Today in Bat Sh%$ Inane

First, we have Trump calling for Barack Obama's arrest again, basically, "Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, Russiagate," which these days is not particularly remarkable, and then we have elements of the Trump administration calling Tucker Carlson and Nuck Fuentes terrorists.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named by the White House as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official.

Sebastian Gorka, himself a former right-wing influencer turned National Security Council principal, has been making his rounds on conservative media, describing the meaning and purpose behind the President’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy (which I reported on previously).

Between grandiose monologues about his vision of a crusade to save Western civilization from “anti-American” and “anti-Christian” extremism, Gorka let slip that the administration’s war on “domestic terrorism” isn’t just aimed at the left. It targets anyone who isn’t in line with the broader MAGA agenda. While Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7 explicitly singles out the left with its list of so-called terrorism indicators, many of them could describe people on the right as well.

………

Asked by Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow if there’s any “right-wing terror” or “right-wing extremism” threat, Gorka replied by pointing to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and streamer Nick Fuentes — both of whom have become vocal critics of the Trump administration — arguing they aren’t actually conservatives anyway. Here’s the exchange:

MARLOW:  “ I wanna get your thoughts on any right-wing terror … Do you regard it as a threat at all or anything that's important to be considering right now?”

GORKA: “…I'm not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives. If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I'm not sure that means you're part of the conservative movement.  So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they're not conservatives, what's left?”

Gorka’s charge that Carlson lauds Sharia law is, to put it lightly, ridiculous.

To be fair, Carlson and Fuentes have been promulgating stochastic terrorism, wherein they realize that someone in their large audience will take matters into their own hands, but what Gorka is talking about is the idea that any criticism of Dear Leader is terrorism.

We really need to make sure that everyone in this corrupt administration sees the inside of a courtroom as a defendant. 

I Agree with THIS Turd?

John Bolton, batsh%$ insane war monger, has roundly condemned Sebastian Gorka's selection as counter-terrorism chief.

F%%$# me, I f%$#ing agree with f%$#ing John f%$#ing Bolton.

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has laid into Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s pick for counter-terrorism chief, as a “conman” whose selection is not “going to bode well for counter-terrorism efforts when the [national security council’s] senior director is somebody like that”.

Trump praised Gorka, who was born in the UK to Hungarian parents, as a “tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement”.

But Bolton came out swinging at Gorka on Friday. The arch-conservative, who served in the Reagan, George W Bush and first Trump administrations, has set out his stall against many of Trump’s picks, including former Democrat and Iraq veteran Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and told CNN that he “wouldn’t have him in any US government”.

Earlier this week, Bolton told NewsNation’s The Hill that up until Gorka was nominated by Trump as a deputy assistant to the president and the senior director for counter-terrorism, he would have said that Gabbard’s nomination “was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history”.

This guy is an unqualified and a bigger lunatic than John Bolton.

I would not say that he was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history though, there is an awful lot of competition there.

Because They are Racist Eugenicist Psychopaths?

Over at The Nation Jeet Heer asks, "Why Does This Racist Keep Getting Silicon Valley Money?,"  about professional bigot Richard Hanania.

Simple question, simple answer.

It's one of the reasons that there is so little diversity there.

In recent years it’s been difficult to keep track of all the pundits or policy wonks on the American right who turn out to have secret—and often not-so-secret—lives as white supremacist provocateurs. This was certainly true during the Trump administrations, which had a weakness for appointing racist figures such as Sebastian Gorka and Darren Beattie. This was also true of nearly a dozen staffers associated with Tucker Carlson and his former show at Fox News. And it now applies to staffers and influencers in the circles around the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. These stories sometimes—although not invariably—end with the racist staffer being fired.

Richard Hanania, a policy entrepreneur [What the hell is a, "Policy Engrepreneur?"  sounds to me to be a rather opaque euphemism for professional asshole] who runs the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and has a large social media footprint, recently joined the ever-expanding ranks of exposed racists. But he’s likely to continue to flourish, for reasons that illuminate the true sponsors of bigotry. Last Friday, Christopher Mathias published a superbly researched exposé in HuffPost documenting that between roughly 2008 and 2011 Hanania published, under a pseudonym, racist and misogynist comments barely distinguishable from Nazism. These included praise for eugenics and for the neo-Nazi agitator William Pierce (author of The Turner Diaries, an open call for race war). At the time, Hanania was between 23 and 28 years old.

More recently, Hanania has established a name for himself as a rising voice on the right, publishing in mainstream venues such as The Washington Post and The New York Times while being invited to speak at elite institutions like Yale and Stanford. Ohio Senator J.D. Vance has described Hanania as a “friend” and a “really interesting thinker.” The centrist pundit Matthew Yglesias wrote of Hanania, “He’s clearly quite racist! But I also think he’s written some good pieces and it’s important to read conservatives.”

Why I haven't read Matthew Yglesias in years.  You get sick of his, "Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" schtick regarding all sorts of malevolence and perfidy from right wingers in an attempt to play at being a very serious person.™

The bigotry Hanania voiced earlier hasn’t disappeared; indeed, it is still explicit (although more politely expressed) in his writing. Mathias’s most important contribution—building on the earlier research of journalist Jonathan Katz—is to establish that Hanania’s rising prominence has been supported by the advocacy (and sometimes the financial support) of a raft of plutocrats (usually with Silicon Valley roots), including Andrew Conru, Charles Koch, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, and Vivek Ramaswamy. The last three have all blurbed Hanania’s forthcoming book The Origins of Woke, to be published by HarperCollins in September. According to Thiel, “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcize the diversity demon.”

Because of Hanania’s wealthy patrons and supporters, he’s unlikely to be canceled. Very powerful people have invested too much in his career to pull the plug, especially since they give all evidence of sharing his worldview.

These Silicon Valley goons are privileged self-important bigots who think that they have created themself out of whole cloth by virtue of there unique intellect and work ethic.

They are (mostly) white boys who were born on 3the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ base, and believed that they had hit a triple,

Heer's last sentence is the real keeper here, "Right-wingers have finally found a Palestinian they can like. It’s too bad he’s a Nazi." (emphasis mine)

Well, Her Husband Routinely Wears Nazi Regalia

Katharine Gorka, wife of the infamous Sebastian Gorka, remains on the White House Payroll, was instrumental in cutting funding to counter white supremacists violence:

A group working to deradicalize white supremacists had been set to receive funding from the Department of Homeland Security until Trump aide Katharine Gorka worked to eliminate its grant.

This is what happens when you employ actual Nazi sympathizers on your staff.

Time to Short Nazi Futures at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

At the rate things are going, there aren't going to be any Nazis in the white house before long.

The latest to go, faux PhD and Bigot Sebastian Gorka.

I'm not sure if this is because they've lost, or if they've just found the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant is located:

Sebastian Gorka, an outspoken adviser to President Trump, has been forced out of his position at the White House, two administration officials said on Friday.

One of the officials said that the president’s chief of staff, John F. Kelly, had telegraphed his lack of interest in keeping Mr. Gorka over the last week in internal discussions.

Mr. Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president, had been on vacation for at least the last two weeks, with no clear assigned duties to hand to others, that official said.

………

Mr. Gorka, 46, has also been accused of having links to far-right groups in Europe.

Of the various racist losers who entered the White House in January, Sebastian Gorka was by far the most malignant.

It's good to see him go.

Buh Bye Sean

Sean Spicer has resigned as White House Press Secretary:

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned on Friday after denouncing chaos in the West Wing and telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with the appointment of the New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as communications director.

After offering Mr. Scaramucci the communications job Friday morning, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Spicer to stay on as press secretary. But Mr. Spicer told Mr. Trump that he believed the appointment of Mr. Scaramucci was a major mistake and said he was resigning, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange.

In one of his first official acts, Mr. Scaramucci, who founded the global investment firm SkyBridge Capital and is a Fox News contributor, joined Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Spicer’s chief deputy, in the White House briefing room and announced that she would succeed Mr. Spicer as press secretary.

………

Mr. Spicer has agreed to stay on for two weeks to a month, and Mr. Trump has told his advisers he is open to rotating new people into the briefing room, including one of the president’s personal favorites, Sebastian Gorka, a blustery foreign policy official who has been accused of having ties to far-right groups in Europe.

Sebastian Gorka? I'd call him a Neonazi son of a bitch, but he really is an old Nazi son of a bitch.

Amazing. Only in America could you fire Sean Spicer and have his replacements be worse.

Gorka Out

Sebastian Gorka, who was brought into the Trump Administration as a terrorism expert, is leaving the administration.

It appears that this was not because his PhD was basically fraudulent, no because he was a member of a Hungarian Neo-Nazi Group, but because the so-called terrorism expert could not get a security clearance:

Sebastian Gorka, an adviser to Donald Trump who has been under pressure over his links to Hungarian far-right groups, is leaving the White House.

A senior official said Gorka, a former counterterrorism analyst for Fox News who joined the administration as an adviser, will be leaving the White House in the coming days.
Trump aide drew plan on napkin to partition Libya into three
Read more

The official said that Gorka had initially been hired to sit on the strategic initiatives group, an advisory panel created by Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon to run parallel to the national security council.

But that group fizzled out in the early months of the administration. Gorka was unable to get clearance for the national security council after he was charged last year with carrying a weapon at Ronald Reagan Washington national airport.

………

In recent weeks, one White House source told the Washington Examiner that Gorka’s role had diminished to the point where he was appearing on television, “giving White House tours and peeling out in his Mustang.”

How the hell do you get a position in the White House, particularly working national security, when you cannot get a security clearance, particularly when 15 years earlier, he also could not get a security clearance in Hungary.  (It appears that his CV is a bit dodgy.)

Seriously, this is a guy who should be asking, "Do you want fries with that?"

Linkage

• Stomach-churning images of 'fatberg' clogging toilets in Cheltenham (The Express) They originally thought it was a concret slab:  It was a block long plug of congealed fat.  Fiber, Britons, Fiber.
• Inside Corbyn’s Office (Jacobin) Half of the labour establishment is actively sabotaging the party.
• White Collar Crime Risk Zones (The New Inquiry) They announce, "White Collar Crime Risk Zones, a predictive policing application that targets white collar crime."  Heh.
• Auditor issues damning report alleging Ferguson court collected illegal fees, lost money (St Louis Today) What a surprise, a carcereal state is a corrupt state.
• The ten graphs which show how Britain became a wholly owned subsidiary of the City of London (and what we can do about it) (Open Democracy)
• Stop calling him 'Dr.': The academic fraud of Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s terrorism 'expert' (Haaretz) Money quote, "In sum, Gorka’s Ph.D is about as legitimate as if he had been awarded it by Trump University."
• After-dinner mint: how ex-politicians hit paydirt with public speaking (The Guardian) I'm lookin' at you, Barack.
• Donald Trump is the best troll in all of politics (CNN) File under, "Well, duh!"
• Goodbye Amazon...And Good Riddance (Princeton Audio) A bespoke speaker manufacturer details the hell that is Amazon.

Have some George Carlin: