White Riot: President Trump, Capitalism, and the 2016 Election

Fuck. Just...fuck.

You’re fired, America!

President Donald Trump. Let that sink in for a minute. If you haven’t yet leaped in front of a bus or fled to Canada, New Zealand, or some other former British colony that uses “ou” in words like “labour,” then you’re probably aware that Donald J. Trump is now President-Elect of the Unites States of America. After writing about the great orange dictator for over a year now, I never once went out and predicted that he would actually pull off the biggest political upset in American history. But I never ruled it out either.

I’ve called Trump a blowhard, a demagogue, an exclusivist tool, a middle-class radical, an authoritarian, a historical revisionist, a Know Nothing, an ethnic nationalist, a sham Evangelical, a rural populist, a faux American Exceptionalist, the Second Coming of Ross Perot, a world-class asshole, and the near inevitable end-result of Movement Conservatism. Now I have to call him president. So let’s try and unpack how America ended up crawling down the deepest, dankest hole since South Carolina decided to form its own republic in the name of preserving Dixie’s former coerced labor force.

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What in the Heck Does it Mean to be a Democrat?

The 2016 Democratic PArty ticket. I guess it's better than the End of the World.

The 2016 Democratic Party ticket. I guess it’s better than the End of the World.

On Halloween night, 1936, incumbent Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a riveting speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The United States was in the eighth year of the Great Depression, and FDR was fixin’ to tout his smorgasbord of government programs known collectively as the New Deal.

FDR acknowledged that Americans “wanted peace of mind instead of gnawing fear.” To offer this piece of mind, he promised to protect currency, ensure fair wages, reduce working hours, end child labor, and crush financial speculation. Moreover, The president directly addressed the business and financial interests and their Republican allies who opposed his administration: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” Democrats used to talk like that. They ought to again.

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Trumpocalypse Now! What Super Tuesday 2016 Means for America

Donald Trump declares wictory on Super Tuesday, while Chris Christie imagines what hell will be like when he shuffles off this mortal coil.

Donald Trump declares victory on Super Tuesday, while Chris Christie imagines what Hell will be like when he shuffles off this mortal coil.

If you followed the Super Tuesday primary results and suddenly felt a noticeable rumble beneath your feet, that was no earthquake. It was, in fact, the reverberation caused by Donald Trump’s gargantuan balls crashing through America’s purple mountain majesties and landing with a tremor-inducing thump into our amber waves of grain.

Trump’s dominating, if not entirely sweeping Super Tuesday victories were just the latest loogie hocked into the national Gatorade bottle during Election 2016. This is a race in which a long-festering culture of anti-politics has combined with bare-knuckled populism to create what will be the most uninspiring — and genuinely terrifying — party tickets in modern history.

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Why Liberalism Matters in the 2016 Election and Beyond

Bernie Sanders yells at those damn kids to get off his lawn, while Hillary Clinton smiles thinking about her next check from Wall Street.

Bernie Sanders yells at those damn kids to get off his lawn, while Hillary Clinton smiles thinking about her next check from Wall Street.

Hey, you, the person reading this. Do you know what it means to be a liberal? Depending on your own political persuasion, being liberal might make you a firm believer in liberty, equal opportunity, and the right to pursue an economic system that distributes the benefits of capitalism more broadly across the citizenry. Or, being a liberal might make you a Stalinist, Marxist, atheist, pantheist, freedom-hating, abortion-craving, tree-fondling, Chick-fil-A scorning, queer-o-sexual menace to Jesus and the Constitution that He wrote.

Either way, liberalism inspires passionate opinions in American society.

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Crash and Bern: The 2016 Iowa Caucuses

Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz crusied to victory in IOwa by Trumping Trump.

Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz cruised to victory in Iowa by Trumping Trump.

Every four years, the Iowa Caucus allows Iowa to be just a little bit more than that Field of Dreams state. The 2016 Iowa Caucus was an interesting affair, to say the least.

First off, there was the not entirely unsurprising second-place finish of marmot-domed billionaire braggart Donald Trump. The Donald got thwomped fairly decisively by immigrant Ted Cruz, proving that the universe does indeed have a sense of humor. Trump’s defeat was predictable: his entire campaign has been long on foamy-mawed resentment but short on real-deal, right-wing meat and potatoes. The policies he’s mouthed – building a Mexican border wall; banning Muslim immigration, and shoring up Social Security for cranky old honkies – have ranged from the absurd to the frankly liberal, hence the disdain he’s engendered among GOP establishment Grand Poobas.

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Trump and the Pungent Politics of Exclusivity

Donalnd Trump trumpets the politics of exclusivity in Richmond, VA. Former capital of the Old Confederacy.

Donald Trump trumpets the politics of exclusivity in Richmond, VA, the former capital of the Old Confederacy.

Donald Trump is a boorish, brash, braggadocious blowhard. He’s the kind of guy who’s richer than — and therefore better than — you, and if you don’t agree, then you’re an idiot. He’s tailor-made for the shame-drained slime bucket that is American politics. This fact ought to be a no-brainer at this point in the 2016 presidential campaign, but America’s over-paid beltway media fluffers still can’t comprehend why the GOP voting base laps up Trump’s uncouth stew of xenophobia, bigotry, sexism, and overt plutocrat sanctification like a St. Bernard who’s jowls-deep in a bowl of gravy-slathered kibble.

In an article for Reuters, for example, Bill Schneider claims that Trump is a new kind of candidate, an unholy, Frankensteinian daemon cross between “the political outsider and the fringe candidate.” This makes the blustery, ball-capped billionaire all the more perplexing to Schneider, who observes that, “Trump is a multibillionaire running against the establishment. He’s a candidate with no coherent political philosophy running as a conservative champion. It doesn’t make sense. But, so far, it’s working.” Trump’s conservative grass-roots appeal confuses the American punditocracy because they don’t want to admit that the secret to U.S. politics is exclusivity: that those with their grubby white maws already stuck in the national cookie jar will always vote to exclude other groups who are demanding some crumbs of their own.

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So Many Victories! The Anatomy of a Trump Speech

Trump in Dallas, Texas. This speech was freakin' yoooooooooge.

Trump in Dallas, Texas. This speech was freakin’ yoooooooooge.

Sigh. Donald Trump. The erstwhile joke campaign of America’s favorite, squirrel-bouffanted, braggadocious billionaire has heretofore beat the Washington punditocracy’s expectations and not only survived the first presidential primary summer, but also thrived.

Need proof? The Donald’s poll numbers are through the roof. He’s racked up approvals from two-thirds of Republican primary voters, and he’s crushing more traditional GOP nutballs like Ted Cruz and Jeb “Son of Poppy, Brother of Dubya” Bush. Former neurosurgeon — and current bedlamite — Dr. Ben Carson has enjoyed some movement in the polls, but his numbers haven’t been YOOOOOGE like Trump’s. But if you want some REAL data on why Trump has more and more Republican voters basking in the glow of his combed-over Collossalness, just take a look at the September 14 speech he yawped out in Dallas, Texas.

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Hillary, Bernie, and the Democrats’ Conservative Shadow

Hillary and Bernie: Who's the real Democrat here? It's a perennial question regardless of who's runnnig for the donkeys.

Hillary and Bernie: Who’s the real Democrat here? It’s a perennial question regardless of who’s running for the donkeys.

It’s tough being a Democrat. Every election cycle, donkey club members must go through the excruciating process of endless spinal implementation surgeries just to muster enough backbone to mouth the liberal platitudes that ostensibly constitute the foundations of America’s only major “progressive” political party. But let’s be honest: it’s hard being a liberal when the foamy-mouthed wingnuts are nipping at your tucked-back tail and the empathy-starved financial sector is flooding your coffers with Federal Reserve chicken feed.

The perpetual question-asking about what it means to be a liberal is once again in full swing amidst of the early primary campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The major issue at hand is just how much punishment the next potential Democratic president ought to reign down — Sodom and Gomorrah-like — on that craven nest of Sherif of Nottinghams known as the American Financial Sector.

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The Roots of Anti-Government Rural Rage

Police detain a ticked-off white dude suspected of firing on military personnel near Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Police detain a ticked-off white dude suspected of firing on military personnel near Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

It’s a wide-open secret that the American South has long been a haven for right-wing political nut-baggery. There are a multitude of reasons for this, many of which I discussed in a piece for Salon. But over the last few decades, a particular style of extreme, far-right, anti-government, gun-humping circle-jerkitude has found fertile ground in the good ole’ U.S. of A’s scattered rural hamlets. In America’s amber-waves-of-grain littered Heartland — much of which is still in the South — far-right populist movements have multiplied like deranged Donald Trump statements. They don’t share much by way of organization, coherent goals, or even basic levels of sanity, but they’re all united in their core belief that the federal government is the root of all evil in the modern world and is hell-bent on snuffing out every backwoods, freedom-firing, bible-believing Bubba from Mayberry to Hooterville.

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The Real Tragedy of the Forgotten White American

Mathhew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Youth Network, takes  sip from a mug emblazoned with the visage of Confederate President Jefferson Davis...who preferred his coffee VERY white.

Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Youth Network, takes a sip from a mug emblazoned with the visage of Confederate President Jefferson Davis…who took his coffee VERY white.

Are you white? Are you an American? Do you feel that your country’s changing ethnic and cultural demographics are steadily strangling your “traditional” values, beliefs, and culture? Moreover, do you find yourself facing a barren social landscape in which steady, meaningful employment and an overall sense of meaning in life are both scarcer than a clinically sane Republican presidential candidate? If so, then you have every right to be aggrieved, just not for the reasons that Matthew Heimbach — a.k.a “The Little Führer” — advocates.

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