Trump’s rallies are getting more violent
CHICAGO — Donald J. Trumpabruptly canceled a large rally here on Friday night as scuffles and shouting matches erupted on the arena floor between large groups of his supporters and protesters angered by his campaign.
Cable news networks broadcast live scenes of chaos inside the arena that showed people on both sides screaming at, punching and shoving each other.
So that sounds healthy.
The protests at Mr. Trump’s rallies have increased and so has the pushback surrounding them. One protester in North Carolina this week was sucker-punched by a rally attendee. Mr. Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has insisted he does not condone the violence but that in the “good old days,” protesters were roughed up to keep them in line.
The Washington Post reports from St Louis:
Protesters and supporters of Donald Trump clashed in sometimes violent fashion here on Friday, the latest in an escalating series of confrontations that have come to define the front-runner’s rowdy campaign rallies even as he gets closer to securing the Republican nomination.
Inside the Peabody Opera House, protesters interrupted Trump eight times, prompting catcalls and chants from the crowd as security officers removed them. Scores were injured or arrested in clashes between Trump supporters and critics outside the venue, where thousands had gathered in an overflow area to listen to the event over loudspeakers.
Trump is known for his massive, raucous rallies — part campaign events, part media spectacles, part populist exaltations for his most loyal supporters. But the events have also become suffused with the kind of hostility and even violence that are unknown to modern presidential campaigns.
But that sound very like the rise of the brownshirts.
Honestly, I’ve been waiting for this moment. If anything, I’m only surprised it took this long.
It’s only a matter of time before someone is killed. Then what?
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#1: Then maybe Capitolium? SA, Reichstag … Sorry, but Godwin is already invoked.
“How has someone *not* gotten killed yet?” is the better question…
Funny you should mention the Brown Shirts: At the back of the U.K. edition of Dude, Where’s My Country? is a reprint of a 2003 interview that Michael Moore gave to Gary Younge ofThe Guardian. During the interview, Moore compared the political situation in the U.S.A. to that of Germany in 1936 after the burning down of the Reichstag.
He was specifically talking about Bush II using 9/11 as justification to basically tear up the Bill of Rights, strip away the American peoples’ civil liberties, lie through his teeth, and bomb the crap out of whoever he pleased, and how a seeming majority of the people blindly went along with it because, well, 9/11 and terrorism and U.S.A., U.S.A.
Of course, dissenting voices were either shouted down or beaten up by TrueAmericans™ in the name of patriotism (“We’re at war, you fucking traitor”), discredited by the right-wing media (and much of the left, who didn’t want to be, or daren’t risk being seen as unpatriotic), or locked away by the government without charge thanks to the USA PATRIOT act (yup, they even had the brass nerve to give the most un-American legislation written into U.S. law since the birth of the nation the acronym USA PATRIOT act!).
Of course, there’s no similarities between USA 2003 and USA 2016 (and not forgetting Germany 1936). Well, apart from the new wave of hysterical patriotism fired up by Trump, the increasing violence against opposition, the increasing number of people being taken in by this megalomaniac, the media’s apparent tolerance toward him, the stirring up of mistrust and hatred of anybody not American, Christian and right-wing, the accusations that anybody disagreeing with Trump is a traitor to the country or un-American and certainly not a……yes, you guessed it right……. Patriot.
Yes, apart from that, no similarities whatsoever. But look on the bright side: there’s not a snowball in Hell’s chance of Donald Trump getting the keys to the White House, is there?
Mind you, I seem to recall a lot of people saying that Bush II had no chance of a second term in office.
Oh, and then there was that thing about ‘I have in my hand a piece of paper……there will be peace in our time’. Remind me how that turned out again.
Forgot to add’ if anybody’s curious about the acronym, here goes;
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism act of 2001.
You’ve got to an acronym that inventive…..and that cynical.
he does not condone the violence but that in the “good old days,” protesters were roughed up to keep them in line
I think the only gloss for this is “doublethink”
@S.J. Obsessive #5 – there are frightening correlations between 1930s Germany and the cultural situation right now. It’s not just the US, there are similar though (thus far) quieter developments in Europe.
There is one thing we don’t have that 1920s/30s Germany did have: a burning and not-entirely unjustified resentment about their treatment after the Treaty of Versailles, something that the National Socialists exploited in looking for scapegoats for the tanking of the German economy. Again, not without some truth to it.
