A few days ago @mrjamesob asked me if I felt vindicated bc I’ve been saying for years that they’re fascists. And I realized when I woke up this morning the answer is: I feel angry. Furious. We warned people, using historical evidence, of what was happening.
Now they’ve come out as fascists and smeared the capitol with feces and bashed a cop’s head in and tried to overturn the election and now those fuckers are calling for “unity”?!
Make no mistake: a call for unity with people who incited and took part in an insurrection against American democracy is not a call for unity, but for surrender.
Unity with fascists makes us fascist.
We don’t unite with fascists. We defeat them.
Unity keeps them in power. Unity concedes they were right. Unity suggests they had good reason for what they did.
They participated in an insurrection and an ongoing coup. They need to be removed, disqualified from ever holding office, & jailed where they have committed crimes.
They smeared our Capitol with shit, threaten to lynch members of our government - including the Vice President, a member of their own party - and you’re telling me to unite with them?
Fuck unity. Fuck the fascists. And fuck anyone who makes this argument.
Tl;dr: The attempted coup isn’t over while they’re still in power. Unity is surrender and keeps people who supported fascism at the heart of our government.
Anyone wondering where I said that this is fascism: in my 2018 book, Behold, America; in numerous essays and in countless talks, lectures, seminars & podcasts (esp @TPpodcast_).
Here is one from September, which includes a shout-out to Kellyanne, who has just discovered that this is fascism and she disapproves. newstatesman.com/international/…
C4 news tonight leading with data leak from Trump's 2016 campaign database: “a major investigation reveals data leak & evidence that 3.5m Black voters were marked as ‘deterrence’ in a bid to stop them going to polls."
“In one of biggest database leaks ever” C4 reveals that 3.5 million black voters were targeted in Wisconsin by Trump campaign and other swing states. Clear racist voter suppression.
#C4News have obtained a huge cache of Trump 2016 campaign database. They had a group called “Deterrence” they knew wouldn’t vote for them and so they tried to stop from voting.
Happy 124th birthday to Scott Fitzgerald, born #otd in 1896. The best decision of my professional life was to center it around his works and the interwar period he chronicled.
This year also marks the centenary of his literary career, which kicked off with the proverbial bang in 1920 - in honor of which I’ve done an essay for the latest issue of @nybooks ($) nybooks.com/articles/2020/…
I’ve written scores of essays about him and his work, but here’s one that isn’t paywalled, and includes my favorite photograph of him. newstatesman.com/culture/books/…
Michelle Obama, DNC, 2016: “That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing...
... and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”
Please tell me more about how rare it is for First Ladies to talk about slavery in the White House... Melania just plagiarizing Michelle again.
The first was this one, which came out at end of June, on why Trumpism can (and in my view should) be construed as American fascism. nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/…
This second one, about to come out with the @TheTLS, connects the story to Roth’s Plot Against America (and the new HBO adaptation).
What makes me crazy about the “Harris might not be loyal to Biden because she criticized him at the debate” take is that she wasn’t *supposed* to be loyal to him at that point. She was his opponent. This hardly precludes the possibility of loyalty if he earns it by making her VP.
They’re criticizing her for not being loyal to a man for whom she didn’t work, who hadn’t earned her specific loyalty. Why the hell should she have been “loyal” to him, even if she weren’t fighting him in a primary?
That’s why it strikes so many of us as sexist, as I think. Because it faults her for failing to show fealty to a senior man who had done nothing at that point to earn it.