THEN WE CAN GET DOWN TO WHAT IS REALLY WRONG
Life comes at you fast, and there’s no reason it should slow down in October. Nevertheless, especially in presidential election years, pundits are fond of speculating about potential “October surprises” – supposedly game-changing information that a candidate will drop right before the election in the hope of swinging votes to their side. Henry Kissinger is credited with coining the phrase a couple weeks before the 1972 election, when he declared that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.
Donald Trump was proud of the October surprise he manufactured. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted, the so-called “caravan” of impoverished Central Americans slowly making its way north towards the American border was intended to be Trump’s equivalent of Hitler’s Reichstag fire – the pretext for demonizing his enemies, and maybe even for suspending civil liberties. He’s already announced his intention to repeal the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship with an Executive Order. That isn’t the way the Constitution is supposed to be amended, but will the Kavanaugh Court care?
But there are surprises, and then there are real surprises.
Trump’s fans love that he’s transgressive. But some of them have impulse control issues, and don’t understand the broader strategy involved in October surprises. No one explained to Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers that they were supposed to wait until after the election to fuck shit up. They took Trump’s words both seriously and literally, and in trying to advance his cause, they may have undermined their Glorious Leader’s best laid plans.
I was in Norway during the rise and fall of Cesar Sayoc; and I was on a plane somewhere between Oslo and Tucson when Robert Bowers decided that killing some Jews in Pittsburgh would make our border with Mexico safer. My “Saturday” lasted about 36 hours, and I’m still punchy from jetlag, so I apologize if I have a few details wrong, but in a way, that physical and mental distance gave me a slightly different perspective on these acts of domestic terrorism.
Although Norway was cold and wet – beautiful, but still cold and wet – I never had the sense that significant numbers of their citizens hated each other. They had a deadly one-man terrorist incident in 2011, but they didn’t go crazy afterwards, as the United States did in 2001. Since the end of the Viking days, Norway has been dominated by every power in the region, from Sweden and Denmark centuries ago to Germany and Russia during World War II. They haven’t forgotten, but they get along with all their neighbors now.
I watched from nine time zones ahead of Tucson as Republicans tried out a variety of responses to the pipe bomb attacks. Their initial response was the old reliable “false flag” argument – Democrats must have been responsible for the bombs. And not just a lone wolf Democrat, either, but a massive conspiracy funded by evil Jewish mastermind George Soros.
The “false flag” argument went belly up when the Magabomber (great nickname, wish I’d thought of it) turned out to be a guy with a long history of Trump fandom and right-wing violence. A few hardcore QAnon fans are trying to convince each other that Sayoc is a Deep State plant who had been groomed for years and activated at a point that would generate maximum embarrassment for Donald Trump. But that’s a tough sell outside of the MAGA fever swamps.
It’s weak tea, but the best argument the right-wing could muster about the pipe bomb affair was an oldie but goodie – the “tu quoque” argument that was developed back in the days of the Roman Empire. “Tu quoque” is Latin for “your side does it too,” also known as “both sides do it” and “whatabout-ism”. This position requires Republicans to equate yelling at people in restaurants with pipe bombs, but whatever. Trump’s Deplorables don’t care about logical consistency. When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead, all that matters is that their leaders fight back, even if the best they can manage is a variation on “I know you are, but what am I?”
Still, as bad as Sayoc’s bombs were, the Magabomber had to settle for second place in the contest for worst wingnut of the week. The life blood of Trumpism is conspiracy – a belief that events around the world are being orchestrated by a sinister cabal bent on global domination. And maybe you’ll find this hard to believe, but that sinister cabal always turns out to be Jews.
In the wing-nut world view, Jews are all-powerful. They run Hollywood, they run Wall Street, they run the European Union and the United Nations. Jewish money is behind everything from the (bogus) Central American migrant “caravan” to Democratic congressional campaigns. If you keep peeling back the layers of right-wing conspiracy theories, sooner or later you’ll find a deep vein of anti-Semitism.
If you were paying attention, you could spot anti-Semitic themes in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. But even if you weren’t paying attention then, by August 2017, it had become too obvious ignore. That’s when the neo-Nazis, the neo-Confederates, and all the other alt-right Neos crawled out from under their rocks and rallied in Charlottesville, VA. Those “very fine people” sported swastikas and chanted “Jews will not replace us” as they marched towards the bloody confrontation they were longing for.
As his legal and political climate becomes increasingly hostile, Donald Trump has doubled down on conspiracy, and he’s adopted some classic anti-Semitic dog-whistle terminology. He advocates “nationalism,” rants against “globalism,” refers to immigrants (at least the ones from shithole countries) as animals and snakes. He’s even taken to calling out George Soros by name.
But wait, you might be thinking. Look at all Trump has done for Israel. Didn’t he move our embassy to Jerusalem? Aren’t he and Netanyahu BFFs? How could someone like that be anti-Semitic?
Well, Trump and Bibi are kindred spirits – corrupt and thuggish – except that Netanyahu was a war hero, while Generalissimo Trump was grounded by his pesky bone spur issues. But Trump envies and admires dictators, and while most strongman-rulers hold power in third world banana republics, Netanyahu is the elected leader of an important strategic ally.
But right-wingers don’t support Israel because they love Jews. They support Israel because of something called “dispensational pre-millennialism” – a belief that the End Times, the Battle of Armageddon and all that – can only happen after a strong Jewish kingdom has been established, with its capital in Jerusalem.
Fifty years ago, dispensational pre-millennialism was an obscure theory, espoused by a relatively small number of evangelical Christians. Then Hal Lindsey wrote THE LATE, GREAT PLANET EARTH. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins followed with their LEFT BEHIND books in the 90s, and suddenly “The Rapture” had gone mainstream. The end of the world was at hand, and right-wing Christians believed that supporting Israel was a key factor in hurrying it along. This is also the last chance that Jews will have to convert to Christianity before being doomed to eternal damnation.
Long story short, in the Middle East, Jews occupy a theologically strategic position. In the United States? Not so much. For American anti-Semites, that makes them fair game for demonization – and for some extreme elements, fair game for murder.
I suppose the world will end sometime, but according to my Bible, Jesus himself said (Mark 13:32) that no man knows when it will happen. In the meantime, the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule continue to apply. We’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, and as Jesus noted in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, everyone is our neighbor – even people we think of as our enemies. Jesus didn’t say it would be easy, but he said we should do it.
In the immediate future, the most loving thing you can do for your neighbors, near and far, known and unknown, is to vote the party of hate out of office. One week to go, friends. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize.