The-Ave.US

This article contains news and liberal commentary with a touch of biting satire.

Author’s note: This is one of my major recent writing efforts. Despite the title, it is wide-ranging. Topics include Trump’s baseless claim about a planeload of “antifa thugs,” Joe Biden accusing Trump of “stoking violence,” past and present anti-democratic tendencies in American society, and what must be done to defuse today’s incendiary partisan divisions.

Men in black. It used to be just a movie. How things have changed.

A conspiracy theory Trump peddled in a Fox interview on Monday, Aug. 31, 2020, that a plane

“loaded with thugs … wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear”

was sent to disrupt the Republican convention is “almost identical to a rumor that went viral on Facebook three months ago,” NBC News reported the next day, adding, “There is no evidence of any such flight.” The NBC News story (read it here) noted,

“The claim about the flight matches a viral Facebook post from June 1 that falsely claimed, ‘At least a dozen males got off the plane in Boise from Seattle, dressed head to toe in black.’ The post, by an Emmett, Idaho, man, warned residents to ‘Be ready for attacks downtown and residential areas,’ and claimed one passenger had ‘a tattoo that said Antifa America on his arm.'”

And then,

“That post was shared over 3,000 times on Facebook, and other pages … added their own spin … [one] claimed that ‘Antifa has sent a plane load of their people’ and that the Payette County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it.”

No, the Payette County sheriff didn’t “confirm” it. His office issued a statement calling it “false information.” I’m not sure why he tacked on the word “information;” it’s merely false, and contains no information.

Why does Trump do this? Delusional? Gullible? Revels in conspiracy theories? Or something more diabolical? Whatever it is, it’s having consequences:

“Some armed Americans took to town squares in several towns to fight off fictitious busloads of Antifa in June, spurred by false rumors on Facebook pages. Seven days after the original Idaho rumor went viral on Facebook, armed men stood guard over protests in Missoula, Montana, worried about the planeloads of Antifa supporters.”

Now you know why Biden accused Trump of “stoking violence” (read that story here). He’s the leader of an angry faction hyped on grievances. He tells his audiences Democrats are evil and will destroy everything they hold dear. His rhetoric is far too angry and threatening to believe he’s merely trolling his opponents. Some of his supporters openly flaunt guns in public buildings to display their disdain of government authority.

An essay in The Atlantic by Yoni Applebaum (read it here) sheds light on the dynamics of this.

It’s all about groups in society vying for power and supremacy. White males are on the defensive because their majority is disappearing. There have been many previous instances in American history of groups turning their backs on America’s democratic principles when they felt similarly threatened. They often accepted election losses, but only because they believed they could win in the future. Today’s Republicans fear being permanently relegated to minority status by America’s changing demographics, and may abandon democracy and reject election results altogether. Trump’s bluster is a harbinger of this. This mindset accounts for the GOP’s massive vote suppression efforts, and also explains why Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices recently turned a blind eye to blatantly undemocratic gerrymandering.

Which raises this question: If the GOP keeps retreating into its shrinking core constituency, and becomes increasingly unable to prevail at the ballot box, will “Trumpublicans” double down on their efforts to game the democratic system, or give up on that approach and try to overthrow it? It can’t be overlooked that millions of guns designed for war are in their hands, and they openly brandish them while issuing threats of “civil war.” Basically this asks whether Trump is a manipulator or a revolutionary. If the latter, and Biden replaces him in the White House, the Trumper nightmare might not be over but just beginning. Deprived of presidential power, he will still be around to stir up the angry armed mobs he seems to be unleashing on American society. Unlike his invisible planeload of “antifa,” those mobs are a real and present danger.

To avoid a catastrophic collapse of the social contract, Applebaum argues, the center and left must accommodate the right and give them space in America’s political system. Not out of fear, but because it’s the right thing to do, and is a vital part of the glue that holds America’s diverse collection of subcultures together. It will be hard to negotiate a compromise with people who don’t believe in negotiation or compromise, and are determined to get their way at any cost. He believes the way to do that is by bringing the center-right on board and counting on them to marginalize the extreme right. The same is true, of course, of the center-left and extreme left. It has always worked that way in the past.

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Left: Satellite image of the antifa plane entering a quantum tunnel after taking off from Seattle, through which it was to fly undetected and swoop down on the GOP’s virtual convention, and disgorge its deadly cargo of men in black. It got lost and never showed up, and is still out there somewhere, perhaps circling over your town looking for a landing place.