In front of the White House, Nov. 13, 2020. (Ted Eytan, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
While Americans get stoked into a mutual tribal partisan loathing by a corporate media, Jonathan Cook says the elite enjoy a free hand to pillage the planet and the commons.
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
It is a fitting end to four years of Donald Trump in the White House.
On one side, Trump’s endless stoking of political grievances — and claims that November’s presidential election was “stolen” from him — spilled over into a mob storming the U.S. Capitol. They did so in the forlorn hope of disrupting the certification process of the Electoral College vote, which formally declared his opponent, Joe Biden, the winner.
On the other side, the Democratic Party instituted a second, unprecedented impeachment process in the slightly less forlorn hope of foreclosing any possibility of him running again in 2024.
Russia wants us to know it is very much against Trump impeachment. https://t.co/tpvVJtXewT
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) January 12, 2021
Barely concealing its alliance with the then-incoming Biden administration, Silicon Valley shut down Trump’s social media megaphone. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lobbied the Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut an “unhinged” Trump out of the chain of command, in a move that was reportedly rejected out of hand by Pentagon officials because, they told The New York Times, it would amount to a “military coup.”
And Biden, who boasts that he was the author the Patriot Act years before 9/11, has been touting a new “domestic terrorism” bill, as though the U.S. did not already have a plethora of ways to crack down on dissent, of both the legitimate and the illegitimate varieties.
With that as the backdrop, Washington, D.C., designated Biden’s inauguration last month a “national special security event.”
Authoritarian Tribes
None of this is just the latest sign that the U.S. political system has degenerated into tawdry theater. It is growing evidence that U.S. politics is devolving into a permanent confrontation between two authoritarian tribes. Both are convinced that the other side is un-American, perverting the true republic. Both are unwilling to compromise, believing they share no common ground. And ultimately both are fighting for a rotten cause.
In any other moment, it would not be hard to understand why it's incredibly menacing to have elected officials supported by Silicon Valley publicly demanding that those mega-corporations use their monopoly power to silence adversaries. But as was true after 9/11, anything goes: https://t.co/OwhHfuvKTf
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 11, 2021
This is not a divide between ethical and unethical politics. This clash is now a bitter grudge match. It is civil war by other means. Not only is the chasm between these rival camps widening, but the real criminals are making off — as they always do — with the loot.
Each tribe has been coalescing for a while now around a center of gravity. On the Republican side that became clear with the emergence of the Tea Party and the birther movement during President Barack Obama’s tenure. But it took Trump’s election as president in 2016 to create a proper oppositional center of gravity on the other side.
Those in the Democratic tribe who now disdain Trump and his supporters for their desperate refusal to accept November’s result overlook how they greeted Trump’s victory in 2016. They struggled against the legitimacy of that outcome too, even if they did not resort to the overt violence of the mob at the Capitol.
It began with arguments that, while Trump might have won the Electoral College vote, he lost the popular vote. Four years ago, the Electoral College also faced self-serving accusations that it had disenfranchised the majority.
The presidency is the only office where you can get more votes & still lose. It's time to end the Electoral College. https://t.co/OXZ9vHaIH1
— Sen. Barbara Boxer (@SenatorBoxer) November 15, 2016
The Democratic tribe took to the streets as well, in protest marches in cities across the U.S. under the banner of the Resistance, denying Trump was their president. That was understandable, given his personal behavior and the policies he advocated. But it did not end there.
Russian Conspiracies
The disavowal of the Trump presidency quickly regressed into a dangerous narrative — one that has never properly gone away, despite the dearth of evidence to support it. The claim was not only that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win, but that Trump himself had actively colluded with Russia to steal the election from his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Anything that had damaged Clinton — including emails showing that the Democratic leadership rigged its own primaries to make sure she was the party’s candidate rather than Bernie Sanders — got sucked into that vast conspiracy theory. That included the messenger of these bad tidings: WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
Would Trump have won without Russia’s help? Wikileaks was THE negative drumbeat of the last month against Hillary. We don’t really know but seems legit answer to say no. https://t.co/3TZyVQDKLK
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) January 1, 2018
For years, the Democratic tribe has invested its considerable energies in fruitless efforts to prove its theory, including the first bid to remove Trump through an entirely self-defeating impeachment process.
None of this could be justified politically. It was a Democrat counterpoint to Trump’s MAGA slogan: “Make America Great Again”. Democrats promised the much less catchy SAPD: “Save America from President Deplorable.”
Can you imagine how much better off we’d be right now if Trump was convicted the first time he was impeached?
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) January 14, 2021
Antagonistic Tango
For this tribe, Trump was an illegitimate president from the outset, one whose election to the highest office in the land revealed something unwholesome about their country they preferred to avert their gaze from because it might implicate them too. Removing Trump largely eclipsed the struggle to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.
The obsession with Trump above everything else seemingly rationalized any means — fair or foul — to be rid of him. Few thought about how this would look to his supporters or to those not already safely ensconced in one or other tribe.
To understand, they now need only look to the storming of the Capitol How they felt watching the building being ransacked — a Deplorable putting his feet up contemptuously on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk — was how Trump’s tribe felt watching their president being denounced as a Russian agent and dragged through impeachment proceedings.
Rioter takes over Nancy Pelosi’s desk – Saul Loeb/Getty pic.twitter.com/OMC7B8zWIR
— Anthony Quintano (@AnthonyQuintano) January 6, 2021
This mood is not likely to dissipate. The two political tribes are locked in an antagonistic tango, mirroring each other’s moves, each other’s grudges, each other’s sense of victimhood. Much more unites them than they would ever care to admit.
Festering Culture War
This may be the pathology, but what of the cause.
What we see here is the culmination of a festering culture war stoked by an unhealthy investment by both sides in a simple-minded and highly divisive identity politics.
Much has correctly been made of the white supremacism of the most loyal sections of Trump’s tribe, and that was on show again during the invasion of the Capitol. The Confederate flag, the neo-Nazi slogans, the T-shirts extolling the Jewish supremacy of Israel are all indicators of a toxic politics of white grievance that may be less articulated but is still felt by a wider swath of Trump’s supporting constituency.
Man holding Confederate flag in Capitol arrested https://t.co/uDZZcWt6tP
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 14, 2021
This ugly identity politics is rightly rejected by the other tribe, but is nonetheless mirrored in its equally deep commitment to identity politics. The progressive coalition of identities at the core of the Democratic Party may be more reassuring to modern sensibilities, but has served in practice to accentuate to parts of the Trump tribe the supposed threat to their white identity.
This is not to equate the justified struggle of Black Lives Matter against endemic racism, including in the police, with the reactionary forces seeking to preserve some notion of white privilege. It is to simply observe that when the political field of battle exclusively revolves around identity, then one cannot be surprised if each side continues to frame its struggle in precisely those terms.
Those who live by the identity sword are likely to die by that same sword.
The Trump tribe want their president, and the Republican Party more generally, to guarantee a white supremacism they fear is being eroded as the Democrat Party flaunts its progressive, multicultural credentials. The Democrat tribe, meanwhile, wants to challenge the old order — and most especially reactionary institutions like local police forces — that have been an oppressive bulwark against change.
This dynamic can lead only to permanent confrontation, bitterness and alienation.
Class Struggle
There is a way out of the dead-end culture war that pits one tribe against the other. It is to formulate an alternative, popular politics based on class struggle — the 99 percent against the 1 percent. But neither the Republican nor the Democratic leaderships, or the respective medias that cheerlead them, has any interest in encouraging a political realignment of this sort.
The Democratic Party is not a vehicle for class struggle, after all. Like the Republican Party, it is designed to preserve the privileges of an elite. Its biggest donors, like the Republicans’, are drawn from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, the arms industries. The political battle in the United States is between two parties of capital united by far more than divides them.
The shadow play of U.S. politics is the enervating, antagonistic confrontation of identities described above. While ordinary Americans get stoked into a mutual tribal loathing by a corporate media that profits from this theatre of hate, the elite enjoys a free hand to pillage the planet and the commons.
“Media firms work backward. They first ask, ‘How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?’ Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.” https://t.co/pI593aN6Xe
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 11, 2021
While we fixate on identities that have been crafted to divide us, while we remain immersed in the surface of politics, while we are distracted from the real battle lines, those elites prosper.
Political paralysis may not harm the establishment. But it is profoundly damaging to us, the 99 percent, when our communities are being ravaged by a pandemic, when our economies are in meltdown, when the planet is on the brink of ecological collapse.
We need a functioning political system that reflects popular priorities, like Medicare For All, a dignified minimum wage and free college; that understands the urgency of the challenges posed by multiple crises; and that can marshal and channel our energies into solutions, not into endless, irresolvable confrontations based on grievances that have been cultivated to weaken us.
Trump is not the enemy. That target is far too small and limited. The class he belongs to is our enemy, as is the system of privilege he has spent the past four years upholding and his successor will defend just as assiduously.
Whether Trump is ultimately convicted or not in the Senate, the system that produced him will be acquitted — by Congress, by the new president, by Wall Street, by the corporate media.
It is we who will pay the price.
Jonathan Cook is a former Guardian journalist (1994-2001) and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth. If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from his blog Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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On a narrow issue of “prompting/organizing” an uprising, there are two aspects: hyperbolic rhetoric of Trump and hard to explain thinness of the “thin blue line” that failed to defend the Capitol. The latter resembles the description of Chernobyl disaster: a crew of engineers performed an experiment that was prevented by security systems, so in succession they disabled four of them, and then “kaboom”. And there are multiple ways to assure enough manpower and physical obstacles to control the crowd that did not congregate in secret and which contained many semi-sane subgroups that conversed in a manner fully observed by authorities (no reports of some plot behind them, with a plot and complicity within police etc. a coup would be actually accomplished). These ways were deployed in DC many times before and also for the inauguration (that reminded me recent mocking of Lukashenka’s inauguration). Why the chain of command failed, and who influenced that failure? In the hindsight, it was very convenient for Democrats, but that clue is highly inconclusive clue.
On a wider issue, Democrats and Republicans are centered on “progressive” and “traditional value” tags with various extras added. It gives credit to their herculean PR efforts how they can manage to avoid critical issues that could change the country for the better.
Bloated military/security/industrial/think tank complex consumes a good part of GDP, and one can ponder if it contributes any positive net value — the fact that it enables and encourages actions that should never take place, that it requires us to declare adversaries and prompts arms race is a huge negative value. If we add economic aggression in the form of sanctions, we can calculate negative net value.
Medical/insurance/pharma/think tank complex consumes roughly 1/6 of GDP, almost three times more than in Australia, without showing better outcomes. One can show examples when the very bloat of costs prevents the bulk of population to use simple ways to prevent diseases and promptly tackle simple but potentially dangerous problems.
Agro/industrial/retail complex makes healthy nutrition artificially expensive, so nutrition and various health outcomes is very bad for poor (and not so poor) people.
Lack of realistic solutions for global warming — mind you, these solutions should have global applicability, cost effectiveness etc.
Deindustrialization and a cascade of social problem it causes.
Police brutality, lethal and non-lethal. Democrats are ostensibly sympathetic, but (a) they hugely contributed to the problem (b) did they offer actual solutions?
Identity Politics – first the white man scrubbed the American Indian from prominence 0n the American landscape by every means necessary – genocide – identity politics I suppose. SEE Merriam-Webster
Then came the civil war, more of the same identity politics. Same with all those in between the civil war and WWI included, which were more of the same.
Then more with WWII. A war at the end of which the elitist influences dominated our government and the communist became the ultimate perceived threat against our way of life. More identity politics although as with reject Trump something had to be done.
Then we have the National Security act of 1947 and the forceful prosecution of identity politics became official.
When the communist went belly up it quickly became the Muslims and here we are.
Go to google get the Merriam-Webster site up and search identity politics yourself . Directly following Definition of Identity Politics, you will find the following ” : politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. ” Observe how the definitions are listed and who they are attributed to. Convenient maybe but not totally accurate by any stretch of the imagination.
If all politics are local and all those elected claim they surely are then identity politics rule the day and have for quite some time. This is a media buzz phrase not serving anyone well.
This development can be traced back to the National Security Act of 1947 and the advent of a new secret arm of the government that became the “decider” of what and who U.S. citizens should fear.
It occurs to me that having Merriam Webster and the establishment identify and qualify individual political groups in such a manner is something the rest of us might want to debate.
Sorry! I forgot Americans no longer debate issues in good faith but rather scream at each other that they intend to by golly get what they want and deserve.
My advice to all is that they may just might want to be very careful what they wish for.
I’m with Buffalo Ken on this one. I’m thinking maybe he like I is a little long in the tooth.
Lech Walesa 1970’s polish leader was a little long in the tooth, that is of an older era.
Funny thing about guys old enough to be grand dads and great grand dads death or life in prison isn’t so foreboding. Not if it means our progeny are released from the bonds insuring their miserable futures.
One thing is for sure many of we pilgrims are restless. 455K covid deaths and counting
Thanks to CN
PEACE
And you point is what? What masses do you want moved?
I asked for a response from Gina Walden, but I knew ahead of time that none was likely forthcoming.
If you know what is gonna happen or if you have hunch then maybe you got something….but
maybe not.
~
All I want is for the truth to be told and I think the spooks need to realize that they are a big part of the reason why the truth is so muddied. And to think, they call themselves “intelligence” agencies. I think they actually have been stifling the truth and I think larger forces are now in play. Don’t gripe to me when the river of chaos flows over your home. If you are willing to “take it to the end” for the sake of honor and justice and fair play…..consider Julian Assange………then you are also willing to die for your faith. I’m willing to die. I’ve had it with the lies and I’m not alone.
~
BK
“As with most wars there is no single cause!”
How many times has this glib statement been uttered before in recent history? What then were some of the multiple causes of the American ‘Civil War’ (talk about an oxymoron!).
All war is uncivilized, without question.
But then, there is in fact, no more than a single cause for why America has been engaged in continuous wars, either directly, or by proxy, in most global conflicts; all the while proclaiming itself as the exceptional civilized, humanitarian “shining city” on the planet?
The attempt at explaining the inexplicable antithesis of oxymoron is futile! Unless, of course, we are finally willing to admit to ourselves our self-deception; that there is in fact, nothing mysterious about this. The single cause being the hegemonic classes’ greed for monopolistic control of all global resources; both human and material.
Haven’t we, years ago, (pick any recent date since the election of 2000) already entered the first phase of the second American uncivilized war. How are the social conditions of the general populace today different from those extant in the early 1860’s? The population has more than doubled in size, yet it is just as divided today as it was back then.
What are the basic core issues? Are they one jot different today than what they were back then, prior to the one-and-a-half centuries of ‘democratic progress’? The joke is on us.
The same disease of greed was never eradicated. It is once again – however, in pandemic form, coming back to haunt and traumatize us; we, the majority of the people on the planet.
Already almost half a million innocents have died, domestically, and the actual battle has not yet really begun.
All it took was one elite, malicious, narcissist psychopath, surreptitiously to unleash a virus on an unwitting populace. He was merely the tinder personified.
Just prior to the first American Civil War, the so-called southern states were adamant about breaking away from the union, to protect their separate and unequal privileged white racist economic/identity status.
This same deception is ongoing today, in 2021, in spades.
Great article to sum up the dying Empire we call the USA.
American politics only have ONE party.
The masses are played by the good cop/bad cop scenario.
Trump was just America unmasked.
The Dorian Gray Portrait uncovered in the attic for all to view.
Biden just another figurehead.
Nothing changes but the bank accounts
Of the few.
The blatant hypocrisy was those poor crying hedge funds managers.
Burn Rome Burn.
Nothing wrong with the System. Exceptional and Indispensable, and calls
every century, a century of its own, 20th, 21st and so on and so forth. Has
got the fate of other people in her kind hand, attacks this country and that,
for misdemeanor and disobedience, takes democracy to those that do not
have it. What else did you expect the Empire to fulfill? Trump was more
Martian than Earthly and deserves what befell him.
You what, Mr Fotoohi???? This nation – stolen by murderous, genocidal ethnic cleansing from its indigenous peoples – is “exceptional” and “indispensable”? Well if by “exceptional” you mean exceptionally rapacious, barbaric, terroristic, bombastic, duplicitious, hubristic… Yes… “Indispensable” – ABSOLUTELY NOT…indeed, better dispensed with…
“class struggle — the 99 percent against the 1 percent” makes for a nice slogan but, unfortunately for some class warriors, wealth and income in the USA as anywhere else is on a gradient. Yes, it slopes steeply at the top but nevertheless a lot of the 99% are rich enough to be deeply invested in capitalism. They own property, they have stocks and shares, they might be day traders using Robinhood and they don’t plan on losing their relative wealth by voting socialist. That’s one major reason the Left in the USA and here in the UK struggles to drag people from voting for the centre or Right – they have too much at stake to lose, no matter if their investments are in weapons corporations or fossil fuel climate deniers. That needs to be addressed.
I thought this was an excellent analysis of this horrific situation we are all struggling with, and being damaged by.
The sooner we all realize what’s happening, the better chance we have of surviving it. If we don’t find common ground with one another across the fabricated divide, and soon, then we are doomed. We are definitely in a class war. It’s all of us against the elites.
Who cares about Rachel Maddow, or whether or not Trump gets impeached again? Those are just distractions as was mentioned in this article. Pay attention to the REAL issues that are going to impact our lives drastically. We are all in deep sh*t on every level, economically, politically, socially, biologically, environmentally, and spiritually. It’s going to take ALL of us to get through this incredible crisis. We cannot afford to “put anyone out of our hearts”. (not sure who said that). These false binaries are breaking down our ability to address extremely complex challenges.
“Who cares about Rachel Maddow.” I’ll tell you “who.” Almost everyone I know has been brainwashed by that awful woman – to the point that one of my cousins, an ardent fan, is terrified Putin is making the US a “Russian satellite!” Much if not all of the blame for the mess we are in can be attributed directly to the “mainstream media,” captured as it all is by corporate ownership, advertisers and “intelligence” agencies that vet every word spoken or printed. Keeping us fighting each other keeps us from fighting “them,” the elite who profit no matter which way the wind blows. The article is correct. Trump is not the disease, he’s the most recent symptom – possibly the infection that finally brought down the victim – us – so the new administration (same as the old, or worse) could feed off the rotting carcass with impunity.
Listening to NPR (and the BBC World Service) one might think that Prez Putin and Russia is utterly devious (far beyond the deviousness of the Mossad/CIA/NSA etc) while also totally incompetent in eliminating rivals (with only 3-4% popularity at that)…But I’m sure lotsa folks believe the crapola…
Mr. Cook is in no position to adjudicate between the “ great divide” ,when clearly, judging from his asides, that he’s squarely in the camp of one of those sides. His notion that both sides play identity politics just isn’t true. Stating that conservative side is indulgent in white supremacy is totally overstated ,indeed untrue ,apart from a very small extremist element that all true conservatives disavow. As Trump did on numerous occasions. Is Mr. Cook aware of the influence Black American conservatives like Elder, Sowell ,Owens and many others have on the conservative movement in America. It seems not.
As opposed to the real identity politics practised endlessly by “ liberal progressives” .
Good luck trying to refocus conservatives with that kind of incessant assault on common sense. Literally forcing institutions, both public and private ,into counterintuitive notions such as critical race theory, white fragility, “white privilege “and cancel culture.
Until those false narratives are abandoned this divide will most certainly continue and the corporate state will continue reaping their rewards.
It seems you are the one denying reality, Mr Reed. Using the conservative trope of ‘common sense’ and invoking the notion that something being counterintuitive means it must be wrong, you place white privilege in quote marks as if it were merely the invention of ivory-tower leftists. Are you claiming that there is no privilege in US history and society attached to whiteness? If so, you’ll need a lot of evidence to bolster your case.
I work a job 95% of folks would choose last. Yes, vulnerable people are involved, some of whom are pretty susceptible to diseases. I realize there are many liberals who, if the truth were known, view folks in my work as untouchables. In a way I wish I did something else, but in another way it qualifies me to NOT be ashamed of my thinking. I do follow HIPPA guidelines and will continue doing so, but I also do question how they’ve managed to restrict reporting direct from ICUs (or is it that MSM just doesn’t want to? you tell me). If all families agree, what’s the harm? I don’t hold it against anybody, but what I think is that most editorialists/reporters I read (or hear) aren’t touching the situation even with their imaginations’ pinkies. I also believe NPR is cherry picking stories.
Greenwald and Cook are ruthless with their truth. But, like I wrote above, I don’t mind being blunt either. Many reading what I write will think it’s the most trite and non-relevant thing anyone could put here. Se la vi.
The chasm between the worldviews, where’s a bridge? One of the things we liberals can do is to examine our own shadows. The pandemic has drawn us into DNA and RNA matters. To cut to the chase, any propensity to think about life itself for a moment like Vandana Shiva thinks about it…IMO has largely been slam repressed over into our shadows (or maybe into our collective shadow?). We’re strung out on determinism. We watch all these quantum cats in youtubes [I mean the scientists], but do not apply the concepts to living organisms and/or to life itself. The other tribe can accept unknowing. They say, “Spirit gave rise to life, but we don’t know how.” We on the other hand keep insisting total randomness stuffed all those compressed files into the DNA (and if we’re not interested or don’t suggest anything else, then it’s assumed we buy the default doctrine). What I’m saying is that IMO maybe our tribe could do with a little of the other tribe’s take (and I’m not advocating getting obsessed with “pro-life”ism). Whole new paradigm? So what, many out there have no idea how some are apparently working their tails off to help those whom they supposedly love. What’s the problem? There has to be one. It might take a whole new paradigm to help the blind see what is going on? Will commentators just sit and zoom their lives away, or do they need another whole (empathetic) perspective to get’em off their butts? Correction…not their butts raised up, but mainly their Inner Selves that are able to focus on how all of industrial consumerism has gotten “life” wrong? Yep, many of yall will deem all this besides the point. While I’m convinced it’s not. It takes Greenwald to remind us that at one point Fauci was against masks. And as far as this page goes, it’ll take me to remind yall that at one point he was for gain-of-function research? You think the other tribe doesn’t notice how far into la la land we are? Not that whatever little thing Fauci says today on the boob tube won’t be solid. Or that what bothers me means I’m not thinking about getting the jab (which I am). But could it be ?!?!?! the other tribe’s media reminds them of these things? Look, there was a Francis Boyle article up here at Consortium back in the fall! (IMO Boyle requires an interviewer as up to snuff as Joe Lauria; sorry to say IMO Mercola doesn’t quite get it…if the interviews have to be slowed down, then they have to be slowed down)
How do we go about changing the system–the wealthy getting all the benefits and the rest of us struggling to get by?
Maybe start over from scratch? The American empire is on the ropes in so many ways. In my opinion there is no fixing this mess. It is going to implode on its own, one way or another, and sooner rather than later. My guess is it will be some version of a complete and sudden economic collapse, which will take everything else with it that hasn’t already been stolen by the virus – our jobs, our homes, whatever security most of us luckier ones still have, everything that makes possible modern life as we know and love it. The other scenario is unthinkable – we decide if we’re going down, we’ll take everyone and everything else with us in our death throes. Nuclear war is not out of the question.
Interesting article but short on the essential reality that the vast majority of the 1% and those they use to assert their control through money and the bureaucracy are ensconced with or controlling the Democratic Party, and that by enforcing its faux change from within mantra, it is the Democratic Party that poses the greatest impediment to attainment of leftist policies like universal healthcare, free education, a guaranteed minimum wage, a functionally fair judicial system. I know many Republicans with whom I debate those policies, and not one is a white supremacist or a misogynist, though like the Clintons, Obama and Biden, their belief in American exceptionalism is boundless . The conclusion though, is accurate, more’s the pity.
Ugh! One of my New Years resolutions was never to hear or see anything from Rachel Maddow. I guess I can cross that one off my list.
Maintaining a strategic distance from witnesses could permit the two sides to zero in on the lawful contentions of whether Trump’s conduct merits conviction for prompting an uprising.
Prompting an uprising to happen is one thing. Making it happen is another.
~
Do you, Gina Walden, understand the difference? If not, then let me ask you if I said to you: Please go jump off a cliff? Would you do it. I doubt it. So, that prompt got me nowhere. If I said I’m gonna make you jump off a cliff if you don’t…..(fill in the blank), then I reckon that would be different. You can agree with me on that can’t you?
~
Do you understand the difference now? The difference between “prompting” and “making it happen”?
~
I’m not kidding around and those were some serious questions for consideration, so please consider them. In fact, I’d appreciate if you would respond directly to this query. Is that asking too much?
~
Buffalo_Ken
Such a thing as “seed thoughts” are real, effective, and can move Masses.
The Democratic Party forfeited that option when they openly and fraudulently anointed Clinton and Biden to be their standard bearers.
Of course Trump is guilty, so is the DNC.
Oh so totally – and as Mr Cook points out, the differences twixt the two parties is marginal because they both work to maintain the grotesque socio-economic inequalities in this country…(vis a vis the MIC, how many Blue Faces vote against the annual funding of this barbaric institution and what it does around the world?)…after all they all benefit very nicely, ta, from how things operate…the corruption in politics and power here is beyond belief, but it has been legitimized…now African countries should take on the lesson….