Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:59 on 14 November 2024

On the matter of foreign interference to elect Trump, I would suspect Israel more than Russia.

It is known that the Trump campaign communicated with the Netanyahu regime multiple times this year, including twice in October alone. By contrast, I am not aware of the Trump campaign having any meetings with Russian officials this campaign cycle.

Netanyahu is not a popular leader, war serves Netanyahu’s self-interest by helping to distract from his domestic problems, and Trump wasn’t quiet about giving Netanyahu free rein to brutalize his enemies. Moreover, both Trump and Netanyahu have a track record as one of their respective nations most corrupt public figures.

Mind you, I am not saying that Israel did interfere, only that Israel might have interfered, and that it is more likely that Israel interfered than it is that Russia did.

Published at 06:02 on 12 November 2024

One of the little-known footnotes of America’s transition to fascism is that former president George W. Bush promptly congratulated Trump on his recent victory. He did so after remaining absolutely dead-silent on the Trump 2024 campaign, all the while many other former Republicans (most of who had already quit the party in disgust over Trumpism) denounced Trump and begged Americans not to vote for him.

This is, I believe, highly significant, as it was the actions of the George W. Bush presidency that convinced me of the fundamentally fascist nature of the Republicans at the time. The George W. Bush Administration was when I started routinely using the f-word to refer to Republicans and Republican administrations. It had by then become obvious: the bald-faced lying to get into the Iraq war, the attitude that truth is irrelevant and what matters is myth construction, the glorification of militarism (witness Bush’s flight suit “mission accomplished” stunt), the willingness to break laws (they literally went so far as to make torture an official policy).

The fundamentally fascist nature of the whole enterprise was clearly evident. When it was all over, after the dust settled and a new administration was in power, what happened? What was done to hold the architects of the fascism accountable? Nothing. Nobody served so much as a single night in jail. Of course not. The Democrats are, and long have been, a party of institutionalized weakness. In this, there was a lesson: fascism works, and it is a viable political tactic in the USA.

I knew then that the USA was in serious trouble, and that it was only a matter of time, unless some sort of revolutionary movement could prompt change from below (most likely as a result of giving the ruling class a good scare and frightening them into reforming). But the revolution never came, so here were are.

Published at 07:33 on 11 November 2024

Establishment liberals are doing it again.

Remember Ruth Bader Ginsberg, how she selfishly clung to her Supreme Court seat as she aged, despite not only a cancer diagnosis but a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, only to die on Trump’s watch and get replaced by a Trump fascist?

Well, it’s happening again. The Democrats control the Senate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor is aging, and she’s clinging to her seat despite the Democrats having a Senate majority and thus the ability to replace her, should she resign.

This is but one data point that explains why I am personally just so completely over Establishment liberalism and the Democratic Party. They are the present-day exemplars of what Churchill observed when he wrote “The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”

Published at 17:20 on 8 November 2024

This is getting circulated amongst pro-Israel social media circles as a modern-day pogrom, an example of why Jews need a state of their own (and by implication why any criticism of anything Israel does is unacceptable).

But read the whole article, and you find this passage:

It was unclear what set off Thursday’s violence or how long after the game it began. Some Amsterdam locals said the Israeli fans had spent the previous two days instigating.

Two videos shot Wednesday showed Israeli fans climbing walls to pull Palestinian flags down from second-story windows; in one of the clips, scores of Israelis gathered below cheered as the flag was burned on the street. Maccabi hooligans also sang an anti-Arab chant Thursday as they entered the stadium.

Other footage seemed to show Israelis engaging in violence themselves. One dashboard camera clip posted Wednesday night by a Dutch taxi driver appeared to show a Maccabi fan smashing a taxi with an iron chain. Another video — it was unclear whether it was shot Wednesday or Thursday — appeared to show about 50 Israeli fans doing the chasing.

There was also disagreement online about what was happening in some of the videos. One was widely shared on Jewish social media accounts as evidence of a mob attack against Israelis, but the woman who recorded the video said it showed Maccabi supporters ganging up on a Dutch man.

And if anyone tries to accuse me of antisemitism or justifying violence against Jews by inventing some fictitious context here, I will just note that the article I have cited is in the Forward, a Jewish newspaper.

It may well just be that “brawl between rival gangs of soccer hooligans” is a far more accurate summary of what happened here than “pogrom.”

Published at 08:06 on 8 November 2024

The Centrist Bad Take

If only those transgender weirdos had stayed in the closet and not opened their stupid yaps about their preferred gender pronouns, Harris would have won. Yes, I am really seeing basically this sort of stuff circulate in the Democratic Party policy wonk space.

It’s crap, of course. Harris did not focus much at all on trans issues in her campaign. It was much more about preserving democracy (as, given the context, it should have been). It wasn’t even a particularly liberal message she sent; she literally had Liz Cheney stump for her. The existence of openly trans people did not stop Biden from winning last time (or stop Michigan and Wisconsin from reelecting their Democratic senators this time).

The Leftist Bad Take

If only Harris had gone full Bernie Sanders and promised democratic socialism, she would have won. Again, yes, I am really seeing this.

Again, also crap. Biden actually, within parameters of being electable, did quite a bit for the working class, policy-wise. Yes, as a liberal capitalist, not a socialist. This is because most Americans, including most working-class Americans, don’t want socialism.

Don’t like how unwilling so many Americans are to see capitalism as the ugly thing it really is? Fine, neither do I. Do the grassroots work to turn that around first. Just running for president based on your personal pet ideology is not the way to do it. People will just vote for someone else. If Harris had gone full Bernie Sanders, she would have lost even worse.

One More Thing

Keep an eye on the Democrats. If they try to, for example, shove transpeople under the bus, challenge them, disassociate with them, or flat-out oppose them as you see fit. This is the party that sent a boatload of Jewish refugees back to Europe (where some of its passengers got the Final Solution) we are talking about. This is the party that locked American citizens up in concentration camps we are talking about. Oh yes they could get that ugly again.

When I recently wrote about establishing moral principles and guidelines, this is one of the things I was thinking about. Make reasonable compromises with reasonable people, yes, but do not sell your soul in the name of gaining the world.

Published at 08:36 on 7 November 2024

My predictions on the likely fate of the Biden presidency four years ago were mostly wrong.

Biden did in fact get his Senate majority, so he was able to enact policy for the most part the proper way, via passing bills through Congress. He actually did pass a fair amount of reforms to increase the power of the working class, which logically is exactly what he should have done to try and chip away at Trump’s base of support in the White working class.

But it doesn’t matter. Biden still failed.

His biggest failure was not directly his failure, but the failure of the Attorney General he appointed: Merrick Garland turned out to be a staunch traditionalist, but the tradition he was particularly staunch about preserving was the American führerprinzip that a president must be above all written law. So Garland dragged his feet about indicting Trump Federally until it was too late.

It was the historic mission of the Biden administration to deal a mortal blow to Trumpist fascism, and the Administration failed in that mission.

Maybe some in the Administration knew the brewing failure, maybe none did. Again, it doesn’t matter. Suppose some did, and Biden was sympathetic to their point of view. He had at that point painted himself in a corner: he campaigned against Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice, and had promised a hands-off policy. So it was ideologically very difficult for Biden to twist Garland’s arm or threaten him with dismissal and replacement.

Which brings us to a darker and more ominous corner: the Democrats have painted themselves, since 2020, as the enemies of insurrection against a leader with an electoral mandate. Well, Trump now has a clear electoral mandate, and he is about to embark on policies for which a measure of insurrection is the morally justified response.

Even as Trump pardons the January 6th insurrectionists, he will willingly crack down hard on any unrest that arises in response to anything he does. A transition to authoritarian rule is then
by far the most likely result.

And all because the Biden Administration failed in its historic mission of crushing fascism.

Postscript: Jonathan V. Last has an analysis that comes to basically the same conclusions I just did above.

Published at 21:12 on 6 November 2024

1. Come up with strategies for protecting the vulnerable, the ones American fascism is most likely to harm, e.g. transpeople, immigrants, and non-human living things (this is not a comprehensive list, and is not in any particular order).
2. Come up with a set of moral principles and guidelines for whatever action(s) you will take. I am not going to tell you what those princples must be, that is for you to determine for yourself. Then write those principles down for future reference.

Published at 22:51 on 5 November 2024

They just called Pennsylvania for Cheeto Mussolini. So Trump won again. More later.

Published at 12:59 on 24 October 2024

Will He?

Over a month ago I wrote that the odds favoured Harris winning. I still think so, although not quite so much given how the polls have slipped some since then.

Despite that, however, I will point out that the polls are not infallible, particularly in this era of smart phones and generally unpublished numbers, which greatly complicates the job of polling. The past two presidential elections, the polls did underestimate the level of support for Trump. If that pattern holds, the USA is indeed f*cked. But it won’t necessarily hold. It is just as plausible that after two cycles of underestimating support for Trump, the pollsters have this time overcompensated for their past errors, and are now overestimating Trump support.

The long and short of it is that we don’t know for sure and it’s going to be close. But why so close?

The Nichols Theory

Anti-Trump conservative Tom Nichols has a theory. Tom Nichols is also wrong, or more accurately, incomplete. Some people are voting for Trump for exactly the reason Nichols stated, i.e. as an “act of social revenge.” Some, but not all.

Nichols retired from his job as a college professor and now spends a significant amount of time on X (formerly Twitter), where no small amount of fascist trolls exist. Those individuals are indeed explained by Nichols’ theory (and of course they show up commenting on his posts a lot, so he notices them).

However, there are a lot of people — not all of them necessarily even particularly right wing, at least not by domestic U.S. standards — who just think that, for whatever reason, the concerns about Trump that Nichols, myself, and many others have aired are simply overblown. I have run into quite a lot of these individuals. They don’t want to burn it all down. They just don’t believe Trump is that big a deal. Nichols’ theory does not explain these people. These individuals tend not to be enthusiastic about Trump either way, so they do not feel motivated to comment on Nichols’ tweets.

What might explain them? The most likely answer is not so easy for a conservative like Nichols to swallow (and it explains the trolls, too).

The Other, More Systemic Reason

There are, quite simply, a large number of Americans who entered the Trump era already pre-indoctrinated to accept fundamentally fascist political values. So when a fascist descends his golden escalator and appears on the political stage, his ideas just don’t seem that odd or threatening to them.

I first started getting truly concerned about this around 20 years ago, during the run-up to the Iraq War. There were just so many bald-faced lies getting thrown about. There was just so much disregard for the truth. There was just so much official malfeasance in pursuit of the goal of foreign intervention. And the media and the Democrats were so disgustingly milquetoast when it came to calling the Republicans on it.

It was at that moment that I realized the core problem of bourgeois democracy, particularly in a military superpower: because it’s still a procedural democracy, and the politics of the ruling elite do not serve the public interest, you must indoctrinate the voting public, else those voters will revoke your electoral mandate.

And it turns out that there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between the amount of indoctrination to needed get voters to support imperialism and class rule under procedural democracy, and the amount of indoctrination needed to get voters to support fascist politics. I saw the danger looming then, and I really see it now.

Rule by presidential fiat? What’s the big deal, that’s gone on for decades when it comes to presidentially-ordered military interventions. Nobody pays attention to the Constitution when it calls for Congress to approve declarations of war, so why should any of the other parts of it matter so much?

Massive domestic military deployments against illegal aliens? Why not, the military gets deployed against foreigners in foreign lands all the time, why not against foreigners who aren’t legally supposed to be here?

Suppress left protest movements? Hey, we back client states that do so all the time! If “stability” is good there, why not here as well?

Decades of bipartisan propaganda to get voters to support high military spending, oppressive imperialist politics, economic inequality, and class privilege are merely so many chickens that have now come home to roost.

And it gets even easier to happen if, as in the USA, your political culture is imbued with no small amount of exceptionalist rhetoric. Democratic decline becomes something that afflicts only other, lesser nations. It can’t happen here. We’re special.

Trump is no aberration; he is the logical conclusion of a system that was rotting from the inside for a long, long time.

Published at 20:24 on 1 October 2024

Vance was a classic slimy pol who knew what needed to be said at a given moment… and said it, regardless of whether or not he actually believed it. In fact, it is hard to say exactly what Vance actually believes.

Unlike Trump, Vance has self-control, and managed to exercise it. Nobody with half a brain who follows how much Vance has changed his tune depending on a given situation found it remotely plausible. The rub is, many voters are idiots without so much as half a brain, so it probably was an effective strategy.

Walz, when faced with a Trump fascist, chose to mostly play Minnesota Nice. Make no mistake: that is who he was faced with; a Trump fascist by virtue of political calculation (as opposed to true conviction) is still a Trump fascist. He could have gone for the jugular a number of times (on democracy, on Vance’s lies regarding his stances on abortion, on Project 2025, etc.), but he mostly chose not to.

It is precisely this nauseating tendency to meet evil with weakness that just irritates the living fuck out of me when it comes to liberals. But I digress.

Walz also just generally came off as weak and unsure, stumbling over his words a number of times and repeatedly checking his notes.

But, Walz didn’t self-destruct like Biden did in the first debate and Trump did in the second, and it was a Vice-Presidential debate, not a Presidential one, so the net effect on the polling needle will probably be small, possibly immeasurable.