Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Bryan Cranston May Be A Gifted Actor, But He Sucks As A Political Pundit — Instead, Read Elizabeth Drew Today

Upon reading the headline for today's essay from The New Republic, this blogger thought — Ooo, Oo, Elizabeth, call on me! The Moron-in-Chief is weak when measured against the norms of presidential behavior, but he has managed — in less than a year — to mortally wound the United States of American by appointing buffoons, incompetents, and jackasses to head executive departments and agencies. He has failed to make critical appointments in the parts of government that are vital to national well-being. When it comes to treason, the Moron-in-Chief has no rival. The only strong element within the Moron-in-Chief is the stench of high crimes and misdemeanors. If this is a (fair & balanced) indictment, so be it.

[x TNR]
Who Knew Trump Would Be A Weak President?
By Elizabeth Drew


TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing

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At his rallies, presidential candidate Donald Trump excited his most avid supporters through displays of toughness: his calls when a demonstrator acted up to “get him out of here”; his incantations of his reality show signature “You’re fired”; his promises of robust actions on “Day One.” He promised his ecstatic followers that he’d tear up trade treaties and the Iran nuclear deal. He’d force other countries to renegotiate and he’d be tough in his dealings with them, just as he’d been in business. And he’d show those so-called NATO allies that the US wasn’t committed to defending them—no more of the wishy-washy deference to other nations that Barack Obama had displayed for eight years. Also, on that busy Day One, he’d have a replacement for Obamacare ready for Congress to enact immediately. He’d pick the very best people but wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of someone who wasn’t up to the job. Above all, he’d be decisive, no vacillating figurehead. He’d be a man of action, tough and strong.

And then ...

Trump not only didn’t have an alternative to Obamacare ready on his first day in office, he never offered one. Moreover, when House Republicans presented to him their own ideas about what should be in the health care bill, they found him to be an easy mark. This was in part because the president didn’t much care what was in the health care bill, he just wanted to sign one; he told aides that would make him look presidential. He’d said in the campaign that he’d produce a health care bill that was better and cheaper than Obamacare, but it turned out that Trump was unfamiliar with the substance of what was in the Affordable Care Act and didn’t grasp the import of proposed alternatives—and this crippled his ability to be a force on the subject. Or, as it’s turning out, most any subject. He keeps telling us what a fine mind he has, but if so he seems loath to exercise it much. His advisers on national security have been encouraged to put as much of their daily intelligence briefings in pictures and charts as they can. A president who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know isn’t in a very strong position to negotiate with others, or to lead.

A president without proposals of his own cannot set the nation’s agenda except in the broadest strokes (as in: next, the tax bill). Ignorant of how the legislative branch works, he let the Republican leaders set the priorities and was surprised that even though his party had the majority, Congress wasn’t more deferential to him. And then, when it came to major substantive questions—whether to stick with the Iran deal, how to resolve the status of undocumented immigrants who came into the country as children, and, most recently, how far to go in smashing Obamacare subsidies—he turned these matters over to Congress to resolve.

In addition, Trump has vacillated on several issues. He publicly reversed himself on whether he supported a compromise reached in mid-October between Republican Lamar Alexander and Democrat Patty Murray, which would stabilize the Obamacare markets and keep the program from being cut off from millions of low-income people by authorizing the payments (which the president had just ended by executive order) to health insurers for two years in exchange for granting states greater flexibility in implementing the ACA. (The Congressional Budget Office said this compromise would lower the budget deficit by $3.8 billion, making it the first health care proposal this year that got a positive rating.) First, Trump supported the compromise. Then, eleven minutes later, he opposed it. What had happened in between was clear enough, and by now familiar: The far right was against the compromise, both in “principle” and because its purpose was to shore up the despised Obamacare; conservative House Republicans (which is most of them) have zero interest in doing anything that would prop up the health care program passed in 2010, which they still passionately preferred to repeal and replace. The question of where Trump will ultimately come down on the compromise is still up in the air.

The president has also been back and forth over whether the US will participate in the Paris climate accord. First, in a Rose Garden ceremony in early June, he announced that the US would withdraw (leaving the false impression that the goals set in the agreement are mandatory). This put the US in the same category as Syria and Nicaragua. But it reinforced the “America First” theme of Trump’s campaign. And it aligned him with the fossil fuel industry that had backed him and played a large role in staffing the relevant parts of his administration. Yet various states within the US have decided to abide by the accord, while voices within the administration have counseled against the US being an international pariah. Typically, Trump said he could stay in the Paris accord if he could negotiate “a far better deal.” (Trump used similar language in regards to NAFTA and the Iran agreement, as if US negotiators had simply ignored the possibility of getting more from the other side.) Trump has given some of our allies the sense that he might be willing to reenter the Paris accord.

He’s also wobbled on whether to extend Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the program pushed by Obama that protects from deportation some 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the US illegally when they were very young; Trump has threatened to send them to the country of their parents’ origin, places many of them have never seen, or barely know. Trump in mid-September ostensibly made a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to extend their stay in exchange for tighter border security (though no wall), but once again the far right roared—and Trump backed off. So now the fate of those 800,000 “Dreamers” hangs in the balance, as their permits to remain face an expiration date of March 5, 2018.

In yet another instance, Trump was unsure whether he’d affirm the US’s commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the all-important provision that commits each member to aid any other that comes under attack. After surprising even his own aides by making no reference to Article 5 in a speech he gave to other NATO leaders at a May summit in Brussels, Trump finally recommitted the US to NATO in June.

So much vacillation on domestic and foreign policies confuses other nations’ leaders as well as US citizens and politicians, and a president less imposing physically and rhetorically would be labeled as indecisive.

Trump has left a lot of the firing of people to others or used indirect methods. He rid himself of his checkered National Security Advisor Michael Flynn only after long hesitation, even after a warning by the Justice Department that Flynn had been compromised by the Russians and had lied to the vice president about it. And Trump had no sooner fired Flynn than he declared him to be “a wonderful man,” and began to lean on FBI Director James Comey to go easy on him in the FBI’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election and possible collusion on the part of the Trump campaign. Later, he fired Comey via a letter carried to the FBI headquarters by his bodyguard, rather than face to face. (As it happened, Comey was out of town, which no one on the White House staff had bothered to find out.)

Trump and his ineffectual Chief of Staff Reince Priebus discussed Priebus’s departure for weeks, but Trump finally forced the issue in July by hiring as his new communications director the noisy and vulgar Anthony Scaramucci, whom Priebus had (rightly) opposed and who in short time drove Priebus to resign. Scaramucci’s appointment had another victim, one whose tenure was already uncertain: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who’d been a bad fit for the job from the outset, and who also had vehemently opposed Scaramucci’s appointment, resigned in protest when Scaramucci was named. Then, on his first day as the new chief of staff, retired four-star General John Kelly fired Scaramucci, who’d been on the job for ten days. Trump’s timorousness about firing people isn’t a sign of a confident person, certainly not the bully boy of the rallies.

Trump’s powers to intimidate have proved limited. He tried to bully Jeff Sessions out of his job as attorney general, but Sessions refused to take the forceful, repetitive hints and remained in his cabinet position. For a while, Trump tried to unnerve Chuck Schumer, but Schumer remained unperturbed and Trump backed off. The Twitter-bully remains comfortably ensconced in the White House, hurling his bolts, but if his intended victim pays him no mind he drops the matter and attacks someone else. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was once the target of Trump’s tweets, as Trump tried to shift the blame for his utter lack of legislative policy achievements, but more recently Trump invited McConnell to lunch at the White House and announced afterward that the two men were “closer than ever.”

This depiction of Donald Trump as a weak president would no doubt shock his ardent followers, especially since Trump usually covers his retreats with bluster. It might also be a surprise to those who have worried that he’s a would-be autocrat. It turns out that Trump has neither the wit nor the grit to seize power, and he may be too lazy and too uninterested in governing to make much of it if he did. (He can, however, empower by default cabinet officials who do know what to do with the power at their disposal—for example, Sessions.) But, except for his use of executive orders (often to countermand ones by Obama) and his cyber-bullying, Trump is essentially a passive participant in his own government. His campaign against the press is of concern, but thus far he’s not taken action to curb its independence, nor have his threats to do so had any discernible impact on the rigorous job the press is doing of holding his presidency to account. In fact, all things taken together, it begins to seem as if the strongman of the rallies was a convenient deception, a figure that Trump invented but couldn’t maintain when it came to making actual decisions in the Oval Office.

If this approach to governing keeps up, Trump may find himself once again on a newsweekly cover—the kind of prominence he craves—but this time with a sobriquet that once ordained one of his predecessors: “WIMP.” # # #

[Elizabeth Drew is a political journalist and author. Her first journalism job was with Congressional Quarterly beginning in 1959. She was Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly (1967–1973) and The New Yorker (1973–1992). Drew has written 14 books and the most recent is Richard M. Nixon (2007, 2014). She received a BA (political science) from Wellesley College (MA) and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.]

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Monday, October 30, 2017

If You Do More Than Glance At Today's Blog-Post, You Will Have Learned A New Word

In the e-mail that brought today's toon to this blogger's In Box, Tom/Dan wrote:

Hey all,

Just another week in the dysfunctional country with the manifestly unfit leader. The second panel references an interview with Jeff Flake, who was being celebrated, mid-week, as a newly-minted Hero of the Resistance for denouncing Trump in a speech. The interviewer asked if he thought Trump should be impeached, and Flake backpedaled so quickly you could almost see the whiplash setting in: no, he said, Trump won fair and square, and we shouldn’t think about things like removing him from office. We should just … denounce him in speeches, I guess. I know that there’s an argument to be made that we need to welcome everyone on board this anti-Trump train on which most of us are traveling these days, but honestly if someone literally has the power to help remove him from office but thinks that a speech is enough, well, I have a problem with that. There’s too much at stake right now, like the literal survival of our democracy in any remotely recognizable form.

News dropped Friday that there’s an indictment coming tomorrow in the Mueller investigation, and Trump is predictably melting down on Twitter. Speaking of meltdowns, Roger Stone went off the deep end (I know, how can you even tell when Roger Stone is off the deep end?) attacking CNN anchors and was actually banned from Twitter.

In personal news, I’m back from Iowa and the big talk at the Englert Theatre, which was a totally fabulous experience. And the local paper featured me on the front page as a local boy made good. Many thanks to Matt Steele and Little Village, the Englert staff and management, and to Prairie Lights for helping sell some books afterwards. I also got to spend some time with some family members I hadn’t seen in a long while, so it was a good visit all around. I was a little reluctant to agree to this one — I knew I’d be just getting back into the work routine after the Italy trip and I wasn’t thrilled about yet another disruption — but it was definitely worth it.

Until next week,
Dan (aka Tom)

In his note, Dan/Tom raised a tantalizing possibility that Paul Manafort and his business partner would roll over and offer evidence about the actual shenanigans involving the Moron's campaign and the Russians (public and private) in 2015-2016. If only.... If this is a (fair & balanced) step toward criminal charges against the Moron and his minions, so be it.

[x TMW]
Everything Is Terrible
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]


Copyright © 2017 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)



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Sunday, October 29, 2017

Out Of 44 Other Choices, How Low Can The Comparisons Go?

Zachary Jacobson has taken a lot of the fun out of analogizing the Moron-in-Chief as this villain or that blackguard in our history. No one in his right mind would refer to the Moron as today's Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ultimately, the best that Jacobson can recommend is careful and judicious use of analogies in today's political dialogue. However, in the Moron-in-Chief's case, he sets the bar so low that it is impossible to identify a sufficiently negative analog to link to our national disgrace. If this is (fair & balanced) futility, so be it.

[s CHE]
Trump Is the New ___(Fill the blank)___
By Zachary Jonathan Jacobson




TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing

created at TagCrowd.com

The coming age is shadowed on the past,
As on a glass.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821

Every historian worries over presentism — the tendency for contemporary sentiment to distort the study of the past. Some call it projection. In graduate school, it’s teleology, or what the French historian Marc Bloch dubbed "the most unpardonable of sins: anachronism." And so, lightly we tread, tippy-toed, when formulating a historical analogy: the likening of something then to something now.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. censured such allusive fare. Analogy rips historical example free of root, context, idiosyncrasy, and counterexample. Such evidence plucked from the past suffers from "confirmation bias," speciously corroborating contemporary-minded hypotheses for the already predisposed. "History by rationalization," Schlesinger damned.

Nonetheless, the historical analogy persists. And for it, Moshik Temkin, an associate professor of history and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, took a great many of his fellow historians to the woodshed. "Historians Shouldn’t Be Pundits," Temkin proclaimed in an op-ed in The New York Times. The peddling of historical analogy to understand current events might earn TV spots, but such spotty practice belied the historian’s process. It was "useless," even falsely "reassur[ing]," not just bad scholarship but possibly "dangerous."

As the kind of historian criticized by Temkin and the anti-allusionists, I was taken aback by his harsh column. So charged were Temkin’s charges that mere hours later, in The Atlantic, Julian Zelizer and Morton Keller, historians at Princeton and Brandeis respectively, hit back with "Why (Some) Historians Should Be Pundits," coyly puzzling over the contradiction of Temkin’s "argument about avoiding punditry" appearing on the Times op-ed page.

By some historical coincidence, that same day, The Washington Post unveiled a new section, Made by History. The Post editors promised, "in an era seemingly defined by the word unprecedented," to deliver a steady diet of exactly the kind of historical analysis — "grappling with parallels between the past and present" — that Temkin had just rejected so vociferously. The game, it seemed, was afoot.

In the Age of Trump, historians have let historical analogies loose. Many have been the comparisons: Trump to Andrew Jackson, Trump to James Buchanan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Trump to Richard Nixon (I was one of those historians), to Hugo Chávez, even to Biff Tannen from Back to the Future, and King Aerys II of the House Targaryen — the "Mad King." The more grotesque Trump’s presidency appears, "the more historians are called on to make sense of it, often in 30-second blasts on cable news or in quick-take quotes in a news article," Temkin grimaced.

For centuries, from Thucydides to Livy, Polybius to Edward Gibbon, historians have wielded the analogy as an instrument for inquiry and instruction. As the renowned Yale professor [and long-time English Department chair] A. Dwight Culler described, "virtually every historian of antiquity and the Renaissance" forwarded to some degree the claim that history, at its core, is "philosophy teaching by example." That is, our discipline aims to illuminate issues at hand by scouring for lessons from analogous predicaments in the past. Machiavelli stipulated simply, without condition: "Whoever with diligence examines past events, it is an easy thing to foresee the future in any Republic, and to apply those remedies which had been used by the ancients, or … to think of new ones from the similarity of events."

There was, of course, a countertradition of skeptics and contrarians. Centuries after Machiavelli, Nietzsche warned, "Monumental history deceives through its analogies." In the late 18th and early 19th century, not in little part fueled by the fractious age of the French Revolution, the likes of Goethe and Herder emphasized change, not parallels, over time. Hegel and later Karl Marx stressed the crash of dialectics, creative destruction. And upheaval born from Charles Darwin’s determinations pushed historians further and further toward rupture and transformation over historical continuity and the backward-looking analogy.

But analogies persist — and they can prove potent. Drawn from a shared past, they can serve as rhetorical weapons: Don’t favor a war? It’s the next Vietnam! Abhor your compatriots’ military forbearance? Brand their hesitation a Munich moment! Don’t like the president? He’s a Tricky Dick. This matchy-matchy juvenilia may score quick points and spawn memes, but flimsy historical analogy can blind the historian from the grail he truly seeks. As the Viscount James Bryce, the one-time British ambassador to the United States, tut-tutted in his classic 1888 tract The American Commonwealth,"the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies."

What Temkin and other critics really target is not so much historical analogy as an epidemic of bad ones. Temkin winces at the "rapid-fire, superficial" takes in the mass media. Once in front of the camera, leaning back pensively in their studio chairs, historian-heavyweights trade in their sweeping, exhaustive, and often beautiful scholarship for trivia-minded TV punditry. They hawk banality. Quizzed by anchors, boxed into panels, these academics have become cable contestants in a game of History-wood Squares.

"Sure, there are similarities," Temkin wrote of Trump and Long. Like Trump, the Kingfish "ran in the name of the ‘people,’ attacked the establishment." Both their opponents branded them "demagogues" and "fascists." But Temkin ably rehashes their fundamental dissimilarities: "Long was self-made, a genuine populist who took on powerful interests, and as governor was responsible for building roads, bridges, and hospitals and helping the poor." Trump may dream out loud of massive infrastructure projects, but he has yet to exhibit any of the skill and ingenuity to follow through with them.

And yet just because a historical analogy is flawed or even misleading does not make the exercise in historical comparison, in Temkin’s word, "meaningless." For we compare to discover similarities, and we compare to dredge up differences. By studying the political minutiae, social and economic structures, and cultural milieu that made Long’s projects work, we may be able to tease out the differences for what today makes Trump falter. From another angle, one possibly fruitful question from the Trump-Long analogy: However different, why did these two anti-elitist populists both become ensnared in allegations of profligate corruption?

When surrounded by a cavalcade of Trump-Nixon comparisons, the answer is not, as Temkin demands, to stand athwart historians, yelling "Stop," but to ask why, how so, and are we there yet? And as one Trump simile slips to another, as comparison after comparison lines up and then misfits, clanks, it is there we find the very peculiarity demanding study. The slipperiness of our subject is the historical question at hand. Why does our president appear so singular and yet so familiar? Like him and like him and like him … but not … no, not exactly …

In assailing today’s purported presentists, Temkin holds up the work of the historian C. Vann Woodward, the éminence grise of postbellum Southern history. Temkin contends that Woodward "did not seek analogies from the past," that he wrote a purer history, untainted by presentist fetor. Woodward’s was model scholarship that, if emulated, could help rescue today’s faltering field of ersatz equivalence.

It’s an odd selection. For in his day, Woodward was accused often of being a "presentist." In a 1981 piece in The New York Times Book Review, the Johns Hopkins historian Kenneth Lynn characterized Woodward’s work on Southern history as "distinguished but rather too anxiously liberal." Too often, Lynn found, Woodward depicted anachronistically "forward-looking citizens," "militant feminist[s]" and aberrants with "prophetic qualities." Far from removing himself from the exigencies of his time, Woodward took aim at his contemporaries, unflinchingly, calling for "Southern historians [to] purge … their minds of rancor and awaken … out of [their] narrow parochialism."

Indeed, few historians’ oeuvres have had such impact on contemporary debate in the last half-century. In his much-celebrated The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), Woodward located "Jim Crow" laws — the systemic codification of racial segregation in the South — as dating back only to the 1890s, three decades after the Civil War. It was a rejoinder to those Southern white supremacists calling for a separation of the races as a matter of "immutable ‘folkways’ of the South," a God-given order lasting time immemorial. "The effort to justify [racial segregation and disenfranchisement] as a consequence of Reconstruction and a necessity of the times," Woodward argued, "is embarrassed by the fact that they did not originate in those times. And the belief that they are immutable and unchangeable is not supported by history."

Woodward had helped prepare a 1953 brief for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People challenging segregation. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. But the court’s mandate for enforcement of desegregation — "with all deliberate speed" — proved vague and unhelpful. Implementation sputtered. The battles over desegregation’s execution raged. Woodward’s research served as validation for the still-controversial decision that ruled segregation not as divinely sanctioned or "natural" but, instead, as a social particularity that was contingent on and limited by historical force, decision, and accident.

In Strange Career, Woodward advocated the employment of history, in all its discontinuity, for the comprehension of the present. And lest his already explicit historical analogy be overlooked, Woodward chose to refer to the years after the Civil War as the "Old Reconstruction" while designating the current years of difficult desegregation post-Brown as the "New Reconstruction." In a 1956 essay in Commentary, he urged readers "to assess the Court decision of 1954 in the perspective of history," to compare the failures of Old Reconstruction to the hesitant possibilities of a New Reconstruction.

Martin Luther King Jr. dubbed Strange Career "the historical bible of the civil rights movement," that is, a living text of not just stories but parables, lessons from the past for present consumption. In 1958 Woodward was recalled to Washington to give expert testimony on the erupting crises over school desegregation. It was then that Woodward’s then-graduate student and now-professor emeritus at Princeton University, James M. McPherson, for the first time "thought about looking at an event in the American past that had that kind of direct relationship to the present." So impressed was he, McPherson added, that he wound up doing his doctoral dissertation on "the act of abolishing slavery" — or, as he called it, "the first civil rights act."

"We teach our students to be wary of analogies," Temkin observes. And yet we do so not because analogies are inherently useless but because we teach our students to be wary in general: of analogies, of stereotypes, of exceptionalism, of the forest, of the trees, of overidentification with one’s subject, of callous disregard.

We use the past to understand the present (and vice versa). The analogy is not only of importance but inescapable in the analytic process. As [Marc] Bloch charged, "No period and no topic can be understood except in relation to other periods or topics." John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of Cold War history, concurred: "We’re bound to learn from the past whether or not we make the effort, since it’s the only data base we have." The much-esteemed scholarly pair of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May upheld that historical analogizing was unavoidable, especially for decision makers. So, the scholars concluded, their aims were "akin to those of junior high school sex education. Since [decision makers] are bound to do what we talk about, later if not sooner, they ought to profit from a bit of forethought about ways and means."

The historical method is a dialectic of continuity and change, analogy and disruption. A one-dimensional rejection of historical analogy would be — to borrow a contemporary simile — like urging computer programmers to pepper their source code with 0s but steer clear of 1s. Analogy is necessary, even inevitable. And so we remain vigilant and evaluate our presentist biases best we can, bending back the warp of our lenses. For as Richard Fontaine and Vance Serchuk of the Center for a New American Security, mused, "It seems that those who remember history are condemned to invoke it." # # #

[Zachary Jonathan Jacobson is a freelance writer in Cambridge, MA. His articles have appeared in numerous publications including USA Today, The New Republic and The Chronicle of Higher Education as well as scholarly journals. Jacobson received a BA with distinction (English language and literature) from Yale University (CT) and a PhD (history) from Northwestern University (IL).]

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Saturday, October 28, 2017

Roll Over, Noam Chomsky, Eags Has Written Another Reqium For The American Dream — The National Nightmare Has Begun

Today, Eags (Timothy Egan) helped me understand my long-lasting malaise. It's the Racism of White Privilege, Stupid! The Moron-in-Chief is a Johnnny-One-Twitter on that matter. Poor Moron — disrespected (dissed) and he's whiter than Wonder Bread! The fool is in a hole and he digs deeper and deeper — seeking the elusive bottom. If this is a (fair & balanced) doomsday prediction, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The National Crackup
By Eags (Timothy Egan)


TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing

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I never cared for the “melting pot” metaphor, in part because it treats a nation of immigrants like a stew with all the cultures cooked out of it. Nor was I a fan of “gorgeous mosaic,” which sounds fine coming from a kindergarten teacher but is flat as a political rallying cry.

I prefer “the American experiment.” It’s just as inartful, yet closer to the truth. The audacious idea that people from all races, ideologies and religious sects would check their hatreds at the door after becoming citizens is our sustaining narrative.

Within our borders, Protestants don’t fight Catholics, Sunnis don’t go after Shiites, Armenians share neighborhoods with Turks, and a family that can trace much of its ancestry to slavery occupied a White House built in part by slaves.

But that tenuous construct is breaking apart. We are retreating to our tribal, ethnic and primitively prejudicial quarters. Everything is about race and identity. We come from privilege, or oppression. We choose politicians based on whether they help our tribe or hurt People Like Us.

This is President Trump’s legacy. He has shattered the idea, eloquently expressed by President Barack Obama, that we are not “irrevocably bound to a tragic past.” In the Trump era, we are neck-deep in that tragic past.

Stupidly, the left is playing its part in this crackup, perhaps ensuring that Trump will stay in office. When people shout, “Check your privilege” at a speaker at a public event, what they’re saying is, “Shut up, your opinion doesn’t matter because of the color of your skin.”

Trump is a master divider. He tweets against football players because he wants people to resent rich black athletes. Instead of sports being our last unifying diversion, it’s just another platform for hate.

He tweets about saying “Merry Christmas again,” because it puts people of other faiths on alert. As Newt Gingrich, a master demagogue himself, said, “He intuits how he can polarize.”

Trump opened the door to overt expressions of hatred. The investment adviser Marc Faber recently made this observation in his newsletter: “Thank God white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the United States would look like Zimbabwe.” For good measure, he defended Confederate generals, “whose only crime was to defend what all societies had done for more than 5,000 years: keep a part of the population enslaved.”

Trump, of course, has never apologized for giving comfort to people who marched on behalf of a confederacy of slaveholders. And we all know that race would be an issue if a black occupant of the White House had fathered five children with three women, attacked grieving combat widows and exploited the office for personal gain.

But when people shame fellow citizens with the blunt edge of identity politics, they only encourage the backlash that gave us Trump.

White people who are not privileged — the poor, the uneducated, the struggling — feel belittled when elite whites scorn their “privilege.” What’s privileged about living paycheck to paycheck? About eight million citizens voted for President Obama — twice — and then flipped their vote for Trump. Most of them, surely, are not racist.

What they heard from Obama was the best American music. “In no other country is my story even possible,” he said in his 2008 speech on race. After noting that he won some of the whitest counties in the country, he criticized a view “that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above what we know is right with America.”

To dismiss white concern over busing or affirmative action as racist “only widens the racial divide and increases misunderstanding,” he said. Yet, that is exactly what many liberal whites and blacks are doing now. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his new book of essays (2017), compares gentrification, which comes in many colors, to “a more pleasing name for white supremacy.”

He’s been getting pushback from African-Americans with a more expansive view. “Coates has convinced me that his particular brand of anti-racism does more political harm than good,” wrote Cedric Johnson, a professor of African-American studies at University of Illinois at Chicago, in an essay last year.

Certainly Steven Bannon knows that. He has repeatedly said that the more Democrats talk about identity and race, the more it helps his white nationalistic cause.

If all cultural appropriation is bad — extending even to, say, an Italian-American chef becoming expert in North African food — then we are doomed. If everyone is a racist, then no one can be saved from an awful destiny at birth.

Most Americans now feel their own group faces discrimination, according to
a new NPR poll. A majority of whites say that discrimination exists against whites, even though a majority have not personally experienced it.

This is a tragic result of the retreat to tribal quarters, pushed by extremists on both sides. If it persists, the United States that Obama celebrated cannot hold. The breaking point is now. # # #

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]

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Friday, October 27, 2017

Antoine (Fats) Domino Jr. (1928-2017) — RIP

"The Greatest Hits of Fats Domino" has a place in this blogger's music library on his iPhone. Today, that selection will play on shuffle as the blogger's drives about on the day's business. And, very likely the blogger — from the driver's seat — will sing along with the greatest rock'n roll piano player — ever. If this is a (fair & balanced) tribute to greatness, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
The Inescapable Fats Domino
By Amanda Petrusich


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The moments in my life in which I experience the least complicated kinds of joy are usually when I’m listening to a record by a piano player from New Orleans: Jelly Roll Morton, Professor Longhair, Tuts Washington, Champion Jack Dupree, Allen Toussaint, and, especially, Fats Domino. I can’t explain the alchemy—let the biologists map out precisely what happens on a chemical level. It doesn’t matter how leaden or battered I might have been feeling before—how encumbered by my own cynicism, how spiritually ransacked. There’s an exuberance inherent to this music that is purely, mystifyingly transformative. In an instant, everything lightens.

Domino—who was born Antoine Domino, Jr., in 1928—passed away Tuesday, of natural causes, at his daughter’s home, in Harvey, Louisiana. He was eighty-nine. Domino was the youngest of eight kids, born into a French Creole family in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He dropped out of elementary school after fourth grade, and taught himself how to play the piano by listening to other people’s records. At nineteen, he was nicknamed Fats by the bandleader Billy Diamond, who thought his style was reminiscent of the work of Fats Waller, a jazz pianist from Harlem. In 1949, while working in a mattress factory, Domino cut his first 78-RPM record, at J&M, a studio on Rampart Street. “The Fat Man” was released by Imperial Records that December. It’s widely considered one of the first rock-and-roll records ever made. (It predates Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” by six years and Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” by two years, though it came after Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” from 1946, and Wynonie Harris’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” from 1948.)

“The Fat Man” sold like crazy—a million copies by 1951. It’s based on “Junker’s Blues,” a song recorded by Dupree, in 1940, for Okeh Records. (“Junker’s Blues” was likely written in the nineteen-twenties by a barrelhouse pianist named Willie Hall, who was better known by his nickname, Drive ’Em Down; it also later became the foundation of Professor Longhair’s “Tipitina.”)

Domino does something startling with Hall’s melody. Now that rock and roll has become such a familiar and comfortable idiom in America, it’s hard to quantify “The Fat Man” ’s singularity, or its wildness—to truly lock eyes with its newness would require unhearing all the various ways in which Domino’s work has since been synthesized and perverted and mimicked and reborn. (Such is the plight of the true innovator.) But I’d still challenge anyone to make it through the bit after the second verse—in which Domino begins to scat in falsetto, approximating the wah-wah-wah sound of a muted Dixieland trumpet—and not be left at least slightly agog. It’s a nonverbal, nonsensical chorus that’s not exactly a chorus, yet is somehow a flawless chorus—effervescent, unexpected, profuse.

Domino sold sixty-five million singles in the intervening decades and made twenty-three records that went gold. Even when he was singing about heartache, as he often did, his songs seemed buoyed by some unwavering belief in the glory of love. It’s nearly impossible to find a photo of him in which he’s not smiling—I like to think that he flashed that deeply credible, no-bullshit grin every single day of his life. He was cherubic and stout, at five feet five. Sometimes, when looking at old photographs of American musical visionaries, there’s something in the physiology that seems to suggest a kind of inevitable virtuosity—Robert Johnson holding his guitar, say. You see the way his hands land on the instrument, the long and elegant curl of his fingers. Watching Domino’s stubby fingers alight on a keyboard, though—nothing about it makes sense. In 1956, he appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” playing his lonesome, loping hit, “Blueberry Hill.” I’ve watched the clip dozens of times, and I still can’t figure out the way his hands move so freely and so gently over the keys, as if he’s not even pressing down. As if he merely charms the song into being. # # #

[Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records (2014). See other books by Amanda Petrusich here. Petrusich teaches courses in writing about pop music and pop culture criticism at the Gallatin School of New York University. She received a BA (English & film studies) from The College of William and Mary and an MFA (nonfiction writing) from Columbia University.]

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Thursday, October 26, 2017

How Low Can We Go?