We are manufacturing a similar sense of oppression and paranoia with considerably less evidence. Our economies in the West haven’t reached that level of desperation (20s Germany had hyperinflation of over 1000% at one point) but Trump and his supporters could manufacture a a similar sense of doom. In fact they are both stoking and exploiting similar perceptions of an outside threat and poverty amongst a class who shouldn’t support him but do.
The situations are not exactly the same but the similarities that do exist are very disturbing.
A major factor in driving US paranoia and the rise of Trump is the situation in Iraq and Syria. A major factor driving that is climate change. Drought drove millions of impoverished farmers into Syria’s cities, where the Assad regime was unable to provide for them. This sparked the civil war, and thus the rise of ISIS. All over the world the facade of civil discourse is breaking down, whether in the US with Trump, or across Europe, with the rise of Golden Dawn, UKIP, Front National, AfD and others. Welcome to the world of one degree politics. Don’t get too used to it, two degree politics is just around the corner!
Bugger! You’ve got to love an acronym…..
Not enough sleep.
Steamshovelmama (great ‘nym), what a lot of the right of all classes do have is a resentment of the eight years of Obama at the helm and a growing fear of losing everything they have to immigrants who are going to flood into the country in their millions any day now. It’s the same fear that’s steadily growing throughout Europe, and even though it is obviously nonsense it is a fear that right-wing politicians and rabble rousers like Trump will exploit to the maximum.
Throw the spectre of terrorism into the mix and once the people are frightened enough they’ll let their governments do whatever they’re told is necessary to maintain the (insert nationality here) way of life.
One just has to look at how easily Bush II and Blair got their respective supposed ‘anti-terror’ laws passed, and how easily they stripped us of so many of our basic rights and civil liberties, all on the exaggerated threat of terrorism. At the time, if our glorious leaders were to be believed, there was a Muslim terrorist under each and every one of our beds. Far too many people were fooled into believing the lies, and far too many people still believe them.
In fact, I’d hazard a guess that a great many people want to believe them.
During the interview, Moore compared the political situation in the U.S.A. to that of Germany in 1936 after the burning down of the Reichstag.
The burning of the Reichstag was deliberate arson designed to consolidate Hitler’s grip on power.
911 was for real It wasn’t a controlled demolition staged by Bush/Hitler no matter Rosie O’Donnell’s expertise in civil engineering.
And Moore is almost as intelligent as O’Donnell…
To read some of the comments here, you’d think that the only right thing to do in American politics would be to vote Democrat for ever and ever and ever…Amen.
That your political sensibilities aren’t insulted by a handful of entrenched crony capitalists ( pigs at trough) offering you a choice between YET another Bush ( ‘Little Jebby’) or YET another Clinton ( Bill’s Rib) is astounding.
Since when has America reverted to Monarchy?
You aren’t being asked to vote, you’re being asked to rubber-stamp.
Some see fascism where there isn’t any, and where you have fascism in spades no one sees anything.
I oscillate between pity and contempt for those who argue the reason to vote for a man who directly and explicitly encourages violence–and then offers to pay the legal bills–is the current system is so broken we need to do ‘something drastic’. Curiously, that ‘something drastic’ is also something incredibly stupid, violent, even oddly like the stupidity that got us _here_. Still, I like to _hope_ this is just the voice of abject despair. It seems the more charitable option.
Yes, dears, the house _is_ a bit of a disaster. Has been a while, and it’s been a frustrating business getting anywhere with that, for feels like forever. But burning it down, everyone still inside, probably isn’t quite the easy ticket to ‘solved this’ you’re trying to sell yourself.
Can’t we manage to critique Hillary without the sexist comments? There are plenty of critiques of Hillary on her own merits that don’t need to reference sexist images. Thanks.
Also, re: Trump. One of the things that burns me is the reportage of the media. They keep talking about how Trump is tapping into an anger about the way the country is going, and stopping there, leaving it sound justified and oh, so, populist. They never mention that the anger is that of privilege slowly having to share its privileges with minorities and women. If it were black voters acting like this, or women voters acting like this (Yes, I realize there are some women, but it is not a group dominated by women), the narrative would shift to “angry black men” or “angry women” with all the negative connotations of unjustifiably angry, hysterical, violent, etc. But when the group is dominated by white men, many (if not most) of them middle class, the narrative is one of justifiable anger at all they’ve lost. What have they lost? The right to beat up on people they hate without consequence. The right to automatically assume that people in power will look like them. The right to rule with an iron hand all those they consider inferior.
This beast is a truly ugly beast. And yes, Clinton is crony capitalism, but the more sexist the other side is, the closer I am to voting for her out of sheer pique.
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@SJO: I dunno if the PATRIOT Act is the most un-American since the birth of the nation… Alien and Sedition Act please?
Free speech is essential to a democracy. The thugs that forced the cancellation of that rally aren’t exactly champions of free speech and democracy. They’re akin to the thugs that attempted to shut down Maryam Namazie last month. Big male thugs screaming ‘safe space’! ‘safe space!’. And if not them, then the transgender ‘activists’ who forced the cancellation of Germaine Greer’s talk.
And then there was the presence of Bill Ayers, the old commie agitator who put the ‘D’ in Democracy ( yeah right!). I guess with all those acid flashbacks he thought he was once again in the Chicago of 1968.
They never mention that the anger is that of privilege slowly having to share its privileges with minorities and women
I see. So all those working class white women are protesting their loss of privilege? The White working stiffs who’ve been abandoned and virtually disenfranchised by decades of identity politics are protesting their loss of privilege? Guys with names like Joe and Bill who live in trailer parks and who work as meat-packers are protesting their loss of *privilege*?! Will you be happy when everyone, absolutely everyone, is reduced to working for 2 bucks an hour?
What the hell every happened to class struggle? The corporate world tells us we must end White working-class privilege (basically a unionized job) by importing millions of cheap third-world laborers so that everything is reduced to the lowest common economic denominators. In place of a decent working class struggling to increase its lot, we now have only Blacks, Latinos and *privileged* White trailer-park trash pitted against each other for crumbs. The denizens of the boardrooms aren’t privileged; naw it’s the White working stiffs who’ve the monopoly on that
Jesus! Would all the useful-dupe SJW progressives in America please stand up and take a bow
And like Trump Hillary faced a little of the same free speech ‘medicine’ yesterday. After having attended Nancy Reagan’s funeral, she said a couple of nice things about the former first lady…it WAS a funeral service after all! She simply stated that Nancy, after having been approached by her own gay son, successfully put pressure on her husband to do an about-face on AIDS funding.
Heads exploded.
Everyone piled on to her, denounced her, and forced her to publish a retraction. Yeah, the progressive Ottos of America hung her out that window over the Thames, brought out her ‘Inner Archie’ and told her to retract…or else!
Yeah, I can recall some of those lyrics. Not necessarily Communist; anti-Fascist suffices. And talent helps. They sold a number of those records, for good money.
Was that really nearly 50 years ago? American travesty of justice has not changed much, sorry to say. Not enough.
John, if Joe and Bill are mostly concerned about their wages why are they in a Trump rally rather than a Bernie rally? They have accepted their low wages, but they were hoping the privileges of whiteness will compensate. And that seems to mean less and less.
Was Joe a plumber? No. And was Joe even his name? It was an alias, anyway.
Isn’t it amazing how oil and coal and methane can produce such convincing grassroots (astroturf) buffeting select anointed appointees?
John, I was going to answer, but I think Anat did it quite well. I live and work among a lot of these people, and believe me, they are invested in white America (yes, the women too, who are not a large portion of Trump supporters). They believe that the main problem with the world, the main thing keeping them from getting jobs, is women and minorities hogging up all the good jobs, even though they are (obviously) less qualified.
My brother has sworn for his entire adult life that the only reason he has not been able to get (or keep) a job is that he was not a black woman. There are not a lot of black women in the jobs he seeks; he simply lacks the qualifications they are looking for, and he doesn’t bother to bathe or put on a clean shirt before going to interview. I used to think he was unusual in his views, because I tended to hang out with people who were compatible with me, and thus not particularly like him. I am now in a situation where it is not as easy to choose who I hang out with, and believe me, I have discovered that my brother is not so different. At least not in this area of the world (the midwestern US).
Trump supporters are not a majority of the country, just a very loud minority. But they believe they have the right to rule, and these horrible people have prevented them from getting ahead. They see people like Obama and Henry Gates, people like Hillary and Rachel Maddow, and they believe totally that these are people who got to the top not for any ability or accomplishment, but that they were brought to the top by the special privileges given to everyone who is not white and/or male. And yes, that includes many of the women. My mother, for instance, would have supported any candidate who screamed and hollered about how awful feminism was, and how women should be in their “proper” place. The presence of women in the crowd does not really mean the crowd isn’t supportive of white male privilege.
Well, guess I decided to answer after all. ;-)
@iknklast: I’m not sure that the Trumpites are necessarily a loud minority. In states like Tennessee they’re almost definitely in the majority (it’s telling that Williamson County, one of the wealthier counties in the nation went Rubio vs. the rest of the counties in the state). I knew things were bad, but this election cycle has illuminated how bad it actually is in the US, and I’m fortunate to live in a sparsely populated blue state.
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@20 Thanks for the heads up with regards to your Brother’s hygiene! Cleanliness is kind of an asset when job seeking.
However, you can’t deny that the middle class has been eviscerated as jobs, unionized jobs, have moved overseas. At the same time the wages and benefits of just about ALL American workers have stagnated and rates of unionization have just nose dived. When you keep the labor market soft by continuously importing cheap foreign workers, no one can get any traction, no one can get a real raise. Even highly skilled white-collar jobs are at risk from the foreign worker visa program, a program that imports, for example, IT specialists who are then trained by the people they’re replacing and who, once in place, will work for only 60% of the former salary This isn’t about losing White Privilege; it’s about the complete destruction of wage structures which facilitates an even greater transfer of wealth from the lower to the upper classes. The corporate world defends and deflects from these practices by portraying anyone pointing them out as ‘bigoted xenophobes’.
The fact that the entire Beltway Establishment, the media and even a good number of Republicans are out to ‘get’ Trump is perhaps a measure of the degree to which Trump’s agenda subverts the status quo. He’s a traitor to his class and a threat to the corporate bottom line and therefore a bigoted xenophobe.
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@John
Do you think Trump would do anything to change that? Don’t be a silly. He’s perfectly happy to import foreign workers and pay them pittances. That’s SOB for him.
Trump is encouraging real xenophobia, not rational dissatisfaction with the plutocracy.
http://fortune.com/2015/08/03/donald-trump-foreign-workers-visas/
Trump is encouraging real xenophobia, not rational dissatisfaction with the plutocracy.
And so the only way to combat xenophobia ( your term) is to dissolve the borders and allow unlimited numbers of cheap workers to flood the labour market?
I’ve always been fascinated by the way ‘progressive’ aims and goals and sympathies so neatly dovetail with the profit-driven agendas of the corporations, high finance and big business. You know, unless we outsource our entire manufacturing base to those slave factories in China we should feel extremely guilty about being xenophobes
When you move a unionized cookie factory from Chicago to Mexico’s cheap labor paradise, you can manufacture the same product for about a third the price.
But don’t expect the price of your bag of oreos to drop accordingly.
No, you’ll be charged the same price, but the difference ( and it’s huge ) will be skimmed off
And then, when next year’s economic figures come out, we will all decry the ever increasing gap between rich and poor, puzzled by this pernicious and insidious trend that seems impossible to stamp out.
There’s nothing xenophobe about saying “American workers first”.
Unless you’ve been hoodwinked into believing that any threat to the corporate bottom line, ie limiting immigration or out-sourcing, is now xenophobia…
Sorry, don’t want to spill all the beans, but “hoodwinked” gives me very bad connotations, especially when used in a political context. Whiffs of denialism, etc. Could be wrong, but that is the kind of Volklore from which I first picked up that word.
Or maybe I meant “cry over foul milk”? Words is hard.
John, I have heard an economist argue that free trade pacts are inherently distortionary because manufacturing will flow to the location with the lowest cost of production. He argued that you cannot have a distortion free ‘free-market’ unless you also make labour migration free. I don’t think I’d want to live through the couple of generations of instability that would engender. Then again, some of us are getting a taste of that right now.
Rrr, for me those terms have these meanings:
Hoodwinked = duped
Spill the beans = let slip a secret
Cry over foul milk – never heard it.
Cry over spilt milk = being upset over something trivial that you can’t undo now = build a bridge = get over it.
YMMV
Thanks Rob.
The first time I came across the word “hoodwinked” was in connection with the type of characters who would distribute the Protocol of Zion or whatever the falsified pamphlet was called. That was quite a few decades ago but it left a lasting bad mark on that terminology, in my associative mind. It does not help much, now, to learn its “neutral”, “real” meaning.
I don’t want to cry fowl either. ;-)
Fallacy of the excluded middle. And yes, Trump (we were talking about Trump, remember?) is a demogogue who panders to xenophobia, among other ugly things.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2016/03/14/klein-on-trumps-ideology-of-violence/