Is America Strong Enough to Withstand the Authoritarian Direction of the GOP?

The most influential person on the right is no longer Donald Trump, it is Tucker Carlson, who last week took his viewers to Hungary, where he portrayed the authoritarian rule of Viktor Orban as his picture of what the United States should be like in the future.

Really? Are his followers, who were groomed by Donald Trump to despise the free press and immigrants, going to fall in line behind a platform based on authoritarian rule?  It’s a frightening prospect.

Lovers of democracy in America should be alarmed at the breadth of the Republican attack on our system. Here are the major components, which should hearten the enemies of America:

1) Treat voting as a privilege, not as a right, just like under Jim Crow. Make it as hard as possible for the poor and powerless to vote, since they can be expected to vote for Democrats.

2) Destroy faith in the electoral process by claiming, despite lack of evidence, that any victory by a Democrat must be due to election fraud.

3) Through gerrymandering, enable Republicans to control legislatures (and congressional  seats) even when the majority of votes statewide were Democratic.

4) Use that control of state legislatures to pass laws restricting ballot access and, best of all, a law allowing that Republican legislature to take the administration of elections away from counties, the most populous of which lean Democratic.

5) Pass laws in those states allowing the legislature to rule a presidential election fraudulent, without evidence, and send its own slate of electors to the Electoral College. (With such a law, Donald Trump could have won in 2020.)

6) Destroy confidence in the mainstream media by labeling anything contrary to the conservative agenda or about Republican corruption “fake news.”  Do this primarily by creating your own news media and channels that allow followers to believe they are fully informed when they’re not.

7) Subtly, or not so subtly, embolden white supremacists to mobilize against minorities and progressives. They can be counted on to use death threats and actual violence to intimidate non-believers. It helps to have free access to mass casualty assault rifles, so oppose all gun control laws.

These and other strategies, amplified by social media, can do immense damage to our democratic system. The question is can we survive the assault?

We can take some comfort from the fact that the majority of Americans have not been infected by the GOP virus. However, given the above strategies, it is going to take more than a simple majority opposing those strategies to prevail.  If we can keep the “Trumpers” to about 40% of the population, we might squeak through.

Our system does have its own checks and balances, the biggest of which is the U.S. Supreme Court. One would hope that despite its rightward movement with three Trump-appointed justices creating a 6-3 conservative majority that the justices would not return us to the days of old when the court came down on the side of white supremacy and voter suppression — although it did show signs of going in that direction with a July 1 decision upholding two Arizona voter suppression laws. As the New York Times put it, the Court ruled that “states don’t have to wait for fraud to occur before enacting laws to prevent it.”

Our last and strongest protection is freedom of the press. Authoritarian regimes like Orban’s, so admired by Tucker Carlson, benefit from shutting down media with which they disagree. We hear it around the world, including in Hong Kong, that opposition to the regime is considered traitorous and can be silenced.

If we see that line crossed by our Supreme Court (which would have to adjudicate it), then we are truly facing the ending of the American experiment.

Let’s not allow that to happen. As I said, it will take a super majority, not a simple majority to prevail and begin the process of reversing democracy’s decline.

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    These columns are archived at TalkingTurkey.online. This week’s column is made possible by reader Ray Leon who donated $1,000 to my GoFundMe campaign. Find that campaign at FundTalkingTurkey.com.

 

This is America today: Neighbors call 911 on Black Realtor showing home to Black father and son

 

Racial Profiling Has ‘No Place in Our Country’

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Real estate pro Eric Brown, who is Black, was showing a home in Wyoming, Mich., last Sunday to client Roy Thorne and Thorne’s 15-year-old son, also both Black, when they noticed police surrounding the house. All three were ordered by police to exit the home with their hands up. They were placed in handcuffs. “[The police] keep their guns drawn on us until all of us were in cuffs," Thorne said.

Brown told police he was a real estate agent, produced his credentials, and explained he was showing the home to potential buyers. The Wyoming Police Department said officers immediately removed the handcuffs and told the men that neighbors had reported a break-in.

On Friday, in a prepared statement, NAR President Charlie Oppler responded to the incident:

“The detainment of Eric Brown, a REALTOR® from Michigan, and his clients during a recent home showing was deeply disturbing. Brown, his client, and his client’s 15-year-old son, all of whom are Black, had guns drawn upon them by local police and were detained after neighbors reported a break-in at the property. While, thankfully, neither Brown nor his clients were physically harmed in the incident, racial profiling—and the humiliation, indignity, and trauma that comes with it—has no place in our country. NAR’s top priority is the safety and well-being of all our members as we work tirelessly each and every day to make the American Dream of owning a home a reality for all.”

Brown told local media that he believes race was a factor in the police officers’ response, which the police have publicly denied. A week earlier, police said there had been a burglary at the same address that resulted in an arrest. A neighbor had contacted police to report that the same suspect had returned.

“The level of response and aggressiveness of the response . . . really threw me back,” Brown told the WOOD TV station. “Am I just automatically the criminal? Because that’s pretty much how we were treated in that situation.”

The Greater Regional Alliance of REALTORS®, Brown’s local board, said in a statement to members that the vast majority of comments it has fielded about the incident have expressed “support and pride in how Eric handled himself as the whole thing unfolded.

“The GRAR Board of Directors will be discussing Eric's experience at its upcoming meeting to determine what GRAR can or should be doing both in response to this event and in how we can contribute to the healing of the unrest in our communities that these types of situations incite,” the statement reads. “In the meantime, GRAR leadership will be doing its homework to attempt to ascertain the facts so that it does not contribute to the polarizing impact that can potentially result from this type of incident.”

https://www.woodtv.com/news/kent-county/it-threw-me-back-realtor-client-handcuffed-at-wyoming-home-after-911-call/

Kevin McCarthy giving medical advice... like Tucker Carlson and others

Will Trump Followers Ever Realize How Insecure and Dangerous Their Idol Is?

   I read many business-oriented email newsletters, including one from Fast Company which had the following attention-grabbing headline this week: “How to spot the warning signs of an insecure leader.”

The subhead went further: “We humans aren’t very good at assessing true leadership qualities and gravitate towards arrogant confidence in those in charge. Unfortunately, that is often a sign of weakness, and the fallout can be tough on teams.”

The article -- click here to read it in full -- was written about business (hence the reference to teams) by a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and a professor of business psychology at Columbia, but it encapsulates the tragedy of the Trump era. It’s bad enough when a business is dragged down by a leader who has deceived both himself and others that he is competent, but it’s tragic when a whole country is victimized by him.

Here are some key excerpts from that article, which will resonate for those of us who recognized Donald Trump as an arrogant, narcissistic incompetent from day one. Try to remember that this was written about business leadership:

We are so seduced by confidence that we habitually end up with overconfident, arrogant leaders.... 

   According to the authors of one study: “Those with limited knowledge…suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it”... 

    What drives educated, rational people...to select people who seem unaware of their limitations and unjustifiably pleased with themselves, as if being your own greatest fan was indicative of talent or...a useful skill in leading others?….

Imagine you aspire to leadership or power and you have managed to delude yourself into thinking that you are amazing when in fact you lack critical skills. Although this delusion makes you a liability, a risk for others..., it can make you more popular. People will gravitate towards you, thinking your certainty is indicative of skill and talent rather than delusion….

We get distracted by irrelevant information provided in the form of confidence, bravado and aggression, which pertain to style rather than substance. Sadly, we live in a world where style without substance will get you farther than substance without style….

Arrogant leaders are more likely to be insecure than competent. Recent academic research conceptualizes narcissism not as self-love but as self-loathing in disguise. The reason is unsurprising. Arrogance is defined as exaggerating one’s own worth or importance. This takes effort and can be seen as a cover for something that one wishes not to be discovered. It’s a deliberate attempt to compensate for self-perceived deficits or flaws….

Research on narcissism further finds that arrogance and entitlement are often a desperate call for validation and affirmation from others. Bragging about talents that are actually lacking is a strategy for fooling oneself by fooling others and suggests insecurity. This is why narcissists get defensive and aggressive when challenged or belittled. 

This is exactly what Donald Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump, described in her analysis of Trump based on her personal knowledge of his upbringing. The title says it all: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. I can picture this book becoming a textbook in future classes about the Trump era.

Regarding those who continue to resonate with Trump’s rhetoric, I can’t urge you enough to read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, by historian Carol Anderson. While the events of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 got people talking about “black rage,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that this was instead “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames, everyone had ignored the kindling.”

The legacy of Donald Trump will be that by emboldening white supremacists with his rhetoric, he lit the kindling, bringing to the surface what had always been there: continued systemic racism.

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On a personal note, I want to express my humble appreciation for the support my writing has garnered. Not only have readers donated over $15,000 to my GoFundMe campaign (which you can find at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com), and sent me over $3,000 in checks, they continue to give my broker associates and me their real estate business.  Thank you so much!

 

Fox News, OAN & Newsmax Are ‘Killing People’; Facebook Is Just a Multiplier

 

When President Biden said Facebook was “killing people,” I think we all understood what he meant, though he was forced to elaborate the next day.

My first reaction was that social media like Facebook and Twitter are only multipliers of the disinformation being broadcast by Fox News hosts, One America News (OAN), Newsmax and other right-wing media. They are the ones providing the fake news and disinformation about Covid-19 and the vaccines.

One thing I have observed about my emails from right-wing readers is that they rarely speak for themselves, especially in their social media posts. Rather, they retweet and “like” memes, and repeat what they heard on Fox News, et al. They can’t, it seems, think for themselves, only parrot what others tell them that resonates with their inner and often unspoken beliefs and biases.

One term for this phenomenon is “confirmation bias,” which Wikipedia defines as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.”  I realize that confirmation bias exists on both sides of the political divide. What makes it toxic is when those beliefs or values are rooted in demonstrably untrue facts. As both sides like to say in attacking the other, “You have a right to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.”

In that regard, you might ask why the Washington Post and  mainstream media have sections or segments on fact-checking, but I don’t recall such a segment on Fox News.

The dominant tactic we’re seeing in Republican circles is the use of “wedge issues” to stir the anger and fear in its base.  Think “critical race theory” or “Black Lives Matter” or “radical socialist agenda.”

Let’s look, for example, at critical race theory, a college-level course of study which is not taught in K-12. The allegation that it is taught in K-12 as a way of attacking the dominant caste (as Isabel Wilkerson calls white Americans in her bestseller Caste) is a great way of turning out voters to oust any school board member who would be so audacious as to defend the teaching (or even mention) of racism in our schools.

Wilkerson does a great job in Caste of comparing America’s systemic racism to the caste system of India and the Nazi demonization of non-Aryan races.

One comparison that relates to the debate over critical race theory is how Germany deals with its Nazi past versus how Republicans would like us to deal with our history of slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism. In Germany today school children are required to learn about Nazism and how it developed. They are even required to visit a concentration camp. There are monuments that educate about the horrors of the holocaust. Displaying the swastika is illegal. There are no statues of Nazis.

Not so in America. The rebel flag of the Confederacy is a staple of white supremacists, who fight to maintain that legacy. I’m not saying that displaying that flag should be banned legally — that would violate the First Amendment — but I am saying that we should recognize it for what it is, an expression of anti-minority hatred and fear.

The quote that keeps coming to mind is Winston Churchill’s 1948 paraphrasing of George Santayana, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Germany lives by that lesson, but not us. Not surprisingly, Fox News, for example, totally ignored the centenary of the Tulsa massacre.

The Supreme Court has in the past upheld white supremacy and could do so again. The Dred Scott decision stated that the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to Black people. In 1883 the Court upheld Alabama’s law banning interracial marriage. The Court didn’t reverse that ruling until 1967.

That same year the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision endorsed the “separate but equal” doctrine, not reversed until the 1954 Brown decision. Today’s conservative majority Court could “Make America Great Again” by upholding those new state laws promoting voter suppression.

 

How Did You Feel When a Friend, Partner, Employer/Employee Lied to You?

  When someone has lied to you, you probably started to question your relationship and whether they are lying to you again, right?

When a spouse cheated on you, were you able to forgive and forget? Or did it cause you to question when he or she was “working late” or going on a business trip without you?

When an employee or employer lied to you, did you “let it slide,” or did you begin to question future communications with him/her?

What’s most surprising about Trump supporters is that they know he is a habitual liar, yet they “let it slide” again and again and fall in line with his next set of lies. Here are some of the lies that surely they know were lies:

>  He said he didn’t have sex with porn star Stormy Daniels, but Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to paying for her silence and went to prison for it.

>  He excused his Access Hollywood  genital grabbing language as “locker room talk,” then claimed it wasn’t his voice.

>  He described the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “love fest.” I think we know better.

>  It rained on his inauguration, but he claimed the sun came out when he spoke. He claimed his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s despite photos proving otherwise.

>  He said that Covid-19 was a Chinese hoax, intended to help the Democrats.

>  He accidentally said that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, but because he can’t ever admit he was wrong, he not only lied about it with a Sharpie, but he pressured government agencies to confirm his lie.

>  He said the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his political speech at the 2017 Jamboree was “the greatest speech ever made to them,” but a Scouts spokesman said no such call had been made — Scouts honor!

A Trumper might still believe one or two of that short list of Trump’s lies, but my own experience as a human being is that it only takes one lie from someone to make me question everything that person says in the future. I suspect that’s true for Trumpers — except when it comes to Donald Trump.

That’s very cult-like. “Cult-45.”

So, how do you explain that behavior by Trump supporters, if not by saying it’s a cult?

I think it’s largely racial. Trump has been successful by playing on voter’s racial fears — fears triggered by the U.S. Census reporting that we’re approaching a time when white Americans will be in the minority. He compounded that by claiming that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, or worse — a claim that no amount of factchecking would fix, since it played to what his base wanted to believe.

In the 2020 election, Trump pleaded with suburban women that they should love him, because Democrats would end single-family zoning, bringing inner city crime to the suburbs. Again, the race card. But suburban women didn’t buy it in enough numbers to carry the day for Trump in 2020.

So now we come to the Big Lie — that the election which Biden won resoundingly was “stolen” through fraud. Again, the truth doesn’t matter to Trump supporters. Lesson number one from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and other autocrats: repeat a lie often enough and it will be taken as truth.

Trump supporters ultimately should realize they’ve been conned by Trump except for one big thing: he speaks to their fears. They are less wedded to Trump himself than to his philosophy. Tucker Carlson is banking on that.

The one lie which strikes closest to home for me as a journalist, and now a columnist, is that the mainstream media are puppets of the liberal left. I don’t expect any Trumper reading this to be convinced otherwise, and that’s the problem — how to change minds.

The Trump GOP thrives on playing to the fears of its base, but now it’s filling us non-Trumpers with fear that they could succeed, that they could take control of the Congress in 2022 and the White House again in 2024.