Connect the Dots

These things all happened this past week (mostly on Thursday, February 23, 2017):

1. At the CPAC conference, Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon declared they are strong partners and good friends who are working together to advance Trump’s agenda. (No chaos in the White House; it’s a well-oiled machine.)
2. We learned that the White House, in the form of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, asked the FBI to make an announcement that the news reports concerning Trump associates’ contacts with Russia during the campaign were false. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe declined to do so given that the request concerned an ongoing FBI investigation. (Insert ironic comment here.)
3. Also at the CPAC conference, Bannon said that the Trump administration’s goal is to “deconstruct the administrative state” and they will fight “every day” to do so.
4. Also at the CPAC conference, Bannon referred to the media as “globalist, corporatist” and “the opposition.”
5. We learned that Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump blogger prone to screeds and anti-Hillary Clinton fake news peddling , received the White House press credential he had bragged in January that he would get.
6. We learned that Jeff Sessions has ended the Obama-era policy of reducing the federal government’s use of private prisons.
7. A group of men convened in North Carolina to discuss their fears about terrorism in their neighborhood, and openly talked about murdering Muslims.

If we examine each of these news items, we can connect the dots and see that a pattern emerges. Can you guess what it is?

First, the show of Priebus-Bannon unity. It is apparent that Priebus and Bannon felt the need to counter all the negative press about internal chaos and in-fighting and back-stabbing in Trump’s White House. Normally I don’t put much stock in Priebus’s statements, but I do believe him when he and Bannon say that they are aligned to achieve Trump’s agenda. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. Just look at the way he repeats Trump’s threats and lies, and amplifies them and defends them. And if he does not really believe what he is saying, and has some secret internal agenda, what exactly might that agenda be? What is the basis for any misbegotten belief that he is not there to advance the ball for Trump and Bannon? The Chief of Staff role is to advance the President’s agenda; that is his real job. If Priebus were not willing to do that, he should be fired. Priebus isn’t looking to be fired and he is nobody’s hero. He is all in. He is not a voice of reason and he will not temper Trump. He will not resign in protest to defend any legal or constitutional or other principle.

And when Priebus — former RNC chair and embodiment of the Republican establishment — and Bannon — rightwing extremist and proponent of fake news and destruction of the world order — say they are united to move forward the “nationalist” vision of Trump and the GOP, believe them and take heed. What they are telling you is that Trump is the GOP, the GOP is Trump, Bannon and Priebus are the GOP, and the GOP is indeed the far-right nationalist, racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, white-supremacist party they used to try to pretend they were not. No more pretending; no more dog whistles; no more GOP members or spokespeople walking away from nativism and white nationalism — even the pretense of inclusiveness is consigned to the dustbin where they believe “political correctness” belongs. That is what Priebus and Bannon stood before you to say. When they say they want the country “back,” the message could not be clearer: the GOP is the party of white nationalism and all the structural racism, patriarchy, and default Christianity that that implies.

Second, Priebus’s attempt to control the Trump-Russia storyline by contacting the FBI. If you had any doubt as to whether Priebus lacks the moral fiber of a Richardson or a Ruckelshaus, it should be put to rest by his apparent willingness to exhort the the FBI to make a public statement in Trump’s favor about an ongoing investigation. This development would be a shocking one in any other context —had, say, Hillary Clinton done it during the campaign. (Of course, this sentiment itself is one I hear expressed multiple times a week in this brave new world of brazen hypocrisy, corruption, and conflicts of interest.) It is possible that Priebus did not know that DOJ internal guidance prohibits the FBI from commenting on ongoing investigations (after all, Comey broke with longstanding DOJ guidance when he commented publicly and at length on the FBI’s conclusion that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server did not warrant prosecution), but it seems much more likely that a White House chief of staff and former RNC chairman, well-acquainted with the furor surrounding Comey’s conduct in connection with the Clinton investigation last summer, was aware of these rules when he asked FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to intervene to publicly rebut unfavorable media reports of Trump campaign officials’ contacts with Russia during the campaign. (And the Washington Post now reports that when McCabe appropriately declined the request, the White House went to senior Republican lawmakers with access to classified intelligence to request that they dispute the news coverage. Senator Burr gave a quote to the Wall Street Journal.)

I note that Priebus’s constant defense of the conduct of Trump campaign operatives may prove warranted, or it may not. The multiple open investigations into the Trump-Russia ties should resolve that question (although their politicization and Attorney General Sessions’ refusal to recuse himself from the process may call into question any future exoneration of Trump). However, at present there is no basis on which to credit Priebus’s hot representations of “nothing to see here, folks” given the conclusions of the intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the election, Trump’s public embrace of that interference, his subsequent denial of the interference, and the extensive reporting documenting ties between Trump associates and their business contacts with Russians tied to Putin.

Significantly, Priebus is entitled to no benefit of the doubt that his words are truthful given his past eagerness to support Trump’s false claims of voter fraud; his defense of Trump’s false claims about the size of his inauguration attendance; his defense of Trump’s false claim that the media does not cover terrorist attacks; his defense of Trump calling the media “enemies of the people” and his spinning of the Flynn departure as having been based on the conclusion that Flynn lied to Pence. A president who lies like he breathes, and whose advisors repeat and defend those lies, cannot expect to believed when, in the clutch, he is actually desperate for their words to be taken at face value. Based on the smoke swirling around this administration and the constant pattern of lying and broken promises, we simply have no basis on which to credit Trump’s and Preibus’s denials that a fire exists. We would be fools to do so.

Third, the supposed fight to “deconstruct” the “administrative state.” When Bannon says their goal is to destroy the administrative state, he is both telling the truth and lying. He’s truthful insofar as he is referring to the administrative state whose historical purpose has been to effectuate laws Congress has passed for the purpose of improving the lives of Americans . The GOP wants to undo the New Deal and the War on Poverty and the Affordable Health Care Act and other measures put into place to address major societal problems that the private sector has proven incapable of addressing on its own except for a small and privileged few in our society. The GOP wants to remove environmental protections; shift education funding from public schools to religious and other for-profit entities; destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and other anti-poverty programs (especially those seen as disproportionately benefiting people of color); repeal the Affordable Health Care Act; abrogate banking regulations designed to prevent financial collapse and fraud; unwind rules designed to ensure our food and medical products are safe; eliminate rules that prevent discrimination; remove rules designed to ensure workplace safety; etc. It is the aspect of the administrative state that looks to alleviate poverty, starvation, suffering, lack of opportunity, discrimination, fraud, pollution, and unsafe business practices that the GOP seeks to gut and destroy.

This end-goal of destruction is why Trump nominated, and the GOP lock-step confirmed, cabinet secretaries who want to dismantle those agencies or, arguably worse, sabotage them from within by turning them into Orwellian avatars of bureaucratic doublespeak (e.g., a la Delores Umbridge, the EPA will ensure that our waters and air are re-polluted and engage in other actions to destroy the environment rather than protect it; the Dep’t of Education will work to destroy public education by shifting taxpayer funds to private schools; the Dep’t of Health and Human Services will do all it can to ensure people lose access to health care, that poverty among children and the elderly increases, and that people who are starving, especially children, have no access to food or food stamps or nutrition, that poor mothers receive no pre-natal care, etc.). These nominations were intentional as we knew they were. And they have long been the holy grail of the GOP. The undermining of the federal government from within, in the form of under-enforcement and sabotage of Congressional goals, started with Reagan and has only worsened over time.

But let us not confuse hatred of some administrative regulations and federal power — what Bannon derides as “socialism” — with hatred of the administrative state. TrumpBannon and the GOP’s loathing is limited to programs that help people other than their wealthy donors, and in particular to programs that help, in addition to white men, people of color, women, and other historically less privileged groups. When it comes to the military-industrial complex, the private prison industry, the use of the administrative apparatus to award fat contracts for “infrastructure” (without competitive bidding or rules to ensure that companies other than those owned and controlled by friendly donors can participate) and other projects from which Republican donors stand to benefit, when it comes to increasing the power of the state to arrest people of color, to incarcerate people of color, to detain people of color, to deport people of color, to prevent people of color from voting, to search people of color, to seize the assets of dissenters, to prevent the opposing party and especially people of color from peaceful assembly, to use taxpayer funds and public lands to advance the private profits of corporations and of large Republican donors, to permit and endorse discrimination, to elevate Christianity over other religions, the GOP has no interest in “deconstructing” the administrative state. To the contrary, they are for gearing it up and expanding it, while also privatizing and militarizing it. For example, a White House that asks for 15,000 additional agents for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to engage in mass deportations and “force multipliers” has no interest in “deconstructing the administrative state.” That is a White House whose goal is to re-purpose the administrative state to transform the country into more of a police state, all to further entrench white supremacy (“economic nationalism”), under the guise of “law and order” and “national security.”

And if you think the entire GOP is not on board and complicit, think again. It is no accident that GOP-controlled states are introducing legislation to criminalize public protest precisely at the moment that public outcry against TrumpBannon’s, and their own, unpopular policies is growing. These laws depend on police power and a police state, and they are laws offered, again, under the guise of public safety but are an explicit attempt to suppress dissent so that the GOP agenda may be forced down the throats of the public.

Fourth, the assault on the media and drive to delegitimize it as a source of reliable information. No democracy can function and survive without a healthy media to hold the government and its actors accountable. Without the media we would not know about Watergate or Iran-Contra or Duke Cunningham or a host of other perversions of democracy, hypocrisies, and corruption that elected officials have engaged in. We would know nothing about the candidates who run for office and what they do in those offices. The media can’t stop the misconduct, but the media’s freedom creates a constant threat of potential exposure and of a firestorm when misconduct is exposed; it provides the means of the exposure and potential for accountability and change. All individuals are flawed and most are corruptible in any event, but unchecked power and lack of accountability are recipes for corruption, kleptocracy, abuse, fraud, illegal entrenchment, and other anti-democratic outcomes that corrode and undermine our quest for a level playing field and for basis fairness and equality. A healthy media is thus required for a democratic state to flourish.

In addition, of course, an informed citizenry and the ability to criticize the government, express disagreement, and question authority are central to the democratic process. A media that does little more than regurgitate government talking points for the benefit of those in the government is simply a propaganda tool through which power is entrenched and illiberalism spreads. I don’t need to walk anyone through the correlation between authoritarian/fascist states and disembowelment of the press. And when the president of a democracy that has until recently been a beacon of hope and freedom calls the press the “enemy of the people” — using the precise language of dictators who have murdered journalists and suppressed dissent in their own countries, and slavishly praising for his “leadership skills” a current authoritarian whose critics have ended up dead and who has succeeded in suppressing a formerly-burgeoning free press in Russia — he is invoking a dangerous history of fascism, oppression, murder and totalitarianism in a specific, and specifically threatening, way. The threat is unmistakable. It is a direct threat not only to the media and the journalists who function within it (journalists dubbed enemies of the state historically have been murder targets and victims), but to a free and democratic society. Do not mistake Trump’s statements as a war on only the media, or part of a deft if disturbing strategy, although it is both of those as well. It is a war on freedom and on liberty itself.

(Trump’s threat also followed multiple furious denunciations of the press by his team — after the media reported accurately on the inaugural crowd size and Women’s March size, Spicer attacked the press and Bannon said the media should “keep its mouth shut”; after the press reported on the Muslim ban executive order, demonstrations against the order, and judicial rebukes of the order, perennially adolescent bigot and Trump advisor Stephen Miller warned the media that Trumps’ powers “will not be questioned”; Kellyanne Conway suggested journalists should be fired for not covering Trump more favorably; etc.)

Here is what is going on, and they are pretty open about it. They want to destablilize and destroy any notion of objective fact or truth. Facts are now “liberal” or “conservative” — simply “alternative” versions of reality. This way, they can swat away news stories that reveal misconduct or simply reflect negatively upon them as “fake news.” Fox and Breitbart appear to have already convinced their partisans that negative news reports about Trump are lies. Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway and other collaborators in these untruths are foot soldiers in the attack on the concept that there is any truth separate from what they and Donald Trump want you to believe. The premise of Trump’s candidacy is itself a lie — that the United States is in decline, crime is up, the economy is failing, immigrants are pouring across the borders, our military is depleted, the U.S.’s standing went down under Obama, climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese, Trump can “bring back” manufacturing jobs that went overseas 30 years ago—none of which is true. News media that reports that these statements are untrue must be attacked as “fake” and “against” Trump; Trump inverts reality so that, every time he is called for a lie, it not Trump who lies, but the media who does. This way, all criticism can be lied away as the lies of a partisan press out to get the dear leader.

We see how this works in contexts from the mundane to the extraordinary, all serving the same end: the media attacks operate together with the underlying lie to undermine the media itself and any opposition to the TrumpBannonGOP agenda, and thus to reinforce the lie, and thereby structurally reinforce their power and set the stage for their abuse of that power:

• The mundane: Trump lied about the size of the attendance at his inauguration. He was visibly and viscerally upset that his crowd size was substantially less than Obama’s and substantially less than that of the Women’s March on the following day. He even lied about the weather itself. When the media called him out on it, the White House his press secretary, Sean Spicer, attacked the media for being out to get Trump and took no responsibility for even acknowledged the pathetic spectacle of the newly-elected president whining and lying about his attendance size. The astonishing and disturbing prospect of a brand-new president and his team offended by the fact that his crowd size was not large — which could hardly have been a big surprise given his historic unpopularity and divisiveness — and then lying about it, became the story because that conduct is unprecedented and unacceptable in a democracy. But Spicer and Priebus and Conway deflected by attacking the media for reporting Trump’s lie an and Spicer’s lie. But what kind of a democratic state would we be if the media dutifully went along and lied to their audiences that the sun magically came out when Trump started speaking (even though those of us who watched it live saw it raining), and the media claimed that crowds that were not there were there (even though those of us who watched in live so all those empty stands and streets)?

Yet if you look on rightwing social media, they promulgated the lies and thousands (millions?) of Trump followers apparently really believe he had a huge crowd size. Pictures of Barack Obama’s inauguration in the sunshine were grafted onto stories about Trump’s inauguration to support Trump’s false claims about his crowd size. Do you think those people took the time to compare the gorgeous sunshine of inauguration day 2009 with the actual footage from the grey drizzle of 2017 to unpack the lie? Or, instead, did the lie take hold to support the myth among those who want to believe it that Trump is wildly popular and that those who oppose him are in the minority and are sore losers who are paid by Soros to show up at rallies across the United States and the entire world? You know the answer. So even that mundane little lie — the absurd, embarrassing lie seemingly born of Trump’s bottomless narcissism and need for dominance, served a purpose. Among the base, the lie took hold as truth and further cemented their distrust of the media, who were portrayed as trying to make him look bad.

• The extraordinary: The reporting that Russia interfered with the U.S. election, combined with the facts that Trump was the intended beneficiary of that interference, publicly endorsed that interference, has business ties to Russia, has repeatedly praised Putin, hired a number of pro-Putin advisors for his campaign, attacked the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence agencies concerning Russian interference, received a briefing about a secret dossier that the FBI and the CIA were concerned raised potential blackmail issues for him, and knew or had no problem with his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, discussing the newly-imposed-by-Obama sanctions on Russia with the Russian ambassador, are all utterly shocking and unprecedented events that, if they appeared in a John le Carre novel, we would think were too crazy to be believed. Trump’s response has been no less extraordinary; rather than promise an open investigation into election interference by a foreign power to to ensure that our elections are safe from foreign meddling, he denied the interference, attacked our intelligence agencies, threatened to reorganize them, falsely stated he had no ties to and nothing to do with Russia, appointed Rex Tillerson, and attacked the press repeatedly for reporting on many of these developments, dismissing them as “fake news” and the media outlets that broke the stories as “failing” or “declining” or “fake.”

The bigger and more shocking the stories about Trump, the more histrionic his and his team’s attacks on the media have become. Their desire to thoroughly discredit the media is clear: because the issues are so serious, and so shocking, raising the possibility of illicit collusion with a foreign government to undermine the integrity of a U.S. election, and possibly even of treason, and by definition, if true, raising the specter of impeachment and fundamental illegitimacy; and because Trump and his team recognize that this specter casts a long shadow over his administration, and because Trump’s own actions are not consistent with those of someone even remotely committed to ensuring our elections are free from foreign influence or that his own actions are untainted by the appearance of a conflict of interest, Trump and his team attack the media for exposing those conflicts and for reporting on their conduct. It’s an old tactic: if you can’t respond with substance, attack the messenger as a liar, to deflect from the merit of the reporting itself. But the old tactic is taken to new heights, because the messenger is now considered any media outlet that covers Trump in a way he deems to be negative (i.e., when the media outlet reports facts). Trump’s demonization of the media resonates with his base, and allows him to avoid the concerns of those who ordinarily would be deeply disturbed at the prospect of a hostile foreign nation interfering in our election and potentially our national security, by convincing them the reporting is lies by a dishonest media out to get him.

This strategy of attempting to erase objective facts that are damaging to them and recast them as lies is also a gateway to authoritarianism, suppression of dissent, and GOP political entrenchment at all levels. If the media is “dishonest” and peddling “fake news” designed to undermine Trump, then none of those facts need be believed and objective facts that might drive another man from office will have no effect. The craven collaborators in the GOP will support him as long as their constituents want them to, and if their faith in him is unshaken, regardless of the facts, the GOP will not uphold their own oaths to protect and uphold the Constitution. Attacking the media is thus a critical part of the TrumpBannon strategy; if the messengers are themselves liars, Trump need not respond to the allegations or change his conduct; calling the media liars also enhances the bonds between Trump and his supporters, who are all in this together in their loathing of the “liberal media” whose sole goal is to undermine him. And all criticism and all negative information is dismissed and dismissable as partisan lies.

Within the attacks are implied and explicit threats. First, there is the explicit threat that unless the media adjusts its coverage, and asks “nice” or softball questions that are uncomplicated and designed make Trump look good, the journalists will either not be called on or will be barred from access. We see those threats have been acted upon against The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, among others—the news outlets that have broken the stories about Trump and Russia. Second, there is the implied threat that the administration will seek to curtail first amendment rights. Third, there is the implied threat that comes from the administration’s tacit endorsement of the repeated physical and other threats that Trump supporters have made against individual journalists whose reporting they think is insufficiently favorable to Trump and his family.

Repackaging that the threats, as Priebus has done repeatedly, by pivoting to attacking the news media as “fake news” every time they report something unfavorable about Trump and the administration; declaring the media the “enemy of the people,” as Trump has done; calling the media “the opposition,” as Bannon has done; excoriating the press for accurately reporting on crowd size, as Spicer did; expecting Trump to be “praised” for finally issuing a statement denouncing anti-Semitism, after weeks of failing to do so and having to be pressured into making the statement at all, as Spicer did — all of this is extremely dangerous. While the conduct likely reflects the fears and cowardice of a weak leader afraid of the facts and unable to deal effectively with his critics, the dangers are clear. We are talking about the beginning of an attempt to supplant a free press with a supine propaganda machine that will allow those in power to do and say whatever they want without consequences.

Fifth, giving a press credential to a pro-Trump fake-news spreading blogger who does not even pretend to be a journalist. This development serves two intertwined purposes. The first is favorable, sycophantic coverage that would make Kim Jong Un or Vladmir Putin proud. That is what Trump wants and needs; that is what a dictator demands. He cannot bear the unfavorable press, so he will largely replace it with supporters willing to lie and spin for him. The second purpose is that the more actual journalists seeking to adhere to journalistic standards are supplanted by partisans, conspiracy theorists and actual purveyors of fake news, the more the legitimate media is undermined. The very act of giving a press credential to someone willing to spread fawning palaver undermines real journalists and journalism and serves the purpose of reinforcing the argument that all coverage is just partisan bias. And, of course, giving greater “legitimacy,” however ill-deserved, to a hack, elevates the hack’s profile more, giving him more power and a greater platform to spread his lies. This is the de-stabilization of institutions and the undermining of any shared notions of facts and reality that Bannon pushed for with Breitbart News, on steroids. It serves Bannon’s agenda well, and is a recipe for increased tribalism and undermining democracy.

Sixth, the Trump administration’s embrace of for-profit, private prisons. The Obama Justice Department concluded that private prisons are less safe, less secure, more costly, and have fewer programs than government prisons, and decided on a path to phase them out. And, at least during the campaign, there appeared to be an emerging bipartisan consensus that the prison population in the U.S. needs to be reduced. Private prisons have come under widespread criticism not only for their conditions, but because they create perverse incentives for the private prison industry to support lengthier sentencing and other policies purely for the purpose of profiteering . Yet Jeff Sessions opposes criminal justice reform and defended his change in policy on the ground that the federal government needs to be flexible for future increased incarceration needs. Former Sessions aides are lobbyists for the private prison companies who stand to gain from this policy reversal; those companies donated to Trump’s inauguration and pumped money into the election on behalf of Trump. And why would Sessions and investors think incarcerations will increase and “necessitate” private prisons? See the third point, above: Trump is not shutting down the administrative state; he is expanding and weaponizing it against vulnerable segments of society and those who do not support him. And that means profits for the Republican donors like CoreCivic, Inc. and GeoGroup, Inc. who are currently paying aides who were working for Sessions in 2016.

Seventh, the public expression of a desire to murder Muslims. At a meeting in North Carolina this week, a group a rightwing men met to discuss their concerns about Islam:

Those present laid out a scenario based on false representations of Islam and tangled conspiracy theories suggesting mainstream Muslims were stealthily plotting to kill non-believers.

Jones told the audience that the Muslim Brotherhood required every Muslim to participate in jihad, and that “any Muslim — that means Muslims right here in this area, all over this country — any Muslim who opposes these goals or these methods is called a kafir, which is a nonbeliever, apostate, Muslim who has given up on Islam. That’s a sin punishable by death.”

Robert Goodwill, who identified himself as a member of the group Act for America — described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in America” — added for good measure: “By the way, you’re all kafirs.”

Near the end of the presentation, Del Valle asked Jones: “Do you have any recommendations as to how we could stop this? Because my only recommendation is to start killing the hell out of them.”

Goodwill attempted to steer the discussion away from violence, noting that the election of Donald Trump was a positive development for their cause.

“There’s a huge pushback coming,” Goodwill said. “Political correctness is being thrown away. A lot of people are meeting like this. We’re making progress in the positive direction.”

“I am beyond that point,” Del Valle replied. “I’m ready to start taking people out.”

Goodwill responded, “I can understand that. We’re not there yet.”

Note the use of the word “yet.” Murder on the basis of religion was openly advocated for; no one condemned it. It did not, apparently, occur to anyone there that an inevitable consequence of the language and rhetoric they were using was violence, and that, perhaps, less apocalyptic language was called for. Instead, the clamor for blood was soothed away as something that might come down the line; the first step was rejection of the “political correctness” that would permit their Islamic neighbors to practice their religion in peace. The president of the United States is explicitly considered an ally in their fear and loathing of Islam.

I do not know whether this reporting is known to Trump or his White House team, though it seems unlikely. If it is, he has not condemned it, and it seems unlikely he would. Trump and his team (especially Steve Bannon and Trump’s forced-out National Security Advisor, the Islamophobe Michael Flynn) have spoken often and negatively about Islam, reveling in their use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” (which Lt. Gen. McMaster his new National Security Advisor, fortunately recognizes is “counterproductive”), consciously stoking fear of terrorism specifically by Muslims, looking to exploit any act of mass violence as an act of terrorism by “Islamists” and an excuse to incite Islamophobia, fabricating terrorist attacks, falsely accusing the media of under-reporting such incidents, suggesting that desperate refugees of war-torn areas with large Muslim populations should be turned away based on their faith, awhile ignoring acts of terrorism and other forms of violence committed by white men against people of color and in particular against Muslims. Indeed,they are reducing the monitoring white supremacist hate groups who pose a significant threat of domestic terrorism. This conduct, along with Steve Bannon’s apparent desire for a clash between the West and “Islam”, Trump’s call for a Muslim registry, and the Trump team’s false suggestions that the U.S. under Obama did not been properly vet refugees or sufficiently combat terrorism, serve as the backdrop for Trump’s fear-mongering, his Muslim ban, and his plans to aggressively expand and use the administrative state against immigrants, particularly immigrants of color.

When the president uses his bully pulpit to demonize a religion and its adherents, to push a narrative that Muslims are to be feared and that the U.S. is under assault from within, his words have consequences. The words, as we see, are the drivers of his policy. The more the words are spoken and normalized, the more those words tap into the veins of fear, resentment, and racism in this country, the more support builds among his supporters for policies based on and justified by that shared demonization. A president should look to unite the citizenry, find our common humanity, attempt to minimize violence. Trump does the opposite; he openly promoted and incited violence against protesters during the campaign; and his rejection of criticism and attacks on those who disagree with him as “enemies” and “opponents,” his open racism and Islamophobia, are open invitations to others to do the same. And so the embrace of fear and racism, even open advocacy of murder, is where we are now. Meanwhile, the Muslim citizens of this country, and many others, live in fear for their rights and their lives.

The disdain for “political correctness” has never been about words. It comes from antipathy to being expected to use language that respects difference — language that has as its goal treating everyone as equal, entitled to respect and bodily integrity. Those who consider it constraining when there are consequences — such as shaming — to deploying speech that denigrates their fellow human beings on the basis of their color, or gender, or ethnicity, or gender, or sexuality, or other factors, want to be able to voice their disgust for difference without opprobrium from those who recognize this as wrong. They want the capacity to enact policies privileging them over the groups they scorn. Rejecting political correctness is not about language. It is about power and control and hegemony.

Trump has given millions permission to bring hate out of the shadows, but he has also done far worse. He has brought hate into the White House in the form of Bannon and Miller; he is enacting it into policy based on lies that “law and order” and terrorism necessitate those policies — when in fact crime is down; immigration is down; refugees are already vetted. He is ratifying the fears and ignorance of citizens and giving license to them to act upon those fears. And his embrace of rightwing white nationalist extremists and Islamophobes like Bannon and Miller and Flynn, his reliance on dangerous conspiracy theories over facts, his support and amplification of those dangerous conspiracy theories, his unapologetic use of racist, xenophobic, and Islamophic speech, all work together to send a clear message that are country has been lost to “the other”; and that “fighting every day” to “take our country back” means ensuring (by force if necessary) that this country is a white, Christian nation — and that its financial rewards will be secured for the benefit of that group. Fear, and the promise of this reward, are the keys to the buy-in required for ordinary Republicans supporters to look the other way as TrumpBannon and the GOP violate the democratic values and norms that have undergirded and guided this country for years.

