Court Drama

The civil war has started, apparently, but it's all on their side. I mean, they're fighting over who owns Trump, at least initially, between Laura Loomer, the self-described embodiment of MAGA, and Elon Musk, the embodiment of billionaires; who's going to be Trump's "sidepiece" as Loomer startlingly puts it, though I'm not sure she means us to understand the word the way I understand it, or whether she's aware how three months ago some of us thought she was advertising herself as the emperor's sidepiece in the traditional sense, speaking of stage 5 clingers:

No one can keep former President Donald Trump away from Laura Loomer.

Throughout his third presidential campaign, aides and advisers have done their best to shield him from Loomer, a far-right social media influencer, and similar figures who stroke his ego and stoke his basest political instincts. (NBC News, September 13)

Now it turns out there's an ideological component to the conflict, over the question of immigration. This goes back to last Sunday (as I learn from Heather Cox Richardson), when Trump named a member of the Musk-Andreesen-Ackman circle, Sriram Krishnan, as a senior White House adviser on artificial intelligence, and Loomer issued an angry protest the next day. Krishnan was born in India himself, and has advocated making it easier for US companies (thinking especially of the tech industry) to hire foreign workers on H-1B visas. This caused an explosion of rage in the nativist caucus of the Republican party—the part where Loomer and Stephen Bannon live—who wanted to know why foreigners were being preferred over the American-born:

Democratic Militancy

 

NSDAP meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller, Munich, 1923. Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann, via Wikimedia Commons.

In October 1923, as everybody knows, a conspiracy of members of the National Socialist German Workers Party, its SA paramilitary force, and some rightwing army officers marched on the Munich headquarters of the German VII Military District (covering the state of Bavaria), with the plan of taking over the city militarily and using it as the base for a march on the national capital of Berlin, in emulation of Benito Mussolini's March on Rome of exactly a year earlier, in the hope of replacing Germany's five-year-old attempt at democracy with a Mussolini-style autocracy. The ensuing battle with the police and a group of loyalist soldiers did not work out very well for the Nazis, who lost 15 dead, but not so badly for their leader, 34-year-old Adolf Hitler, who earned a five-year sentence of Festunghaft, a particularly mild form of imprisonment, later reduced for good behavior to eight months (the same as the time Dinesh D'Souza did!), all the time he, Emil Maurice, and Karl Hess needed to draft Mein Kampf, published in 1925-26.

One other upshot of the incident for Hitler was his determination that next time, if there was a next time, he'd do it entirely by the book, as he told a courtroom in 1930: "The National Socialist Movement will seek to attain its aim in this state by constitutional means. The constitution shows us only the methods, not the goal. In this constitutional way, we will try to gain decisive majorities in the legislative bodies in order, in the moment this is successful, to pour the state into the mould that matches our ideas." (Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1998) "Now we are strictly legal!" exclaimed Goebbels.

I used to think it was funny how Trump followed this procedure backwards, starting his political career by getting elected to the presidency more or less legitimately, and ending it with an illegal adventure even more ill-planned, shambolic, and doomed than the Beer Hall Putsch.

For the Record: Legitimate Political Discourse

 

Cool variant on Lévi-Strauss's famous analysis in which the stories of the Theban cycle are shown as simultaneously present in the myth, like the voices in a musical score. Via John Phillips, National University of Singapore.

Structuralism continues to be bon à penser!

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

That's after Claude Lévi-Strauss, the totem hero of structural anthropology, who said that mythology is "bon à penser", "good to think", in the same way as we say certain foods are "good to eat". In the same way, structural anthropology itself can be "good to think"  I've been working on an example that's interesting, I think, with reference to gloomy comparisons between the 1923 Nazi coup attempt in Munich and the 2021 Republican coup attempt in Washington—it's gloomy because it gets the relationship upside down.

Beer Hall Putsch has always been the best Jan 6 comparison

— Paul Lerner (@PFLerner) February 6, 2022

2016 immature movement seizes power constitutionally, with aid of moribund conservative establishment
2020 moribund movement attempts to retain power extraconstitutionally, with aid of (uncooperative) miltary

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Trump was an old fool in 2016 who failed to learn that constitutionalism had led him to success and did everything worse on his second round.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Literary Corner: Tucker In

Jephtah Killing his Daughter Judges 1, from the Maciejowski Bible (France, c. 1250), via Pneuma Review.

Thoughts on His Receiving Support From White Nationalist Institutions Like David Duke and the Daily Stormer Website For His Denunciation of Imaginary South African White Genocide

by Tucker Carlson

Joseph Stalin loved his daughter.
I love my daughters. Does that
make me a Stalinist? That's such a
stupid question I don't know what to say.

(AP via Lincoln Journal-Star)

Moral: Don't ask yourself stupid questions. Let somebody else do it.

How does that analogy work, though, exactly? "Nazis love me. I love myself. Does that make me a Nazi?" Well, no, that's not a valid syllogism, but. If a father's love—Iosif Vissarionovich's or Tucker's— for his daughter is a good analogy for a Nazi's love for Tucker, what's good about it? How does it work? Are we saying the Nazi's love for Tucker is warm, sweet, chaste, and somehow inevitable? Are we saying nothing could be more natural, unless it's Tucker loving Tucker? And why would that be?

For the Record: Fart Act and Other Disasters

Trump had to double down, of course, and say it was done on purpose, a message to the Fake Media, though he obviously couldn't say clearly what the message was ("Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares"), or explain why her communications director had said there was no message and her stylist was completely unfamiliar with the jacket. He's really trying to convince us that he was in control of whatever it was. I believe Trump would rather be accused of almost anything, no matter how gross, than admit that a woman got out ahead of him. 

Trump is about to blow up the global trading regime with an unsettling FART Act. https://t.co/tgDZxQSE2V

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 1, 2018

When I was first working in Singapore, the National University moved from the ancient hill of Bukit Timah to a new campus in the south of the island, everything very shiny and new, and in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences every office door was equipped with a bright brass plaque displaying the room number, ASS 1, ASS 2, etc. As a representative American, I quietly let the Dean know he had a problem, and the faulty acronym was replaced with something else, with Singaporean efficiency, basically overnight, before we moved in.

This kind of thing can happen in a densely multilingual society, where people up and down the hierarchy share enough languages to give and receive orders but not necessarily the ones they need to get the job done. In my later career as a magazine editor I found that the art direction staff were always graduates of Chinese-language schools, while the editorial were inevitably from English-language ones, and crucial miscommunications could take place, though none quite that funny.

For the Record: Can you name one rightwing group persecuted by Hitler?

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1883, The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, via Wikipedia.

Yes, because Hitler was right wing who killed leftists and he can't name a single RW group the Nazis targeted. #TheBigLie

— 🃏The Joker 🃏🏴 (@ATrueJoker) October 5, 2017

Yes, I can! Hitler targeted the churches and imprisoned or killed innumerable Christians who resisted Nazism in the name of their faith https://t.co/SxzyEWz1Pz

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017

I love that. "I can so!"

But can he? It's true that most of the 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau (of 160,000 prisoners total, over 100,000 of them political prisoners) were Catholic priests, but I don't find any record of any of them being killed, while Nazis killed between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons and 2,500-5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses (because of their refusal to swear fealty to the Reich)...

Wait, you define Christianity as "a rightwing group"?

For the record: The last of Sanger

Still from Margaret Sanger's lost 1917 film Birth Control. dramatizing her arrest and jailing for violation of the Comstock Act by providing contraception to patients at her Brownsville Clinic in Brooklyn, 1916. Via Margaret Sanger Papers.

A kind of last word on the subject of Margaret Sanger and her support for sterilization of the "feeble-minded" popped into my head, right out of real life.

Her highest priority was for CHOICE (except for the intellectually disabled she believed were unable to choose, which I agree was wrong)

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

That cliché demurrer at the end won me a like from my interlocutor, but I didn't really feel good about it.

Still, when you think about it long-term birth control was unavailable then. I have a somewhat severely retarded nephew in his 30s...

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

they've been together a long time, it's good for them. Having a kid really wouldn't be.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

We say girls—young women beneath the age of statutory consent—can't "make a choice" to have sex. This is why we prosecute their seducers for rape. Similarly lots of states have statutory rape laws dealing with sexual abuse of women with intellectual disabilities. The legal standard focuses on when such women have the "capacity of consent". We can have a discussion of whether they can consent to sex but we can't discuss whether they can consent to having a child?

They didn't have hormonal birth control in Margaret Sanger's time, or IUDs, just condoms and cervical caps, and using those was against federal law after the 1873 Comstock Act, which was being rigorously enforced by the beginning of the 20th century. Sanger's great cause was to change that, and give women of all classes the ability to make their own choice as to whether to have a child or not, positive and negative.

The "feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic" were a pretty peripheral part of her quest, and I don't know whether she thought it was a good thing for them to have sex, as I do, but she knew that they would, and she didn't contemplate trying to stop them. At the same time she didn't believe they should have to "make that choice", so she thought it was a good idea to give them tubal ligations or vasectomies and didn't think it was necessary to ask their consent (keep in mind that the concept of informed medical consent didn't exist, either—it only dates back to 1957). Even if she did use the language of "racial betterment", she absolutely rejected the concept of racial or religious identity as grounds for sterilization, unlike Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill and Calvin Coolidge and the rest of the eugenics movement. I really can't see any more how her thinking has anything to do with Nazis and their plans for Jewish and Roma genocide. It has to do more with my nephew.

For the Record: More D'Souza Lies

Tivadar Soros, 1894-1968, bon vivant and combatant against fascism. One of the reasons I can't leave Dinesh D'Souza alone.

Bogus. A journal Sanger quit in 1929 published questionable articles in 1933. No connection to her. https://t.co/y8KpDylWpK pic.twitter.com/XE66N3Ipq9

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 22, 2017

Sanger joined anti-Nazi movement in 1933. In Germany Nazis (anti-birth control) burned her books. pic.twitter.com/27glaikSv4

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 22, 2017

And some George Soros below the fold: