Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Alex Holder is a British documentary producer who managed to get a lot of time to interview Donald Trump and his three oldest children from September 2020 past January 2021. Holder was interviewed by the congressional committee that is investigating the events of January 6th.
When the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack deposed British film-maker Alex Holder, it heard from a first-hand fact witness who inadvertently observed some of the darkest and most politically fraught days of Donald Trump’s time in office.
…Holder was there for it all: three sit-down interviews with Trump, including one at the White House, numerous other interviews with Trump’s adult children, private conversations among top aides and advisers before the election, and around the Capitol itself as it got stormed.
…Holder testified for about four hours behind closed doors last week about his roughly 100 hours of footage, used for an upcoming documentary titled Unprecedented, and turned over to House investigators the parts demanded in a subpoena compelling his cooperation.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the beleaguered president of Sri Lanka, who had insisted that he would stay on as president for his full term despite widespread protests and calls for him to quit, has finally decided to resign on July 13th.
This news came following a massive protest organized for today (Saturday) in which people were urged to come to Colombo and show their displeasure with the government. The government tried to block the protest by declaring a curfew and stopping transport to the city but that seems to have failed as crowds gathered at Galle Face Green, a beachfront esplanade in the heart of the city, right next to the office of the president and just a block away from his official residence.
The protestors stormed the president’s office, with the overwhelmed security forces looking on helplessly.
Rural America has many roadside attractions, some amusing, some religious, most of them kitschy. My attention was caught by a news item a couple of days ago about a faux Stonehenge granite monument in rural Georgia called the Georgia Guidestones that had a mysterious origin and aroused quite a bit of controversy and, this being America, conspiracy theorizing. It had to be demolished after unknown persons exploded a device that had damaged part of it and rendered it unstable.
In a recent post, I discussed the influential 1963 essay by Richard Hofstadter about the paranoid style in politics. The paranoid style in politics is not a clinical diagnosis of individuals but a style characterizing a certain kind of political thinking that may be held by ordinary people. In the case of a paranoid individual, they fear that sinister forces are targeting them personally. In the case of the paranoid style in politics, people do not think that they themselves are under attack as individuals but believe that their way of life, their values, even their nation, is under attack by evil forces. This gives them the sense that their desire to fight back vigorously against these shadowy and malign agents, however misdirected, even delusional, their fears might be, is a noble cause that must be fought to the finish.
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When I went to bed last night, British prime minister Boris Johnson was defiantly claiming that he would stay on even as there was a steady stream of resignations by members of his government and of Conservative party officials, coupled with reports that those cabinet members still remaining had urged him privately to resign because he had lost too much support. Johnson had even been defiant at the weekly session known as PMQs where the prime minister is supposed to answer questions. Needless to say, the House of Commons was overflowing and raucous, with members even sitting on the aisle steps. Johnson kept insisting that he could continue as prime minister and that the country needed him to carry out the mandate that the electorate had given him two years ago.
Here is a brief except.
Like his friend Donald Trump, Boris Johnson is a sleazy, corrupt, liar who only cares about his pwn interests. They are both assisted by enablers who help them until things get too hot at which point some of the enablers abandon ship to advance their own interests or to salvage their reputations. The number of people in the Trump administration who fit this description are too many to count.
Johnson’s government was rocked yesterday by the simultaneous resignations of two senior cabinet members who in their letters said that they no longer had confidence in Johnson’s leadership after a series of scandals
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was dealt a huge blow on Tuesday when two of his top ministers announced their resignations, saying they could no longer work for a government mired in scandal.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak and [health secretary] Sajid Javid both announced they were quitting in letters posted to Twitter within minutes of each other on Tuesday evening.
“The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously,” Sunak said in his resignation letter. “I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe these standards are worth fighting for and that is why I am resigning.”
Javid and Sunak were not the only ones to go on Tuesday.
Shortly the two quit their jobs, Conservative party vice chair Bim Afolami announced live on television that he too was resigning.
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The title of this post is that of a very influential lecture by Richard Hofstadter that he gave in 1963 that was later revised and expanded into an essay and was later published in an abridged form in 1964. The full essay can be found in the collection of his essays Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. What is noteworthy is how remarkably relevant it is to what is going on today. It is a long essay and I have excerpted below just the main aspects, omitting much of the historical arguments that he provides to support his case.
We are currently living in a time in the US when we are awash in grand conspiratorial theories that are being pushed by prominent individuals, like Donald Trump about the election being stolen, to anonymous creators of fantastical ideas such as that there is a vast conspiracy of pedophiles at the highest levels of government and public life or that there is an organized movement to replace white Christians with people of color and other religions or that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately created and released and that the vaccines to combat it is also part of some diabolical plot. Going by Hofstadter, these are the just the most recent manifestations of a long-standing tendency in US politics.
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I finally got around to seeing this film that had long been on my list of things to watch. It tells the story of a young man Derek Vinyard (superbly played by Edward Norton) who, under the influence of an older neo-Nazi, gets drawn into a skinhead gang in Los Angeles with swastika tattoos and all, and becomes a leader and recruiter for the gang. He ends up killing two black men and goes to prison where he undergoes a change in views that causes him to abandon his prior beliefs. When he emerges, he tries to change the beliefs of his younger brother who idolizes him and, in his absence, has joined the gang that he had been in, under the influence of the same older neo-Nazi. What struck me most about this film is that though it was made in 1998, how contemporary it is in terms of the neo-Nazi ideology it articulates.
There are three powerful scenes (they are in black and white like all the flashback scenes). One is a flashback to the family dinner table where high-schooler Derek describes his excitement about his English course where he is reading the book Native Son. His fire fighter father advises him to reject the teaching of his charismatic black teacher because it is all propaganda designed to advance black people at the expense of white people. The film implies that this is what starts Derek down the road to racism.