit Quillette, a low brow version they can visit The Drudge Report, an academia-focused version they can visit David Thompson’s site, etc. There’s a flavour for every hypocrite out there, from your ‘classical liberals’ to your ‘libertarians’ to your more fascist-y types or your I-hate-women-because-they-think-I’m-a-hateful-creep types. There are, I’d probably wager, more of them than there are sites criticising the president of America and the rest of the morally AWOL American right.
I’ve been here long enough to know that calling for PCC to write about something specific is not on. Which is absolutely fair enough. But some balance surely? On a proudly liberal website? Some articles on the Trump right? This is one(although it seems to be mainly blaming the left for inciting the right, much in the same way the illiberal-left spent years blaming us for inciting those poor mindless Muslims into blowing stuff up, because they couldn’t help themselves, etc. That’s another story though.). But it’d be nice to read Jerry’s generally perspicuous thoughts on the most serious political issue in the country, no? Some balance?
This is my habit here. I keep coming back, and eventually I get frustrated enough to post something far too long, which probably breaks da rulez in a variety of subtle and interesting ways. And then I subside, and I keep coming back to see the same angle of attack in the majority of articles. And then I do the same again.
For what it’s worth I like this site, and I like many, many of the commenters here too, but I don’t know if it’s worth it to see the same kind of stories over and over again, and the most important issues generally sidelined.
*”as dangerous” used for the sake of massive understatement.
You’re a brave man, Saul. I believe I’ve seconded one of your past eruptions. 😉 I continue to do so.
Thank you Diane. I’ve always liked your comments. You’re one of my favourites, for what it’s worth 🙂
I come here daily, but I admit I’m not a daily poster. Never have been, due to a pretty…chaotic…lifestyle. Posting stuff like this stresses me out, I don’t do it for fun. What’s happening in the world ATM really frustrates me/angers me/scares me, and this is a site with a significant following, so it matters how it presents the political world.
In normal times a president would take the lead in tamping down civil unrest. But not this president. In a Montana rally Trump praised a GOP representative for body slamming a reporter. As the Washington Post reports:
—————–
President Donald Trump on Thursday openly praised Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for assaulting a reporter in his bid for Congress last year, as the United States faced an unfolding crisis over missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who is believed to have been killed by Saudi Arabian agents.
The remarks from Trump at a campaign rally — staged at an airport hangar here with a mountainous backdrop — drew boisterous cheers from the conservative crowd, who applauded as Trump noted of Gianforte: “By the way, never wrestle him.”
“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-montana-rally-trump-praises-congressman-for-assaulting-reporter/2018/10/18/1e1d0d1e-d304-11e8-8c22-fa2ef74bd6d6_story.html?utm_term=.3630c84122a0
——————–
To his cult, Trump is endorsing violence, which is a big step beyond harassing people. Trump will not condemn right wing street violence should it occur and blame it on the press. He’ll come up with a nonsensical excuse to justify it, which his supporters and party will defend. I see shades here of the early 1930s in Germany. He is the greatest threat to freedom of speech and freedom of the press since the 1790s.
Interesting that the protests seem to have been dominated by Cuban-Americans, shouting at Pelosi in Spanish as well as English. They are an immigrant population which is heavily Republican and tends toward the conservative extreme. Could their political tendency have something to do with their or their parents’ experience of Socialist life in the former homeland of Cuba? Of course, that mere experience doesn’t compare to the deep theoretical insights offered by the Democratic Socialists of America.
The politics of the Miami Cuban community are rapidly changing (and shifting leftward), as the generation of the Brigade 2506 Bay-of-Pigs veterans (and the Alpha 66 elements) die off. The reactionaries involved in this incident harassing Pelosi are throwbacks to a moribund breed.
The vibrant Miami Cuban professional class knows exactly what Donald Trump was up to when he called Indiana-born federal district judge Gonzalo Curiel a “Mexican” who was unfit to preside over the Trump “University” fraud case.
That’s a good point, Ken, and good news. Nonetheless, I suspect that the Leftward shift of younger Cuban-Americans is not toward the naive worship of anything using the word “Socialism” typical of the campus pop-Left fashion trend. Is it rather toward
a more pragmatic Liberalism, in the way the word used to be used?
Yeah, Jon, it was, initially at least, more shift toward the center. (When you start at the north pole, the first step you take is always to the south. 🙂 ) It’s moving more and more to a center-left position.