*****

TrumpBannon seeks to destroy the liberal state and replace it with an authoritarian-lite version of illiberal democracy in which wealthy, primarily white, men and their wives reap most of the economic rewards, and in which Republicans who are elected to office or support those who are rewarded by redistributing public resources into their own hands and those of private donors — whether in the form of private prison contracts, or infrastructure projects handpicked by Trump’s business partners, or juicy defense contracts, or permission to drill on public lands, or regressive tax structures in which the poor pay a disproportionate amount of the costs of government and fund pro-wealthy policies, or exemption from/elimination of regulations requiring corporations to pay for the costly damage they inflict on the environment and, thus, on the population.

To achieve this goal, structural white supremacy and patriarchy are required and that, in turn, requires a massive rollback of civil rights of the groups who have fought so long and so hard to chip away at it — from women to African-Americans to Latinos to LGBTQIA people to the disabled and beyond. “Taking your country back” ensures that the less privileged whites who will be otherwise deeply damaged by the evisceration of the liberal administrative state remain invested enough in the white supremacist structure to support it despite being lower down in the privilege hierarchy than the wealthy who will receive the majority of the economic rewards. Investment in that structure requires blaming “the other” for the soaring economic income inequality and wage stagnation that have bedeviled this country for the last few decades.

Those of us who opposed Trump’s candidacy, and who oppose the GOP in general, do so because, among other reasons, we recognized that their agenda is to abrogate our rights and continue the pattern of massive income inequality for a privileged few. The widespread demonstrations that have accompanied Trump’s ascendance are a direct reaction not only to the verbal assaults of misogyny and bigotry that Trump inflicted on us during the campaign, but to the prospect of his pursuit of an agenda rooted in those views and that is inimical to our rights, our freedom, and our lives. Trump’s, the GOP’s, and the rightwing news media’s attempts to cast our legitimate fears and anger as the whining of sore losers, and as dangerous, is all part of the lying messaging that animates this White House and the GOP itself: tax cuts for the rich are the answer to everything; crime is at an all-time high; the the dissenters are not legitimate; they are paid; they have no reason to be angry; they are in the minority; they are themselves minorities and therefore their votes and their concerns are not legitimate; if they believe something, it must not be true; etc.

And media stories that highlight Trump’s unpopularity and that are otherwise unfavorable to Trump, and facts that cast doubt on his legitimacy threaten his ability to achieve the GOP agenda. A media narrative that exposes his corruption and gives voice to public outcry and dissatisfaction is not acceptable; only a media narrative that serves as a mouthpiece for his agenda is acceptable. The attacks on the press, the judiciary, anyone who criticizes him is part of a broader plan to suppress dissent, suppress the Democratic vote in 2018 and beyond, and permanently entrench Republicans who continue to be elected even when they destroy their states’ economies. Demonization of the press and all things “liberal”, dismissal of news organizations and government programs favored by liberals, is also a means of destabilizing what ought to be bipartisan support for our country’s institutions, for democratic values and norms, for ensuring that our elections have integrity, our national security and intelligence agencies are not compromised by politics, our president is not acting to further his own business interests, and our elected officials pursue policies for the betterment of all Americans, not simply to advance the economic interests of the privileged few.

The attacks on the press as liberal fake news, and the destruction of the liberal administrative state in favor of white economic nationalism and a ramped up police state, go hand in hand with the unsubtle appeals to authoritarianism and the fear-mongering that is used to justify the purported need for law and order that will be used disproportionately against people of color to keep us in line. And all of it is about one thing only: the arrogation and entrenchment of power and the economic benefits that are engineered to go with that power.

Connect the dots. Follow the money. Resist.