We might say that the fabric of American society is unraveling, the victim of a desperate Trump whose psychopathy thrives on stoking violence, chaos and division, monopolizing the media, posing as the ultimate authority, and being adulated by his base. His first goal can be disbursed among 940 hate groups nation-wide.
His me-first obsession projects his anti-social tendency, displaying a barrenness of empathy and social responsibility that infects many in society. One of many outrages is his part in spurring several armed white supremacist group actions during the Oregon wildfires.
In itself, such thuggery seems an extension of Trump’s own personality disorders. Like past fascist leaders, he needs to command personally like a would-be, ruthless, tyrannical leader, never tolerating disloyalty, his paranoia is projected to others, including Antifa hunters.
In pursuit of a corporate agenda, this ruthless obsession with power seems a malady displayed among tribal Republican leaders as well, especially since Newt Gingrich.
Presently some Republican candidates are actually joining in with other lurid claims, not just Antifa, but other conspiracy theories like QAnon, claims centering on child-trafficking led by the most decent public figures like Tom Hanks, supposedly with Donald Trump leading efforts to stop it. It even spills over into other realms: inflating pandemic casualties, wearing masks being unnecessary, false vaccine claims, and even 5G protests.
Social media has been slow to police conspiracy postings in their forums. But the focal point of conspiracy threats is Donald Trump who spends a great deal of time engaging in Trump media, ignoring his duty to protect all Americans. By tweets and rallies he willingly spreads the most toxic conspiracies.
Surrounded by hand-picked loyalists with no special talents, prone to delusions of superiority, and unhampered by political restraints, Trump’s disorderly reach projects to impressionable, angst-driven followers.
His message is constantly amplified and coordinated by soulless news sources like Fox News, a source with no conscience, no principles, only profit as a motive. It’s an angry, fear-based, divisive message which corporate chieftains long ago found helpful in marshalling the masses to their agenda.
Effectively, it projects the personal anti-social tendencies of the chief of state through the megaphone of right-wing media (Fox News & others), fires up minions serving as Trump’s anti-social arms projected to chosen arenas where this infection mingles with the travails of climate change, the pandemic, and the misery that Republican lawmakers are glad to ignore.
Thanks to Donald Trump and enabling Republicans, even coordinated with Russia, white supremacy and racism are both in fashion and spurred on by the Trump news networks of Fox News, Sinclair Communications, talk-radio outlets and social media, & often permitted on Facebook.
Brazen white nationalists have put BLM members under threat, one given three years for cyberstalking and threatening BLM candidates and activists.
Antifa conspiracy theories recently threatened travelers near Portland, Oregon desperately battling wildfires, a conspiracy theory supported by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, inflaming white supremacists on social media and broadcast on Trump-supported media (Fox News, Sinclair, Daily Stormer, Breitbart, talk-radio, etc).
The politically targeted, fear-based social media and TV-broadcast message convinced gun-toting white supremacists that Antifa was setting the fires in Oregon. Many staged roadblocks and threatened travelers, a few checked by local police.
How did we get here?
It started with corporate chieftains wanting to build a new corporate culture by any means possible in the 1970s. It has now come to this, though this kind of chaos wasn’t their original plan, though their ruthless pursuit of corporate control did lead to it.
When they progressively drew the GOP into their plan, it being the party most closely aligned with their agenda, Republican leaders, also hungry for power and control, forgot any concerns for an American majority and sought ways to ingratiate themselves with corporate bosses to earn their election keep.
Of course, Democrats grew to slowly abandon worker concerns as corporate money flooded the political scene and relaxed their fixed alliance to unions. Conservative ideology was very persuasive in applying pressure and money in advantageous directions, establishing infrastructures of control like conservative think tanks, privatization of public functions, deregulation that helped business, and for-profit moves for the news media.
Democrats went along with decisions like ending the FCC Fairness Doctrine, eventually leading to right-wing radio and Fox News. They muted their anti-trust efforts, allowing huge oligopolistic corporation to form. The even joined in law and order issues which helped to incarcerate millions. Corporations began to control many public functions in law enforcement, education, immigration, public highways, and bridges. Their ideology infiltrated law enforcement with varied money schemes.
Turned into a culture of commercial transactions: money, power and political control of most importance with our courts, our politics, our media, even religion was infested with these values. Still, Democrats have managed to retain most democratic values and fight this transactional descent.
Currently, America is debased and pitied in the world, a country dragged down by a totally corrupt would-be autocrat, enabled by tribal Republicans, and still supported by corporate money.
While the norms of common decency are in shambles, crony capitalism succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Democratic norms have been discarded. The excesses and corruptions of a ruthless plutocracy have slipped into religion and the evangelical movement, using it to push a political agenda and their candidates, currently including Donald J. Trump.
With Trump, no corruption, no dissipation of political norms, no foreign attacks on our system, no undermining of our democracy were reasons for his base to abandon its candidate.
Many still sit by and support Trump re-election, even with his campaign of domestic terror, erosion of democratic structures, subjugation of human rights, shredding of cultural norms, along with abandonment of human decency.
For Donald Trump, nothing is more important than his own needs, and his primary need is adulation. He is one of those twisted individuals who would destroy the world to fulfill his own gratification or perhaps destroy the world for spite if his gratification is somehow blocked.
Giving power to such a totally sick, totally corrupt man makes violence, even murders by his supporters, almost certain. One of the latest involved two murders of peaceful protestors by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after an unarmed black man was shot in the back seven times by a white officer. Such hatred of another is unfathomable.
Even now his intention to make BLM protests the focal point of his own lawlessness, his tweets and rallies are inciting white supremacists descent on the streets of Louisville, KY to encounter BLM protestors and spur looting and unrest, even violence as BLM demonstrators peacefully react to the Kentucky Grand Jury and the its AG failing to charge anyone with the reckless death of Breonna Taylor.