A good barometer of this shift is the district currently represented by retiring Republican congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. That district was at one time represented by Claude Pepper (whom the hidebound Republicans used to call “Red” Pepper because of his moderately liberal tendencies.) The Cuban-born Ros-Lehtinen started out as old-line Cuban hard-right, but has steadily transformed herself into one of the ever-diminishing Republican moderates. Her district is likely to flip back to Democratic in the midterms.
While I agree with most of what Jerry says, the following snippet doesn’t make sense:
———-
When I posted this on my Facebook page, with an indictment of the Left for “normalizing” this behavior, one person, eager to defend the Left at all costs, wrote this:
I’m now suspicious that these are paid left wing activists acting as if they are right wingers heckling.
———-
That sounds a whole lot less like “one person, eager to defend the Left” than the typical right-wing accusation of paid (usually supposedly by George Soros) “left wing activists acting as if…”. Which generally comes from the same far-right conspiracy theorists who speak of “crisis actors”. I don’t even see how such a statement can be construed as a defense of “the Left”.
Maybe I’m missing something.
I agree. That seems a lot more like someone defending the Right.
Your Facebook commenter:
I don’t think anybody is claiming that are they (well, maybe the people actually doing the harassing are). The point is not that it makes it OK but that it makes it likely, or even inevitable.
It seems odd that a response in kind is considered inevitable when coming from the right, but we don’t consider it inevitable that liberals will start screaming death threats at journalists or talking about them being killed in campaign rallies, and we don’t think liberal politicians will suddenly start body-slamming right-wing journalists.
I find this whole finger-wagging attitude(and I’m not necessarily talking about you here, least I don’t think I am given your routinely sensible comments), almost indiscernibly so, to the way the illiberal left would respond whenever Muslims started smashing things up or threatening death upon people who’d criticised them. The implication was always that they were a kind of animalistic aggregate with no control over their actions and no responsibility either. Don’t poke them or it’s your fault. Charlie Hebdo? Well, it was awful of course, but inevitable if you start criticising their religion.
The same nauseating attitude towards Trump supporters seems to be developing among their apologists: they can’t help themselves; of course they’ll react like that; we provoked them.
To me, it is not that they are “provoked”, it is that they see their opponents indulge in their base urges and get away with it, and want to emulate them to obtain some primitive satisfaction.
I was about to comment on the stupidity of someone calling Pelosi a communist (she is a centrist liberal), but then I remembered that some Cuban-Americans in Florida consider anyone left of center a comrade of Castro.
Pelosi herself is not a Maxine Waters type and did not bring this on herself. She is a middle of the road politician. I think this sort of harassment is less a tactic of the left than the inevitable product of extreme ideological polarization and just as liable to occur with an extremely Right-wing group, as we have just seen. The only reason we haven’t seen more of it among the right is that fewer liberal politicians are in power. Should Democrats retake the House, Pelosi will encounter even more hatred and vitriol than she did in the Obama era.
Nancy Pelosi has an 80% rating for her voting record, according to Americans for Democratic Action, about middle of the pack for Democratic members of congress. Hardly enough to earn her an invite to the Comintern. 🙂
I agree. Calling her a communist is eye rollingly stupid. As is calling a Trump a Nazi.
Maybe not a Nazi, but a Nazi sympathizer.
No, not even that.
Yes, that.
Insert eye roll here.
Or at least a neo-Nazi symp. Or — as Trump referred to the tiki-torch marchers at Charlotsville — “very fine people.”
That’s what I was referring to. Plus all the endorsements from white-supremacists (and what is a Nazi’s core belief if not white supremacy?) that he has never once denounced.
That’s a lie.
Misquotation may play to the choir. The rest of us know he meant both sides of protests over pulling down statues.
Trump was specifically referring to what he claimed he saw on the the tv video of the protests in Charlottesville. I think the pro-Confederacy historical preservationists steered clear of the marches shown on tv of torch-bearing neo-Nazis screaming “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”
Trump finds it all but impossible to disavow anyone who supports Trump. That’s why Trump flat-out lied about not knowing who David Duke was, and why his disavowals of white-supremacists always take the form of “You want me to disavow? There, I disavow. You happy now?”
Claims to the contrary might play with Trump apologists, not here.
Nazi? No. That’s too specific. But I think you’d have a very hard time arguing with the label ‘fascist’ for Trump. He ticks pretty much every single box there is for that epithet and he’s become more openly fascistic since his elevation to POTUS.
And the fact that he has no idea what the word means is irrelevant. He doesn’t know what the word ‘twatsatchel’ means but that doesn’t make him any less of one.
I can tell you what’s happening here in Texas. The republican TV ads are viciously attacking Pelosi without end and trying to associate her with Fletcher and Beto. The lies are sickening to say the least. It does shows though that the bastards are running scared. Now the fool in the white house is coming to Houston on Monday to arouse the mob in support of “lying Ted” Cruz at a downtown rally. The police will be out in full force.
We’re praying to Tlaloc for a cloud burst.
I don’t approve of the physical harassment of politicians but, as usual, this is a case of false equivalencies. Calling Nancy Pelosi a communist is as ridiculous as calling Barack Obama a Kenyan Muslim — both are absolutely irrational fantasies maintained by nutjobs. The people who have harassed Mitch McConnell and Sarah Huckabee Sanders have done so based on things those two have actually done.
Agreed. People are rightfully pissed off at republican politicians destroying this country, and “harrassing” them is morally justifiable. People calling Pelosi a communist are an idiotic mob.
That is sarcasm. Right?
There is also a false un-equivalency here. The point being that it is morally reprehensible to deplatform and harass public figures, whether they have or have not done something that others disagree with.
All the reasons have been provided here many times, and I won’t bother going over them.
The first sentence of my comment said I agreed it was wrong to harass politicians. That doesn’t mean there’s not a false equivalency between being angry at Pelosi because you’re ignorant or delusional and believe she’s a communist, and being angry at McConnell for, for example, blocking Obama’s judicial appointments, including the appointment of Merrick Garland.
Sometime people’s bias make them delusional.
The divisions we see in our politics currently may have been exacerbated by Trumpists and anti-Trumpists, or far right, far left, but have been part of American politics from the beginning. They have never been resolved. Maybe, they can’t be and the best we can do is be civil.
Wherever the fault for these behaviors and actions originate, we also have other countries (ostensibly Russia, China and Iran) using the internet to manipulate these divisions in the U.S. Most recently, see:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/politics/elena-alekseevna-khusyaynova-russia-charged/index.html
“All we like sheep have gone astray.”
You sampling the Wiffenpoof Song, Rowena? 🙂
I think that’s right. Jefferson and Adams were an early split between republicans and royalists. The nation started as an experiment that not everyone was eager to support. The first division in the US is between the haves and the have-nots. Between the inherited wealth and the striving proletariat. Between the owners of wealth and the groveling masses. Politicians along the way made use of the divisions to further their own agendas. The same as it ever was, the same as it ever was.
Pruitt was confronted by a single woman with her small child (and someone filming). At most you could say that was slightly rude, if it was objectionable at all. He was in no way threatened or abused.
Huckabee Sanders wss asked to leave a restaurant, because the staff were uncomfortable about serving her. I can’t see anything wrong with this really. A private business is within its rights to refuse service. I don’t recall she was harassed at all during this incident.
So theirs no real comparison between these cases and the harassment of Pelosi, that I can see.
The Cruz and Nielsen incidents are more comparable, but at least the protesters there were actually protesting about *something*. There was a point to the protests, even if you found the method objectionable. Pelosi, it seems, was merely being abused for being a Democrat and a ‘communist’.
IIRC, she got comped a cheese platter for her troubles. 🙂
It’s sobering to realize that Russian trolls are fanning flames of anger on all sides of the questions. One post affirms that Trump collaborated with the Russians and should spend time in Gitmo. Another that anti-Trumpists are communists and should spend time in Gitmo (Gitmo is referred to a lot). One more subtle one claims that the 12 indicted Russian trolls came into the US over the Mexican border. In all cases, the tweets / FB posts are aimed at pouring gasoline on already existing hatreds and prejudices.
In one way, what does it matter what they are specifically saying? Their aim is to sow hatred and division in our country, and they are succeeding in spades. I think it behooves everyone to give serious thought to whether we want to play our enemy’s game, to dance by their tune, to fight by their rules.