Today's essay will take you down the dark rabbit hole of the alt-right. Trigger alert: the essay deals with some of the darkest aspects of US society. If this is a (fair & balanced) alarm-bell ringing in the night, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
Birth Of A White Supremacist
By Andrew Marantz


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This summer, after a loose coalition of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Confederate apologists announced that they would hold a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, promotional flyers began to circulate on the Internet. The flyers included a list of names: the self-proclaimed thought leaders who planned to speak at the rally, arranged, Coachella-like, in order of prominence. At the top of the list was Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” almost a decade ago, and who has been so successful at making himself the poster boy of the movement that he was once sucker punched while standing on a sidewalk in Washington, DC. Farther down the list were Jason Kessler, the Charlottesville resident who organized the rally; Matthew Heimbach, who has been called “the affable, youthful face of hate in America”; and Christopher Cantwell, who would later star in a Vice documentary about Charlottesville, unpacking a small arsenal of guns and saying, among other things, “We’re not nonviolent—we’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.”

The second person listed on the flyers, immediately below Spencer, was a white-nationalist shock jock named Mike Enoch. The name might have been unfamiliar to most Americans, but, to an inner cadre of Web-fluent neo-fascists, Enoch is an influential and divisive figure. In May, David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted, “Hate him or love him—Mike Enoch is someone to pay close attention to.” Just three years ago, Enoch could be heard mocking Spencer (“talks like a fag”) and Cantwell (“a dickhead turtle”), criticizing their ideologies as too extreme. But that was before his radicalization was complete. These days, Enoch routinely refers to African-Americans as “animals” and “savages,” and expresses “skepticism” about how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Apart from interviews with Spencer and Cantwell, who are now his close friends and ideological allies, he largely eschews attention from the media. He prefers to speak—voluminously, articulately, and with an uncanny lack of emotion—on his own podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” (The title, a pun about the Holocaust by way of Comedy Central, reflects the over-all tone of the show.) “The Daily Shoah” is the most popular of more than two dozen podcasts on The Right Stuff, a Web site that Enoch founded in 2012. Once an obscure blog about “post-libertarian” politics, the site is now a breeding ground for some of the most florid racism on the Internet. One of its pages is set up to accept donations, in dollars or bitcoins; another is devoted to “fashy memes,” songs and images that extol fascism in an antic, joking-but-not-joking tone. The podcasts—meandering, amateurish talk shows hosted by bilious young men who make Rush Limbaugh sound like Mr. Rogers—are not available on iTunes, Spotify, or any other major platform, and yet collectively they draw tens of thousands of listeners a week.

The Charlottesville rally, on August 12th, immediately erupted in violence, and the police shut it down before any of the speakers could take the stage. A few of them reconvened in a park two miles away. Enoch, surrounded by small concentric circles of reporters, protesters, and counterprotesters, stood on a wooden riser in the shade of a dogwood tree. A tall, stout man with a husky voice and a grim, downturned mouth, he wore aviator sunglasses, a slight beard, and the unofficial uniform of the day: khakis and a white polo shirt. “We’re here to talk about white genocide, the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race,” he said. “Have we heard this conspiracy theory of white privilege? This is a concept that was brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves.” He finished his remarks and introduced the next speaker, David Duke. An hour later, James Alex Fields, Jr., wearing khakis and a white polo, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer, a local counterprotester.

Enoch’s father, who is also named Mike, spent that Saturday at home. He lives in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that is often listed among the most progressive towns in the country. “I made breakfast, and at some point I mowed the lawn,” he said recently. “Then, as I do every day, I sat down to read the New York Times.” He saw a photograph of a torch-wielding mob taken in Charlottesville the previous night. “I looked at the picture for a while, and I couldn’t find Mike anywhere,” he said. He scrutinized other photos online, and still didn’t see his son. “I said, ‘Thank God,’ and I went about my day.”

On Sunday, after he got home from church, he saw that a relative had e-mailed him a YouTube link. He clicked on it: his son and David Duke, standing shoulder to shoulder. “It turned my stomach,” he said. “Until that moment, I had imagined that, whatever had caused him to go down this path, it could somehow be reversed, and he could come home again.”

Most of the bloggers and commenters on The Right Stuff use pseudonyms—Sneering Imperialist, Toilet Law, Ebolamericana, Death. “Mike Enoch” is a pseudonym, too. Over the years, on “The Daily Shoah,” he occasionally dropped hints about his identity, though he was careful not to reveal too much. He said that he lived with his wife in New York City—“which narrows it down to me and eight million other people”—and that he worked at a “normie” day job, which he would surely lose if his employers ever learned about his alter ego. As a child, he had attended church camps and public schools, where he’d been “programmed” to believe in universalism and equality. Most members of his immediate family were still “shitlibs”—committed liberals who had not yet seen the error of their ways.

In January, a group of anti-fascist activists dug up his personal information and released it against his will—an Internet-specific form of retribution known as doxing. Mike Enoch was actually Michael Enoch Isaac Peinovich, a thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer who worked at an e-publishing company and lived on the Upper East Side. As predicted, he lost his job. Someone printed out color photographs of his face and pasted them to telephone poles on the corner of Eighty-second Street and York Avenue: “Say Hi to Your Neo-Nazi Neighbor, Mike Peinovich!” The dox revealed that he had an older sister, a social worker who treated traumatized children, and an adopted younger brother, who was biracial and cognitively impaired. Perhaps most baffling of all, Mike’s wife, who was also identified in the dox, turned out to be Jewish.

At first, Enoch tried to insist that he wasn’t Peinovich, but he soon put up a post on The Right Stuff confirming his identity: “I won’t even bother denying it.” On white-nationalist message boards, including the Right Stuff itself, a few commenters accused Enoch of being “controlled opposition,” or demanded that he divorce his wife. (“I can’t believe all you fags still support this Jew fucker!”) Some held out for more information (“How Jewish? Because if 1/4 or less, I don’t give a shit”); others changed the subject (“I’m more disappointed by how fat he is than anything”).

A few days later, on “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch and his co-hosts read dozens of notes from listeners who were remaining loyal to the podcast, some of whom had donated money to Enoch in his time of need. “My heart goes out to his wife,” one fan, a long-distance trucker, wrote. “If she is married to Mike, she must be a good individual.”

“That is a really nice thing to say,” Enoch said. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.” He didn’t mention that his wife had gone to stay with her mother in the Midwest.

Also included in the dox were two e-mail addresses, both purportedly belonging to Enoch. In general, I am opposed to doxing—I worry about vigilante mobs, false positives, slippery slopes—but not opposed enough, apparently, to overcome my curiosity. I e-mailed both addresses.

Enoch responded right away. He said that he didn’t want to talk—“I have a platform to tell my story that is bigger than yours”—and yet, every time I sent another e-mail, he sent one back. I made no secret of the fact that I found his views repugnant, but I added, truthfully, that I wanted to know how he’d ended up in this predicament and what he planned to do next. At one point, I wrote him a long note trying to persuade him to talk to me. His entire response was “You seem kinda mad.” We went back and forth for a while, but I had no real success in drawing him out, and eventually we both lost interest.

He later read our full exchange on “The Daily Shoah.” To his credit, he didn’t edit his responses to make them sound smarter, but he didn’t have to. According to the rules of online debate in The Right Stuff’s “Essential TRS Troll Guide,” which I hadn’t read at the time, Enoch had won our exchange by default, because he had written fewer words and maintained his ironic detachment, whereas I had committed the greatest possible faux pas: letting myself be “triggered” into displaying emotion. After the podcast aired, a few of Enoch’s fans sent me nasty messages on Twitter. I figured that was the end of it.

Then I heard back from the other e-mail address. “I am not the Mike Peinovich to whom you addressed this email, but I am his father,” it read. “Until two days ago, I was totally unaware of his ‘alt-right’ activities. . . . I am struggling to understand how Mike E. (which is what we call him to distinguish him from me and my father who was also Mike Peinovich) could have said, posted or tweeted the things that are attributed to him.”

I called Mike, Sr., and we talked for a long time. It was the week of Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and he spoke in the tone that a lot of liberals were using then—weary and a bit dazed, as if struggling to shake a bad dream. “We tried to give our kids good values,” he said. “Mike E. went to good schools, and he loved being part of his church youth group. We knew that he was an outspoken Trump supporter, and he was very much the only one in the family, so we agreed, at a certain point, not to talk about politics.” He had listened to the podcast for long enough to recognize his son’s voice and profane sense of humor, but lasted only a few minutes before turning it off.

Four days after the rally in Charlottesville, I went to meet Mike, Sr., and his wife, Billie, in New Jersey. They live in an Arts and Crafts house on a tree-lined block near the center of town. Mike, Sr., answered the door. He was taller and thinner than his son, with silver hair and rimless glasses, but I saw the resemblance right away: the square jaw, the downturned mouth.

Billie and Mike are retired, and they spend several months a year travelling. They gave me a tour of the house, pointing out items they’d collected: Persian rugs, Mexican pottery, a floor-mounted globe. Mike was once a professor of Old English at the University of Pennsylvania, and his study contains several dictionaries and translations of Beowulf (1025, 2000), along with contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015). We sat in armchairs in the living room, and he talked at length about his ancestors. “My grandfather helped drive the KKK out of North Dakota,” he said. “My other grandfather came from Yugoslavia, fleeing religious persecution.”

Billie, who was a psychiatric social worker for many years, spoke in the language of therapy. Mike E.’s parents broke up when he was three, and Billie married into the family a few years later; as far as she was concerned, she was as much Mike E.’s parent as anyone. “I feel shock and anger,” she said. “I also feel shame, which is irrational, because I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. I think he brought this on himself because he wants to distance himself from us, from everyone, as a form of self-protection.” Then, more quietly, she said, “He must be so lonely.”

Billie wondered aloud how to tell their friends and family about Mike E. “What do you do?” she said. “Send a letter to your cousins—‘Haven’t spoken to you in twenty years, hope you’re doing well, and, oh, P.S., our son’s a Nazi now’?” She worried that people would wonder what she and Mike, Sr., had done wrong as parents. “Everyone wants it to be simple, to know who to blame,” one of Mike E.’s relatives told me later. “But lots of kids have parents who get divorced when they’re young. Lots of white kids have difficult personalities. They don’t all become Nazis.”

A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise.

s a child, Mike E. suffered from severe asthma and eczema. In most old photographs, his face is red and swollen and his shoulders are hunched, a sign that he is straining to catch his breath. The Peinoviches spent one summer at a lake house in Ohio, where the air was fresh and Mike E. found it easier to breathe; still, he went swimming with his shirt on, because his skin was covered with scratches and open sores. “When we walked through an airport or a mall with our younger son, we would get stopped and told what a beautiful child we had,” Billie said. “Not with Mike E.”

He was so allergic to so many things—dust, pollen, nuts, wheat, shellfish—that he carried an EpiPen almost everywhere he went. At birthday parties, while the other children ate ice cream and cake, he ate saltines. “A few months ago, for some reason, it became a joke on the alt-right to talk about drinking milk,” someone who knew Mike E. as a child told me. On Twitter, “his bio said, ‘Lactose tolerant’—as code for, you know, white power. But the funny thing was, anyone who knew him knew that any exposure to dairy would make him sick.”

In 1980, Mike E.’s mother left Mike, Sr., and she later moved out of the state. The divorce was ugly, and for many years she rarely saw the children. Mike E. was sent to a series of therapists, who mentioned potential disorders, but nothing definitive. One therapist, instead of giving a diagnosis, said that Mike E. was “as vulnerable as a peeled grape.”

Gradually, he learned to insulate himself with jokes and insults. He was clever, and found strength in contrarianism. His ideology shifted over time, but his approach was always the same: exposing and attacking the flaws in commonplace arguments, often without any sense of proportion. Even when he agreed with someone’s opinion, he still loved to engage in rhetorical battle—not to advance any particular agenda, one of his relatives told me, but “to stir up resentment. He strikes me as someone without a core, who only knows how to oppose and who chooses his positions based on what will be most upsetting to people around him.”

He grew up listening to the Jerky Boys, virtuosos of the scatological prank call, and to Opie and Anthony, a pair of afternoon-radio comedians who always seemed to be daring their station managers to fire them. Opie and Anthony, in particular, revelled in boundary-pushing for its own sake. For several years, they held a “Most Offensive Song Contest.” Crowd favorites included “Baby Raper” and “Stuck in an Oven with Jews.” Such songs were not actually calling for genocide, of course. The point was to flout as many taboos as possible. Anyone who didn’t find it funny was urged to grow a thicker skin.

This aesthetic now thrives on forums like 4chan and The Right Stuff, where the dominant modes of self-expression are trolling and “shitposting”—transcribing the motley contents of one’s id, the more bizarre or abhorrent the better. But, compared with terrestrial radio or network TV, the Internet offers fewer direct boundaries to push against; there are no station managers to thumb your nose at. If “Stuck in an Oven with Jews” was shocking before social media, the race to the bottom has since accelerated into free fall.

Mike E.’s high school was diverse and academically rigorous. (His sister’s classmates included Zach Braff and Lauryn Hill.) He had the sort of grades that are common among smart but disobedient kids: A’s in classes that interested him, D’s and F’s when he was bored or felt that the teacher didn’t deserve his respect. He went to Ohio University to study graphic design, but dropped out after the first quarter. He studied at two Rutgers campuses, then took computer-programming classes at Pace University, but left without a degree. “Mike E. took his fourth run at college and finally faced the fact that he is not suited to academic life,” the family’s 2006 Christmas letter read. He moved to Bushwick, in Brooklyn, taught himself how to code, and eventually got a lucrative job as a back-end programmer at AOL. His supervisor there was a blond woman from the Midwest, a musician and photographer who shared many of his interests—sci-fi movies, medieval history, recondite Internet humor. They started dating. Her father was born Jewish and her mother had converted to Judaism, but Mike E. hardly found this remarkable; half the people he grew up with were Jewish, including his high-school girlfriend. The Christmas letter continued, “Though he commutes into Manhattan to a corporate job, he’s still the non-conformist that he always was.”

He and the supervisor got married and moved to a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. (Their wedding ceremony was mostly secular, but they recited a prayer and stomped on a glass.) She maintained a blog, reviewing local rock concerts and drag-queen shows, and she often talked about a fantasy novel she hoped to write. To get his eczema under control, Mike E. ordered large doses of prednisone, a prescription steroid, from an Indian Web site, and took it without medical supervision. Prednisone’s side effects include depression, agitation, weight gain, and vision problems. He gained so much weight that he was almost unrecognizable, and he went temporarily blind in one eye, necessitating emergency cataract surgery.

Gradually, he and his wife stopped going out with their friends from Bushwick, then stopped going out much at all. Instead they stayed home, playing video games or reading on their laptops. Mike E. spent hours in political-debate forums on Facebook and Reddit, where he let his contrarian side run wild. Online, no one was keeping track of his opinions. No one even knew his name, or what he looked like. It felt like another video game. Sometimes he would stake out a seemingly indefensible position, then see if he could invent an argument to back it up.

It was obvious to him that the country was profoundly off track, and that both major political parties were morally and intellectually bankrupt. The only question was which utopian system should replace the current one. He read books by Noam Chomsky and articles on antiwar.com, which published critiques of American foreign policy from the far left and the far right. He dabbled in leftist anarchism, but discovered glaring flaws in the ideology; after that, he became a Trotskyist. One Saturday, he later wrote, he found himself at a meeting “in a run down YMCA in Brooklyn with a group of middle-aged Jewish public school teachers.” They were discussing what stance to take on Islamic terrorism. “An overwhelming sense of loathing washed over me like an awesome wave,” he wrote. “The people I was around suddenly seemed twisted and horrible. A revelatory religious experience is the closest thing I can compare this experience to.”

He began reading books by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, the grandfather of libertarianism. For a few years, he was an enthusiastic and doctrinaire libertarian. He started a blog called the Emptiness, where he wrote posts such as “Socialism Is Selfish” and “Taxation Is Theft.” Through online debate forums, he met a few like-minded friends—a painting contractor from upstate New York, an EMT from Virginia, a devout Christian from Tennessee. They called themselves “post-libertarians,” though they weren’t sure what would come next. In a private Facebook group, they debated the merits of various micro-ideologies—paleoconservatism, neo-reaction, radical traditionalism—and made jokes that were too self-referential or too offensive to share with the wider public. Each time Mike E. adopted a new world view, he was able to convince himself that his conversion was rational, even inevitable.

Within a few years, he started to wonder whether libertarianism was too tepid. After all, its premises pointed toward a starker conclusion: if the state was nothing but a hindrance to freedom, why not abolish the state altogether, leaving only the unfettered market? From there, he went even further. What if you couldn’t account for people’s behavior without considering their cultural background, and even their genetic makeup? “Slapped in the face by the reality of human bio-diversity,” he later wrote, “I had to come to grips with the fact that libertarianism isn’t going to work for everyone, and the people that it isn’t going to work for are going to ruin it for everyone else.” Human biodiversity: the idea that people are different, that they differ in predictable ways, and that some people—not just individuals but groups of people—might be inherently superior to others.

He thought he had carefully examined each of his beliefs, reducing them to their most fundamental axioms. But here was an axiom so fundamental that he hadn’t even articulated it to himself, much less subjected it to logical scrutiny. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure why he should assume that all people were equal. Maybe they weren’t. If this was a textbook definition of racism, then so be it—maybe racism was true. “They’re fucking religious fanatics,” he said later, of liberals like his former self. “They believe in the equality of human beings like a Muslim believes that he has to pray five times facing Mecca, or like a Southern Baptist hates the devil. . . . If you’re a liberal, you’ve never thought twice, you’ve never reconsidered, you’ve absorbed what you were taught in the government schools and by the TV.”

The idea of racial hierarchy seemed to hold enormous explanatory power. As a liberal, he had dealt with troubling facts—the achievement gap between black students and white students, say—by invoking the history of racial oppression, or by explaining why the data didn’t show what they appeared to show. As a Marxist, he had attributed unpleasant facts to capitalist exploitation; as a libertarian, he had blamed the state. But all those explanations were abstract at best, muddled at worst, and they required levels of context that were impossible to convey in a Facebook post. Now he was free to revert to a far simpler explanation: maybe white people had more wealth and power because white people were superior. After arguing himself out of every previous position, he had finally found the perfect ideology for an inveterate contrarian—one that presented such a basic affront to the underlying tenets of modern democracy that he would never run out of enemies.

He felt the urge to explain what he was learning to his co-workers, his parents, and his sister, but he knew that they wouldn’t understand. He stopped haranguing his family about tax policy and the Federal Reserve. They assumed that he had lost interest in politics, and he didn’t bother to correct them.

In December, 2012, with friends from his post-libertarian Facebook group, he started The Right Stuff. “We’re right wingers,” the About Us page read, “but we welcome comments from intelligent and civil people across the political spectrum.” A few months later, the About Us page was edited: “While unabashedly authoritarian, fash-ist, and theocratic, we welcome comments from intelligent and civil people across the political spectrum.” In 2016, the page was amended yet again: “Even though you are wrong, we are open to outside opinions. . . . Also we’re white and we’re not sorry.”

The Right Stuff’s podcasts are laden with acronyms, abbreviations, and inside jokes. (At one point, the site published a TRS Lexicon, a glossary for newcomers.) Some of the neologisms are unique to TRS; others would be familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time in certain parts of the Internet. A person who takes on an overly theatrical identity, for example, is “larping”—live-action role-playing. A “red pill” is a transformative bit of knowledge that is supposed to subvert left-wing brainwashing. (“Red-pill me on that, goy,” one “Daily Shoah” co-host might say to another, asking to be brought up to speed on the latest white-nationalist thinking.) The tone of a discussion can swing, sometimes within a single sentence, from sincerity to sarcasm to reverse sarcasm. These distinctions are so subtle and ever-shifting that the co-hosts sometimes have to tell one another, on air, “I actually meant that,” or “I was just doing a bit.”

Bigots these days often claim that the bigoted things they say are ironic, or quasi ironic. Part of what makes this feint so disorienting is that it is sometimes true. When “The Daily Shoah” started, in 2014, its title was not, or not primarily, meant to be earnestly anti-Semitic. “At first, it was a joke,” Enoch explained on Chris Cantwell’s podcast, in May. “It was just a funny pun. But we kinda put ourselves in a box.” The Right Stuff launched other podcasts, each with its own parody logo: “Fash the Nation,” “Nationalist Public Radio,” “Good Morning White America.”

In the early days, “The Daily Shoah” reserved most of its firepower for its neighbors on the political spectrum, mocking those on the alt-right who reduced all geopolitical issues to a simple Zionist conspiracy. With each episode, though, the co-hosts’ anti-Semitism sounded more sincere. Allusions to gas chambers and ovens became almost a verbal tic. Whenever the co-hosts mentioned a Jewish journalist or politician, they would emphasize the name, pronouncing it in a nasal accent and using a reverb effect. This invention—the Echo, they called it—became one of their signature memes. They approximated it in writing, in the blog and on Twitter, surrounding Jewish names with triple parentheses.

Then, in January, 2015, Enoch read The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach. The book—published in 1998, heavily footnoted, and roundly debunked by mainstream social scientists—is a touchstone of contemporary intellectualized anti-Semitism. On “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch called it “important and devastating, something I urge everybody to read,” and then offered even higher praise: “It triggered me so hard.” From then on, he began to express his anti-Semitism more frankly. He sometimes spun his Northeastern upbringing as an advantage: having grown up around Jews, he understood the enemy. “You’ll talk to white Americans today, and they don’t actually know if someone’s Jewish or not,” he said. “I have very honed Jewdar. I can tell.”

Enoch still lived with his wife, in the one-bedroom apartment where he recorded “The Daily Shoah.” His wife—they separated in January and are in the process of divorcing—declined to be interviewed for this piece, and no one I talked to, including people who were in a position to know, could fully explain how a Jew and a professional anti-Semite stayed together for so long. “They always talked about everything,” one person told me. “She was his best audience. It’s possible that they never talked about this, but it’s hard to imagine.”

After the dox, Mike E.’s parents spoke to his wife, and she told them that, although she was aware that their son hosted a podcast, she didn’t know anything about its contents. This was false. On December 22, 2015, she appeared on “The Daily Shoah” ’s annual Christmas episode to recite a poem, a parody of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” “She wrote this,” Enoch said, by way of introduction, “and she’s really proud of it.” The poem betrayed a deep familiarity with the show’s tone, and with several of its inside jokes:

’Twas a TRS Christmas, and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even my spouse
The cucks were all prepped for the ovens with care,
Just waiting for morning to pop ’em in there. . . .
Out Communists, out Socialists, out left-libertarians!
Out betas, out allies, SJW contrarians
Out beaners and dindus and Muslim jihadists
Spare us your Syrian-refugee problems
Just fash away, fash away, fash away all!

