Kaspar Hauser

White Supremacists love Trump, and his followers have been eager to harass people who have spoken out against him or whom he's targeted in Twitter tirades. Removing far-right extremism from multi-agency scrutiny isn't simply morally repugnant, I think it's strategic. The playbook for any far right leader facing declining popularity was written a long time ago. You peddle conspiracy theories and crackpot economic policies to the uneducated masses, you lie so much and so blatantly that the distinction between truth and fiction loses all meaning, you encourage the worst instincts in the population, you erode the independence of the courts and the media, you engage in massive voter suppression, you find easily scapegoated populations to target for intense persecution, you shovel money into the military and law enforcement while removing mechanisms for their public accountability, you start a war, you demonize dissenters, and you take sympathetic right wing paramilitary gangs off the leashes that previously restrained them. Trump may not be smart enough to figure this out, but Bannon certainly is.

You mean the guys who got that idea from the now White-House press-credentialed Infowars? Those guys? Once again: I feel like I'm living in one of Moore's or Ellis's dystopian futures.

The Republicans are moving to kill the commission charged with ensuring the security of American elections. http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/02/07/house-gop-quietly-moves-kill-commission-charged-securing-elections

Trump is excluding white supremacists from being targeted by a multi-agency program designed to counter extremism. http://fortune.com/2017/02/02/trump-counter-extremism-program-white-supremacists-islam/

A Michigan GOP official just called for another Kent State for campus protestors. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/michigan-gop-official-kent-state_us_58952eafe4b09bd304bb86f0?

Regarding the Muslim ban: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOLsI2BIM0

I hope so. My fear is that the ones prepared to push hardest are the angry men with computers and guns who form the backbone of Trump's support. I think that they will be the first to go after Trump's tweeted targets with both doxxing and physical violence. I think it is very likely that we will see extrajudicial killings of dissidents and critics in the near future, especially as his asinine policies produce an economic collapse and he imposes martial law to secure his position. Americans may be sturdy people, but physical terror tends to shut down dissent awfully fast. He will have all the means he needs to produce a lot of that in less than 72 hours from now. There's a good reason why Bill Maher is frightened for his own safety.

The transformation of the US into a terror state resembling Pinochet's Chile would probably do the trick.

I think that this administration will prove to be far, far worse than the second invasion of Iraq. I don't think we have anything in our lifetimes to compare this nightmare to.

The Alt Right movement is profoundly disturbing, but you can see the logic driving it. As economic conditions become more difficult, as hyper capitalism continues to dissolve communities, as the wellsprings of meaning and hope dry up, as people are excluded from higher education, and as stimulus-driven entertainment continues to usurp reality, it makes sense that people will lose access to their nobler potentials and will begin to disintegrate both psychologically and politically. Plato talked about this: personal virtue requires harmony among the appetitive, willful, and rational faculties, which in turn requires a comparable balance in one's society. As that harmony is lost, it becomes harder to aspire to virtue and people become increasingly enslaved to their "master passions," or addictions (taking the term in its broadest sense to include ideological fanaticism). People lost to their master passions create further chaos in their society, leading to more suffering and, ultimately, a yearning for a tyrant to impose order. The tyrant is typically a person utterly subjugated to his master passions, and the order he imposes is pathological, but his psychologically disintegrated subjects are blind to his failings. Maybe it's just my own depressive state talking, but as economic growth rates continue to regress to 19th Century historical norms, and as ecological collapse proceeds and geopolitical chaos worsen, I can only see the problem of brain-dead right-wing authoritarianism getting exponentially worse. The internet seems to accelerate the process by, in Chomsky's words, lending itself to cult formation. No one can really educate themselves on-line, but for people deprived of a decent education and living in an increasingly image-driven post-literate society the Internet and its crazy quilt of factoids and conspiracy theories is all they have with which to design a worldview. And now we have a President who loves Infowars, is skeptical about vaccinations, and thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax. This nightmare is moving really fast. It's like watching a zombie apocalypse erupting all around me. In fact, I wonder if the modern cinematic zombie expresses exactly this peril. The Haitian zombie was a mythological analogue for the hyper-exploited producer, the soulless slave of a monstrous economic machine. The modern cinematic zombie seems to represent the hyper-exploited consumer, the atomized individual bereft of any rational community or psychological harmony, enslaved to his master passions to the point of complete ethical collapse. It's no wonder I'm tempted by such intense panic. I just can't see this getting any better in my lifetime.

The song is beautiful, Michael. I think that what is happening to me is an intense activation of the flight/freeze response in reaction to a situation I feel at an utter loss to fight...that is, the degeneration of the US into a monstrously corrupt terror state comparable to those it sponsored throughout Latin America in the late 20th Century, and the effect that will have on Canada. If I can figure out how to soothe that prefrontal cortex-bypassing, amygdala-level response, I may be able to survive this. I have been away from this forum for far too long. It's nice to be on a discussion board that hasn't been targeted by Russian Agitprop trolls. If you want to get a sense of what I mean, go to the site I'm about to link to. It's Canada's premiere progressive discussion board. Look for the thread "The New Russophobia". It will creep the hell out of you. http://rabble.ca/babble/active-topics

Japan is undergoing a nerd-driven demographic apocalypse. Speaking of Japan:

Thank you, everyone, for your words of encouragement. I think I have the same challenge ahead of me that we all face: we have to find ways of valuing life in the face of a coalescing societal order that is contemptuous of our lives. Trump and his power elite see us as little more than roaches to be ground under heel, and now--"checks and balances" platitudes notwithstanding--they have all the power they need to grind us into the filth. Our culture tragically shares this vision of life. Our entertainment media is saturated with a kind of death porn that proclaims that only heroic lives are worth paying attention to, and only then so long as they continue to fascinate. Collectively, we have lost faith in the idea that even humiliated lives have dignity and significance: we see each other as disposable commodities, and so we ultimately see ourselves that way, too. Every time we turn away from people who plead for help and dignity--and, God help me, I have turned away from many--we slander sentient life itself, and rob ourselves of any sense of entitlement to help and dignity. I am tempted by self-destruction not only because I am afraid of the colossal and unexpected evil of Neo-fascism, but because I have too little faith in the value of life. I have throughout my life struggled against an inner nihilism, an abjectly desacralized vision of existence. I have wrested little sparks of sanctity from that unholy vista, but only with monumental effort. Now I face a future in which the social order is going to exponentially accelerate its efforts to drown the working class in self-contempt, hatred, and fear. Those of us who are white and who have not yet been condemned to the horrors of the deindustrialized rust belt are going to get a taste--we're going to get ever-larger mouthfuls--of the humiliations inflicted for centuries upon people of colour. I have precious little reason to believe that my vision of the good is sturdy enough to support that weight for very long. I may very well ultimately lose this fight against moral despair. If I was placing bets, I wouldn't wager much on my long-term prospects. But the value of the struggle for each of us may lie not in whether we lose but rather in how long we hold out, how long we continue reaching out for those sparks. There was an existentialist vampire movie called "The Addiction" that came out in the 90s, and there was a line in it that's stayed with me. It goes something like this: "Our propensity for evil lies in our weakness before it." It is our vulnerability in the face of monstrous and malevolent power to succumbing to moral horror and its desacralized vision of life that opens us up to infection by that malevolence. Cruelty inflicted or witnessed tempts us with nihilism, and nihilism tempts us to hate life, regardless of whether that life resides elsewhere or within our own breast. That's the price of turning refugees away: by radically devaluing their lives, we radically devalue our own. If they don't deserve love, then neither do we. The lynch mob ultimately hangs its own humanity. I think that's what I've done to myself. By abandoning someone in need when I felt overwhelmed by that person's demands, I abandoned myself, I corrupted myself. I am, I think, damned, and I don't know how to find redemption. My cowardice is born of shame. We are going to be terribly tempted, because this horror isn't going anywhere. The timeline is not going to reset, he's not going to be impeached, his power is just going to grow until something catastrophic happens. The disease is too far advanced. He is clearly making China his regime's official enemy, so we can expect war, emergency measures acts to eliminate dissidents, the draft, the further militarization of the economy, and, I fear, nuclear confrontation. The characters of the men in this regime show no signs of wisdom, virtue, or restraint, and they are threatening what China rightfully sees as its non-negotiable vital interests. Love has to be strong now. I don't mean the saccharine love that Clinton spouted, I mean the real deal, I mean agape in its deepest sense. Love does not trump hate, but it can endure and eventually weaken hate if it has time enough to work. We may not have that long: the fire next time may well be the fire within a year or two. But whatever our moral measure, the call of love is insistent and it remains so until death claims us as individuals and communities. I honestly want to answer that call, but I have to drag myself through my own sewer to do so, and the undertow is very strong.

The press conference was part of a strategy: http://www.alternet.org/media/welcome-era-bs-message-my-doomed-colleagues-american-media-russian-journalist#.WHmiSFNz2ZM.facebook

Thank you, and yes, I am seeking help. I’m getting counselling, I’m in regular contact with a very wise minister with the United Church of Canada, I’m meditating, I’m eating right, I don’t use any mind altering substances other than anti-depressant medications. I know that my despair is putting my life is in danger. The problem I’m facing is that I can no longer tell the difference between paranoid catastrophization and a realistic appraisal of our situation. I honestly don’t think we’re going to be okay in any meaningful sense of the word. Even assuming that Trump and the Republicans don’t successfully impose such extensive voter suppression measures that it becomes impossible for the Democrats to ever win a majority in either the Congress or the Senate again, much less win the presidency, he will certainly use his time in office to inflict horrific violence both domestically and internationally. Think about what would be entailed in rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants: the only way to do that would be by taking away every restraint upon police powers and creating sprawling concentration camps. Do you think those police powers will only be used against undocumented immigrants? What do you think will happen when an utterly unrestrained and malignantly empowered police state is turned against Muslims? Or Black Lives Matters protesters? Or Standing Rock water protectors? Or anyone who demonstrates against Trump’s government? Think about what will happen to tens of millions of people who will lose their coverage under the Affordable Care Act, not to mention the many millions more whose lives will be at risk if the Republicans follow through on their plans to gut Social Security and Medicare. Think about what will happen to LGBTQ people when in the name of religious freedom it becomes perfectly legal to discriminate against same-sex couples. Think about the enraged followers of the Alt Right who have been empowered by this monster, and what they will now feel at completely liberty to inflict upon their scapegoats of choice, not only in the United States but around the world. Remember that in 2008/2009 we came within a hair’s-breadth of a global economic depression. We were only saved by some very smart thinking by an intelligent Democratic president who acted in the face of concerted Republican opposition. Trump’s team is planning to dismantle the regulations erected to prevent such a disaster from recurring, and he’s appointing Goldman Sachs executives to his cabinet. How do you think things will play out if we face another global financial crisis under Trump’s watch? And what happens when he launches his trade wars? I’m a Canadian. How well do you think our faltering economy is going to handle a trade war with a country ten times our size that accounts for well over 50% of our trade? What kind of concessions is he going to demand in order to avoid such a war? Is he going to insist that we tear up our socialized medicare system and open our borders to the American health insurers who are salivating at the thought of gaining access to our health care market? What effect do you think he’s having on our political landscape? Our official opposition, the Conservative Party, is on the cusp of an Alt Right transformation. With Trump in office and applying the thumbscrews to Canada’s economy, who do you think is going to win our next federal election, and what do you think the victor will do to labour rights and our social safety net? Can you imagine the human devastation he will inflict upon Mexico as he takes aim at its entire economy? Moving beyond North America’s borders, how do you think China is going to respond if Trump tries to hurt them economically, or if he continues to prod them over Taiwan? The man sees the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims as his mortal enemies. What do you think is going to happen when terrorists start blowing up Trump Towers in order to provoke him into overreacting and thereby persuading Muslims throughout the world that radicalization is their only viable option for resisting American imperialism? In his security briefings he was reported to ask why he just couldn’t “nuke” his enemies. How long do you think it’s going to take for him to start a nuclear conflict with, I don’t know, North Korea? What effects are this man’s policies going to have on the civilizational threat of climate change? Most of Canada is locked into a ferocious winter because an Arctic heat wave is forcing a cold air mass south. My home town is suffering one snow squall after the next. In the summers we’re facing wildfires that are threatening entire cities. How long can our economy endure these climate-mediated stresses? They say that character is destiny. America has elected a psychopathic and impulse-driven kleptocrat, a man who has been credibly accused not only of rape but of child rape, a man who has a history of mob connections, who’s spoken highly of the Philippines’ Duterte and Russia’s Putin, who’s unrestrained by either a Democratic Congress or Senate, who gets to not only fill the next Supreme Court vacancy but make somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 judicial appointments, and who inherits control of the most expansive surveillance state apparatus on Earth. What kind of destiny do you think this American president has in store for the world? Even assuming that a miracle happens and a Democrat wins the next presidential election, do you think this man—this man—will ever concede that he lost an election to anybody, or allow for a peaceful transition of power? The dangers I’ve listed are only the most obvious ones, the ones that are so blatant you can’t ignore them. But as we all know, what’s obvious is never more than the tip of the iceberg. What threats are below the surface, the ones that won’t become apparent for a year? Or two? Or eight? Assuming Trump isn’t made El Presidente for life, what damage has he already inflicted upon American democratic traditions? Even before he takes office, Trump is making me pine for the George W. regime. Who the hell succeeds Trump as the next Republican president? I’m a superhero RPG nerd who just turned 50, and since the election I can’t imagine a future in which I will have any economic or even physical security. My spouse and I don’t have kids, and we don’t have family we can rely on for support. We work in the social services field: how secure do you think our jobs will be if Trump’s actions send Canada into a severe and prolonged recession? But it’s not just Trump. Slowing economic growth rates and rising economic inequality, the impact of automation on workforces around the world, mass dislocation of populations due to war and flooding and desertification, and spreading geopolitical conflicts are exactly the conditions in which right-wing authoritarianism flourishes and democracies wither. That’s why we’re seeing far right parties rising fast throughout Europe. Yes, when trying to imagine our future I’m tempted by the thought of self-annihilation, and so is my wife. I don’t think we’re unusual in that. I don’t want to take my own life, but I can’t get the idea out of my mind because I can’t get the implications of Trump’s character, power, and stated agendas out of my mind. Evil may not have had a final victory, but It has had an overwhelming victory that the West may not be able to recover from. This man makes Nixon, Reagan, and George W. look angelic by comparison. While counselling is useful, the truth is that my counsellors are all exposed to the exact same disaster I’m reeling from, and, like me, none of them have ever lived through anything like this: there is no one outside of this burning box to seek an objective point of view from. All we have is guesswork, and our guesswork is based on First World assumptions that don’t look terribly credible anymore. Looking at the Trump regime, I’m reminded far more of Latin American terror states than anything we’ve ever seen in America since the 19th Century. If I’m wrong in my assumptions I would dearly, dearly love for someone to demonstrate my errors to me. I desperately want to be grossly mistaken, but at this point I don’t see how I can be. When I said that I was wrestling with an angel I meant it. I have never in my life felt such horror, and I don’t see any end to it.

I don't envy you that discussion, Old Man. Michelle Obama was right: a lot of people are learning what it feels like to lose hope. As bad as things got, I never expected to see this kind of gutter fascism, complete with all of its brain dead conspiracy theories, ascend to the highest positions of power in the world. It's as though that world is rubbing my face in the innocence of my hipster pessimism. God, was this what it was like watching the fascists rise to power in the 30s? Were people as gobsmacked by the titanic stupidity of fascist ideologies? Were they just as certain that these imbeciles would self-destruct or be taken down by sensible adults before they could do real harm? Confronted by such monstrous and predatory foolishness, were they tempted by suicide? Are such suicidal thoughts signs of pathology, rationality, or complicity with fascism's nihilistic ethos? Is the loss of hope not just an injury but also a choice? If everyone despaired as I'm despairing, wouldn't that eliminate whatever redemptive possibility this catastrophe might still offer? Wouldn't that be a betrayal of everyone and everything we love? But what on Earth can we reasonably hope for in this dawning age? The world we grew up in and loved is gone and it isn't coming back. What if we simply don't have the means to make our way in this new world? How do we choose to hope when nothing we want to hope for seems possible? What if the redemptive possibilities offered by our situation are simply too meagre to sustain our sanity? What did compassionate and rational Germans hope for in 1933? Where is the free world that stands opposed to fascism in 2017? I have been insulated by crumbling bourgeois illusions for a very long time. The impoverished in our countries have been struggling against these exact terrors for much longer. I've known too many people who, in the grip of well-earned despair, have either attempted or completed suicide. The economy has been grinding lives into mush for decades. This must be what it's like to wrestle with an angel. No one told me that angels are so terrifying, or reminded me that in such contests they almost always win.

I just have a hard time seeing anything good surviving the next few years intact. And I think I'm including myself in the category of "anything good." Thomas Picketty has demonstrated pretty conclusively that the high economic growth rates that built the Western middle class were aberrations produced by the decimation of wealth during the two World Wars and the rebuilding and expansion opportunities afforded by the post-war period. With high growth levels, wealth's power relative to labour's declined somewhat, allowing the working class to gain some real concessions. Well, the wealth lost in the wars has been restored, rebuilding is long completed, and the global market is saturated. Growth rates are returning to their historical norms, restoring wealth to its formerly unassailable position, a process accelerated by automation. Meanwhile, climate change is driving political upheaval, conflict, and mass displacement. If you look at Syria, it's near-collapse had a lot to do with a climate change-induced drought that drove farmers into the cities where they mobilized in opposition to Assad's regime, provoking a crackdown followed by an armed insurgency and pretty soon you had 4 million refugees fleeing their homes. That number is going to be dwarfed as the years go by: Malaysia alone will produce over ten million climate refugees from sea level rise. When you factor in geopolitical conflicts produced by climate change, the next decade or two could easily see many tens of millions of people on the move, many of them seeking access to Europe and North America. Faltering economic growth coupled with mass uncontrolled immigration is a perfect recipe for the growth of xenophobic movements and the rise of authoritarian political regimes, which is exactly what we're seeing all through the West. The more reactionary governments become the less intelligent they are, and the solutions they pursue just make matters infinitely worse. And the modern agent of socialization of the body politic has proven utterly lacking. Chomsky is right: the internet doesn't educate anyone, it just generates cults. People pull together factoids into paranoid conspiratorial narratives that are profoundly emotionally compelling but that lack all cognitive quality control. Far from helping us search for truth, our collective political consciousness is descending into a vast funhouse mirror maze reflecting infinitely retreating distortions of our own hyperstimulated minds. The retreat of a sizable minority of a populace into xenophobic conspiracy theories untethered from the rules of evidence has historical precedents too terrible to contemplate for any length of time. Speaking of that malignant process--Watching the growth of the Alt Right all around me reminds me of movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" or--more to the point--"28 Days Later". The only thing remotely as disturbing are the spreading cults of histrionic impotence on the Left--cults devoted to sacrificing themselves on the altar of their own virtue without any interest in the means of obtaining and wielding the power that could actually do some good in the world. Why do we even call them the "Left" and the "Right" any more? We should just rename them "powerless conscience" and "conscienceless power" and be done with it. Russia has undoubtedly exacerbated this problem through its hacking and brilliant agitprop campaign, but the underlying dynamic is massively systemic. Trump is only a symptom of the disease...albeit a symptom comparable to a debilitating stroke. Given that this repellent man is about to get control of the apparatus of the apparatus of the American police state, I'm not sure that he can be stopped by anybody. I don't think that he will ever allow another free federal election to take place: he will use voter suppression, changes to campaign finance laws, thuggery, suppression of the press, and--I suspect--outright terror strategies to shut democracy down. Even if he is stopped, that won't do anything to stop the immiseration of the working class or the destabilization produced by climate change and mass displacement. It won't slow down the spread of fascism. And again: he's a malignant narcissistic bully with marginal impulse control who has been placed into the most stressful job in the world and given command of America's nuclear arsenal. How the hell do you fight this? How do you preserve anything good in the face of what can only be called a radical evil? I am not prepared to live in this fascist ecohorror timeline: I don't know if it's possible for me to exist in it without losing my mind. I'm realizing that I'm not prepared to die, either. You know, I used to love the horror genre. And when I say I "used" to love it, I mean that was just last year. Now, though... I'm an old agnostic, but I'm finally recognizing the importance of the Christian faith in resurrection, not as a supernatural event but rather as the creation of loving communities following savage violence, communities that reject paralytic terror in favour of a fidelity to a goodness that transcends the slaughter-bench of history. I can see how that lends people remarkable moral strength and courage. I wish I could access that kind of vision right now. I grew up in a home poisoned by addiction, vulgarity, stupidity, and bigotry. I've spent my life trying to form an identity built around clarity, compassion, and hope, but in the pit of my soul that miserable household still calls the shots. And now it's as though the authoritarian pathologies of that household have in the last two months laid claim to my whole adult world. God help me, the spiritual vision I've been seeing the world through for decades turns out to be far more aligned to the Cthulhoid terror of the Greco-Roman tradition than the Abrahamic. Global Neoliberalism has finally given birth to Global Neofascism. What do we do now?

Having witnessed his complete inability to manage his rage and vindictiveness, I'm now honestly worried that this man is going to provoke a nuclear war, and that he's going to do it sooner rather than later. Even if he doesn't, the economic, political, and ecological carnage he's going to leave in his wake will be incalculable. Perhaps it's just my pessimism speaking, but I don't think the odds are in our favour at all. I know that resistance is mobilizing against him, but any successes that resistance might have are not going to happen quickly and in the meantime he's a rabid baboon loose in an ICU ward, with the Alt Right shrieking "more bites, scratches, and feces!" at the top of their lungs. I am so not prepared for what I think is coming. At this point I'm just going through the motions of living, consumed with bottlenecked grief for a future I think is dying before my eyes. Why the hell did I live long enough to see this? God, I feel bad for children right now.

His tweets and petty conflicts are designed to distract attention from issues of grave substance, such as the confirmation hearings of his grossly compromised cabinet appointments.

How do you go about doing that?

How do people here who did not vote for Trump or the Republicans, and who look upon the acceleration of hypercapitalism and the rise of fascism throughout the Western world, go about maintaining courage and hope? Are there specific strategies that you use, or philosophies that give you strength?

I think he's lying about his role in this decision. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-keeps-claiming-credit-jobs-he-had-nothing-do

Hello. I used to post here years ago under my own name, but for privacy reasons I've chosen a new handle. Anyway, while I disagree with the implied fatalism regarding voting in this article, my own experience resonates with the author's comparison of what many Americans (and many others around the world) are going through in the wake of the Trump presidency to a collective psychotic break: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/03/stripped-of-false-realities-americans-political-psychotic-break/ While the material consequences of the new regime will likely be too ghastly to contemplate, I think that there is also a profound psychological threat posed by this mutation of American politics. I think that it will be important to understand this threat and to commit to working with one another to restore a sense of meaning, hope, and personal and collective power. Despair and panic are profound temptations, and they can easily be exploited to push through vicious policies that people would organize quickly to resist in normal times. The only effective remedy to these feelings, I think, lies in the hard, gruelling machinery of compassion: in an age of triumphant and bipartisan cynicism and contempt we need to relearn the skills and virtues that separate compassion from mere sympathy and that instill courage in hearts stricken by horror. I've found this book to be helpful in my own attempts to wrap my head around compassion: https://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881