Speaking for myself, while I think the Trump cultists are hugely blinded by their addiction to Fox news and its ilk, I don’t intend to give into my natural tendency to berate and hate them. I believe in fighting falsehoods and hatred in every way consistent with truth and our character as a nation of laws. That’s very different from fighting dirty, of “going low when they go low”. We’re in a war that can’t be won except by winning hearts and minds. There are myriad ways of fighting stupid; not doing so should be priority number #1.
+ 1
At least there are a couple of people here who don’t react differently depending on who is being harassed and want to fight the further polarization of this country. For all the talk about how Russia is trying to divide us, people sure seem quick to give into the tribalism being stoked.
I oppose public harassment of political figures from all quarters, BJ. But now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country. Ain’t nothing in the middle of the road this time around except yellow stripes and roadkill.
You might oppose it. But you only smirk about cheese plates when it happens to Republicans.
I don’t put Sarah Sanders’s missing a chicken dinner at the Red Hen because the proprietor declined her business on the same plane as threatening harassment in public. Do you?
Actual Communism died as an option for the Left in the late 20th century, though the Right continues to use it as a slur.
Owners of restaurants can ban who they want. Public heckling is an entirely other matter.
I agree that public heckling should be held to be a violation of the right of privacy under the ninth amendment, but apparently it is not
How is that different from outlawing hate speech?
The 9th Amendment has never been held to be an independent source of the “right to privacy,” OG. But even if it were, it would, like all the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, apply only to “state action” by governmental actors. Accordingly, it would not bar private citizens from engaging in public heckling.
I took con law in the summer of 67. I knew that. Or I did then
There was a lot of this going on in the early 1800s. The 1800 election was a bitter one.
We seem to be one the verge of a civil war. Each side claiming to be justified in saying they are correct and the other side detached from reality. They are both right about the other side. Hard to find people in the center not detached from reality anymore.
According to the UN climate change report it will be over soon enough and we will have bigger problems to worry about. Like how to find food and stay alive.
It seems like there will be pain, and likely blood, before this is all over. As far as I have a chance to choose, I would choose to be in the center trying to be a buffer against the hatred, protecting the innocent, rather than on either side dishing it out. If I take a bullet aimed at someone else (or even at me), so be it. I’m 65 and would rather leave this world in a way consistent with my moral beliefs than lingering in some nursing home.
I am 76 and know what you mean about nursing homes. I saw my parents and one aunt go through that. It is no way to finish out your life.
You are to be congratulated, Jerry, for your discernment to note that much of the current state of incivility began on the Left. Most leftists won’t agree with that (as amply demonstrated in these comments!), but we on the right will agree.
A sense exists that we face what we call “The New Rules”, and these affect more than just confronting political figures when they appear in public places, or shooting them up as happened with our baseball team. We’re also including the efforts to de-platform non-leftists from social media. Shadow-bans. Hounding people from workplaces and various communities for the crimes of WrongThink. A very palpable sense of being under siege exists on the right, increasingly on personal levels.
Many have spoken urging that if these are The New Rules we must adopt them, too. Nobody is particularly happy about this, especially the large numbers of civic-nationalists on the right who do place a high priority on civility. Steve Scalise, the most wounded of those on the ball field on the day of the shooting, exemplifies the civic-nationalist attitude when he says (as you quoted him):
“I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi’s agenda, but this is absolutely the wrong way to express those disagreements. If you want to stop her policies, don’t threaten her, VOTE! That’s how we settle our differences.”
Take heart if you will because very many on the right are in agreement with Scalise here. But I would note there’s no small bit of futility in that sentiment he expresses. The ballot box only works to settle our differences if both sides can agree to live with the results. Everyone on the right has noted with alarm that the left is having extreme difficulties with this these days. It’s a serious danger to the republic, to the possibility of successful democratic governance, when one side categorically rejects the outcome of votes and republican forms and so constantly seeks to undermine the results.
We’ve never seen anything like this Trump Derangement Syndrome. We thought the Bush Derangement Syndrome was bad, it was nothing compared to this.
“A very palpable sense of being under siege exists on the right, increasingly on personal levels.”
And feeling personally threatened makes people think they have to protect themselves, which leads to possibility of more tension between the right and left. Carrying guns to political events, and such. What worries me is that this rising state of tension is being exacerbated, not just by fringe activists, but by the words of the president. That’s pretty unprecedented.
What is frightening is that actions by the fringe on both sides could expand into general chaos. Most leaders know this and try to calm the waters, while the leader of the right seems to use anger as a political tool. I too feel under siege.
“What worries me is that this rising state of tension is being exacerbated, not just by fringe activists, but by the words of the president. That’s pretty unprecedented.”
Au contraire mon frere! We need only to look to Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, and we find a president urging his followers to “go out and get in people’s faces” and the like including “We’re going to punish our enemies and reward our friends,” and “Why? I won.” and “You get nothing.” Obama’s political arm even hosted workshops on how to politicize Thanksgiving dinners. Quoth Michelle, “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual.” A major rallying cry of Barack’s America, promoted by his PAC? “No justice, no peace!”
In the end, however, it is too easy to blame one man, either Trump or Obama, and assign all manners of sins to them personally, as if they are the sole origin of whatever ill you may suppose. No American president rises to office solely based on his personal attributes excepting maybe a rare few such as George Washington or Dwight Eisenhower, who were living legends beforehand. In the ordinary case men become president because they’ve tapped into popular currents that are already swirling. Rarely if ever do they manufacture broad political feelings, instead they find extant ones and give them expression. The wise course is to look beyond the individual men and what are the political currents that they surfed into office?
In our cultural wars the clear aggressors are the Left. This is necessarily the case, the Left conceives of itself as the agent for transformative change, a vehicle for social justice. They infamously the set of, “If you want to make an omlette you gotta break a few eggs.”
Fifty-seven percent of Trump voters still subscribe to the “Birtherism” that gave Donald Trump his toe-hold in politics — that Barack Obama is a secret Kenyan-born Muslim.
You happen to be among them, Mr. Ramsey?
You seem to want to compare Trump to Obama. That’s simply a false equivalency. Sounds like the snort of a troll to me.
I agree about the troll. One saving grace – he seems to be familiar with the body of work of Del boy & Rodders of Peckham [sowf of the river], London.
I’m not familiar with that body, but would that make him a Russian FSB agent living in London on one of Putin’s pet projects? Perhaps he’s bored and watches a lot of Telly.
Here’s gifted linguist Del Boy being savoir fair fumee la pip or sometin’:-
I am worried that a commenter is called “troll” for expressing different views. I also see much equivalency between Trump and Obama who, after all, were elected by the same nation. Particularly in the personality cult. Here is how I saw things a decade ago, immediately after Obama’s election:
“…All those crowds of people totally out of control, shouting, crying, fainting etc. I have never seen or heard of adults behaving this way without being under the influence of a psychotropic substance. In backward countries like Bulgaria people are quite susceptible to messiah politicians promising the Earth but, frankly, I never thought the same to be possible in an advanced post-industrial country with established democracy such as the USA. I briefly visited a couple of my favourite US-based blogs and other sites. In a number of them, I found accounts of the authors crying when they heard about Obama’s victory. How sad… As far as I can grasp something rational in the “hope” and “change” abracadabra (most of which, however, clearly works well below the brain cortex), Americans want to renounce their role in the world… They want brilliant isolation, keeping all their money at home to pay their own mortgages and letting dictators and terrorists do whatever they wish.”
Obama’s presidency only confirmed my predictions.
I profoundly disagree. Obama was a decent man and a president who will be ranked with the best of presidents. His motto was hope and change, which are positive and optimistic motives, even if hopes are sometimes hard to achieve. He took the country in a progressive direction where he had some leverage, but after the GOP took the house and senate he was restricted to problem solving and maintaining the functions of government in an intelligent way. He achieved this by gathering smart experts around him. Above all he was a deep and serious thinker, not an ideologue. He played to the best aspects of American character.
Trump on the other hand, plays the fears of his white male base. He is a performance artist who acts the clown to win their admiration as a disrupter – someone who will resolve their fears through crassness and bullying. But his approach is a huge deception. He’s serving as a front for the greed of corporate America. His influence on America is corrupt and destructive of the cultural values we have evolved over a century. He will go down in history as the worst president in US history.
To try to compare these two presidents is to fly in the face of reality.
Bush is a great example of how strange the TDS phenomenon is. Compared to starting two wars, Trump’s policies (like them or not) seem rather mild. Despite this a large number of people feel vastly greater personal hatred for Trump than they ever did for Bush. Why? It is clearly not based on his policies since what you see here in the comments and at large is 90% ad hominem attacks on Trump. Also, TDS is not only for progressive activists, many National Review, George Will type conservatives have it too. Further evidence that TDS is not based on policy but something else.