Somehow, Enoch’s wife must have convinced herself that the words she was repeating were empty signifiers. She was an aspiring writer, and she presumably wanted to demonstrate to her husband and his friends that she, too, could excel at their game. In the poem, she referred to herself as a troll. Maybe she imagined that she was indulging in a bit of victimless, anonymous humor, another edgy joke that went too far.

During one of my visits to Mike, Sr., and Billie’s house in New Jersey, I met their adopted son, who asked to go by his middle name, Joshua. Before the dox, he and Mike E. had had a good relationship. Every once in a while, Joshua would take a train to New York, they would see a super-hero movie together, and Joshua would sleep over.

After Mike E. was doxed, Joshua said, “I was a big target.” Some of Enoch’s followers, apparently upset that he had a nonwhite family member, found Joshua’s Facebook page and sent him threats and obscene images. “I just deleted them, just blocked the people,” Joshua said. “I didn’t even want to acknowledge it.” Joshua has a brain injury, and he tends to express his thoughts simply and flatly; still, it was clear that this had been a harrowing experience. The two brothers haven’t spoken since.

Mike, Sr., told me that after he found out about his son’s online persona, in January, he’d seen him only once, in Manhattan, where they met to put a modest inheritance from Mike E.’s grandmother in a trust fund. As they waited in the lobby of a bank, they made awkward small talk. “He told me he’d been going to the gym and not eating carbs,” Mike, Sr., said. “He didn’t say where he was living, or what he was doing with his days, or how he was feeling. It felt like talking to someone I hardly knew.” Before he left, Mike, Sr., made one request: that Mike E. legally change his last name to Enoch, or Paine, or anything, really, other than Peinovich. Mike E. agreed.

The day after Charlottesville, Mike, Sr., texted him, reminding him of his promise. “Whatever,” Mike E. wrote. He had changed his mind. “This is my final decision. Perhaps if you had shown more sympathy and interest in fairness, my decision would be different.”

One Friday afternoon in September, Mike Enoch called my cell phone. “I hear you’ve been talking to my family,” he said. I told him that I’d been hoping to speak to him, but that it would have to wait; I was in the middle of lunch. “What are you having?” he asked. I didn’t want to tell him the real answer—a bagel and lox—so I lied and said I was eating a salad. As if we were on his podcast, he went on a comedic riff about a takeout chain called Just Salad: “I’ve always thought that that was a nice little double entendre, to appeal to social-justice-minded white people.” He was about to board a train to Washington, DC, so we agreed that he’d call again that night. I assumed that he would record the call, troll me for a few minutes, and then play the audio on his show, as he’d done with other reporters.

In the end, we spoke for more than two hours. He was surprisingly forthcoming. “My family always larped as WASPs, even though we’re not Anglo-Saxon,” he said. “My dad wore tweed jackets, that whole thing.” His biological mother, he said later, “was always a bit of a race realist on this point. She’s completely Norwegian, while my dad is half Norwegian and half Serbian.” He added, “My mother always said, ‘Your temper comes from your Serbian side.’ I’m quite sure she meant that in a racial sense. And I think there’s something to that.” (His mother, a retired college president in New York, clarified that she meant this “in a cultural sense” and that she is not fully Norwegian.)

I asked him whether he regretted the violence in Charlottesville. “You’ll have to ask Antifa,” he said. “The violence wasn’t initiated by our side.” He described his current ideological position as “white nationalism, or the alt-right, or whatever you wanna call it.” In hindsight, he now says, he was always more wary of African-Americans and Jews than he let on. “I noticed these differences, even when I didn’t necessarily put emphasis on them or think that they were socially deterministic,” he said. He spoke freely about his “intense, personal antipathy for Jews,” but insisted that he did not hate black people: “I just feel sorry for them and see them as a social problem.” I asked how to square this with the fact that he had a black brother. “He’s only a quarter black,” he responded.

A few times, I tried to ask another obvious question: If you never liked Jews, why did you marry one? The first time, he sighed and then said, “I don’t really know.” The next time it came up, he said, “Jews have certain physical features that I don’t think are particularly attractive. She didn’t have those. I thought she was very pretty.” Nor did she exhibit what he considered typical Jewish traits: “The pushiness, this absolute inability to empathize with others, an exploitative personality. She didn’t have any of that.”

Why did he work so hard, for so many years, to keep his normal life separate from his online alt-right persona? “My wife,” he said without hesitation. “For a long time, I wanted to have it both ways, by just being anonymous on the Internet. But then we got popular.” In 2015, he attended a conference hosted by Richard Spencer’s think tank, the National Policy Institute. Enoch’s identity was still secret, and audience members were asked not to take his photo; still, everyone he talked to recognized his voice, and several people told him that they had bought a ticket because they were hoping to meet him. “At that point, it was, like, OK, this is getting out of control,” he told me. “I kept saying, ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine.’ But I knew that I was just delaying the inevitable.”

We talked about The Culture of Critique, the anti-Semitic text that he’d found so formative, and I mentioned that I’d just ordered a copy. “Well, don’t red-pill yourself too hard,” he said. Then, after a pause: “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

I am. I don’t put triple parentheses around my name on Twitter, as some Jews do, in defiance of TRS’s Echo. But I have never made a secret of my identity. I have written for Jewish magazines. My face looks Jewish. My name sounds Jewish.

“Yep,” I said.

“Interesting,” he said, sounding a bit flustered. “Fully Jewish, or half Jewish?”

“Fully,” I said. “Your Jewdar must be broken.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve got red hair,” he said. “That threw me.” He encouraged me to read MacDonald’s book nonetheless. “I would hope that you would be able to look past any dissonance and at least examine the argument,” he said. “Maybe do some internal—not that I expect you to hate yourself . . .” He trailed off.

At one point, without prompting, he said, “You wanna know the first thing my dad asked me after Charlottesville? He didn’t say, ‘Are you OK?’ or ‘How are you?’ He said, ‘Change your name.’ ” His birth mother had asked about his safety—“Mothers are mothers,” he explained—but not his father. “He didn’t care about that,” he said. “All he cared about was his good name.” I couldn’t be sure, over the phone, but it sounded as if he was holding back tears.

On my last visit to the Peinoviches’ house, Mike, Sr., flipped through a photo album that Billie had brought up from the basement. One photo sparked a pleasant memory: a twenty-fifth-anniversary trip to Hawaii, in 2008, with the three children. “We were all in good spirits that week, even Mike E.,” he said. “We went out to these long dinners and ordered a bunch of cocktails, which probably helped. Mike E. had brought along this computer program he’d made—”

“The Bergman Plot Generator,” Billie said.

“He somehow figured out how to randomly generate plots of Ingmar Bergman films—”

“ ‘A dark knight encounters death on a lonely road,’ that kind of thing—”

“And he left it running, in the condo we were renting, and all day it would be spitting out plots,” Mike, Sr., said, chuckling. “We’d come back inside and read them out to one another, and we’d fall down laughing.”

Mike, Sr.,’s smile faded. “I still love him, in spite of everything,” he said, his voice catching. The sun started to set, casting shadows across the living room, and Mike went into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. Billie said, “All I keep thinking is that, if we were Jewish, we’d be sitting shiva right now.”

At one point in our conversation, I brought up the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but Mike, Sr., rejected the comparison. A few days later, in an e-mail, he elaborated: “The prodigal son eventually realizes that he would be better off returning to his father as a hired hand than starving as an outcast in a foreign land. His return is an act of self-preservation rather than of repentance. Mike seems to be thriving in his new environment and it’s unlikely he would return to us to save himself.” The parable is a story of unconditional forgiveness, Mike, Sr., wrote. “It’s a very difficult example to live up to.” # # #

[Andrew Marantz is a Writer/Editor at The New Yorker. In addition to The New Yorker, his articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Men's Journal and Harper's magazine. Marantz was a Royce Fellow at Brown University where he received a BA (religious studies and literary arts) and he received an MA (journalism) from New York University.]

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