To answer, I think we need to break an American taboo and talk about social class. Trump is like Rodney Dangerfield in the movie Caddyshack; loud, gaudy, and definitely not conforming to country club norms of behavior. TDS sufferers are like Ted Knight’s character, scandalized and outraged by this uncouth behavior. In short, TDS is class snobbery. “Progressive activists” (per the recent “Hidden Tribes” study) and National Review conservatives are overwhelming members of the elite (upper middle class). Trump, with his gold-plated faucets, is not even middle class. To the elites this is an affront and a scandal.
Whether you agree with this analysis or not, if you want to understand the very real TDS phenomenon you have to go beyond the simplistic left versus right model and engage in some introspection. The level of emotion and personal hatred for Trump is not proportional to his policies.
Nonsense. Most people born into privilege don’t have Trump’s level of derangement. It’s far too early to determine the cause of Donald’s shortcomings, but it will be well examined in the coming decades.
Did you just purposefully misunderstand what TDS means as a rhetorical device or do you genuinely not understand? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. In which case I give you points for cleverness and admit this is a bit funny, but I’ll have to subtract points for failing to engage the argument.
The poorly educated try to blame Trump’s derangement on those aligned against Trump, but this makes no sense at all. Donald’s derangement precedes the world turning against him (e.g. birtherism).
I’d happily ignore Trump’s Ba’ath Party-chic tastes and overall loutishness, were it not for his utter unfitness for the office of the US presidency — by experience and training, by intellect, by character, and by temperament.
Is it asking too much for the President of the United States to not lie every day? Having a President who can control himself enough not to blatantly lie would go a long way to calm those who despise him. I despise and deeply distrust pathological liars; there you have it.
Yes, Donald is very good at playing on the fears of the poorly educated. It’s his most significant skill.
More to the point, the privileged poorly educated “white” people.
It is easy to feel under siege, when picking on white people has become mainstream (enough examples on this site alone).
Anyone who counts himself among the 90% of the Republican Party who supports Donald Trump has feet of clay when it comes to lecturing anyone else about “civility.”
Hear, hear. And I disagree that there’s anything like the right’s definition of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Being horrified by Trump is the only sane, intelligent response to just how deplorable he is. The only real TDS that exists is among his followers–anyone with half a brain who still excuses his lying, crass, law-breaking, bullying, disparaging, ham-handed, ignorant, unprecedented approach to managing the government of the most powerful country in the world.
The rest of us aren’t the deranged–we’re the outraged.
Nicely put.
The shooting of Steve Scalise and others was a horrible moment in American history. I rooted for his recovery, and always feel good when see him improving physically with each passing public appearance.
But before we go citing Steve Scalise as a fount of civility, let us recall that he made his bones in Louisiana GOP politics by pandering to white-supremacist audiences and billing himself as “David Duke without the baggage.”
“The ballot box only works to settle our differences if both sides can agree to live with the results. Everyone on the right has noted with alarm that the left is having extreme difficulties with this these days.”
This is total bullshit. The ballot box only works to settle our differences when we allow our citizens to vote freely and unencumbered. Voter suppression, cross-check, citizens united, voter roll purges, gerrymandering (yes I know both sides do gerrymandering, but the GOP is by far the more egregious) are all GOP tactics to make sure the playing field is tilted and the ballot box is not a clear way to decide who gets elected. Why is it that time and time again, democrats cast more ballots and lose more elections? To not accept this is simple intellectual dishonesty.
And who continuously spouted on about the election being rigged as Hillary continued her lead in the polls? And in a way, it was rigged…rigged so the GOP could win. Mueller will have more to say on that.
If the blue wave does materialize, Trump et al. is already ahead of the blame game, already blaming China and Iran (of course not his Russia friends) for meddling. The lies and excuses will be forthcoming if he loses any branch of government. This wreck of a human being can’t take responsibility for anything…unless it somehow makes him look good…like the economy. He was handed a great economy that Obama established, but he’ll take all the credit. And of course, will never mention the great 2008 recession that Obama pulled us out of. So short the memory of Trump and his cult followers.
+1
I remember very well the disorderly protests after Trump’s election, and the talk how to impeach him that began immediately.