Focus

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

The Trump regime vows to focus its suppression campaign on those crazy people who dare to be not right-wing.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told officials from more than 60 countries on Thursday that the United States would seek to ​refocus international counterterrorism efforts on what he called “far-left terror”, arguing that left-wing violence had long been overlooked.

Right. Trump has notoriously been lax on punishing anyone he considers to be to the left of him, in other words most people.

Trump has made countering left-wing groups a priority. Trump singled ​out the antifa movement on the campaign trail in 2024, and vowed to take action against left-wing groups he accuses of fomenting violence after ⁠the killing of conservative activist and Trump ally Charlie Kirk last year.

Trump on the other hand doesn’t bother to foment violence, he just goes ahead and perpetrates it. Dropping bombs on people in tiny boats is his favorite.

Eleven Democratic lawmakers wrote to Rubio on Wednesday questioning the evidence for the new focus on left-wing groups and called the White House’s May counterterrorism strategy, which did not mention neo-Nazi or other far-right groups, a “politically partisan document.”

The letter, obtained by Reuters, referred to concerns that designating groups as far-left terror organizations risked targeting lawful protests and political opponents.

“We strongly urge the Department to return its focus to a serious mission set that is definitionally apolitical, data-driven, and rooted in reality, instead of rubberstamping the political priorities of extremists ​within the Administration whose views and policies put ​U.S. national security – and the American people – ⁠at risk,” wrote the lawmakers.

The letter, of course, is an exercise in futility.

At the conference, White House ​deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said leftists were driven by “envy and hatred” and derided antifa demonstrators as “all deformed in some way, in ​their appearance, in their ⁠dress, in their mannerism”.

“Why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred,” Miller said.

There’s your one normal-looking person. Why can’t we all look like him?

Comments

3 responses to “Focus”

  1. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    arguing that left-wing violence had long been overlooked

    Spoken like someone who is truly ignorant of history. I know he wasn’t alive in the 50s or 60s, but seriously, hasn’t he heard of J. Edgar Hoover? HUAC? Cointelpro?

    I tremble to think people who are so proudly ignorant are in charge of the major institutions of our country.

  2. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    At the conference, White House ​deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said leftists were driven by “envy and hatred” and derided antifa demonstrators as “all deformed in some way, in ​their appearance, in their ⁠dress, in their mannerism”.

    “Why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred,” Miller said.

    This is the most classic of the conservative/liberal divides, isn’t it? Straight out of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s television. Postcard-perfect Leave it to Beaver and Andy Griffith on the one hand; Maynard G. Krebs and those perverse, long-haired hippies on the other. “Not one normal-looking person among them” sounds like something Archie Bunker might have whined while watching the news in 1971.

    Of course, the point of “abnormal” dress/appearance, and of body piercings and tattoos and scars and all the other stuff that by the 1990s had become more-or-less mainstream fashion, is that it emerged from all the people conservatives refused to include in their vision of “proper” society: the sailors, the dockworkers, the bikers, the ex-cons, the hippies, the inner-city punks, the BDSM fetishists, the carnies, the gays and lesbians, the traumatized war veterans…

    “Freaky” dress (including gender-bending), and minor body modifications like piercings and tattoos, symbolized a liberal worldview because these things rejected narrow ideas of what constitutes “normal-looking” and they synthesized the cultural practices of the marginalized into a new idea of “normal”.

    It’s sadly true that, as the culture war has plodded on and become entrenched, some young people have taken the idea of challenging norms to extremes, and it’s morphed into “queer theory” and a new set of ideas about children being born in “wrong bodies” (etc) that doesn’t merely challenge some narrow-minded, outdated social norms, but many sensible, principled ones, too — and even the biological facts of the human species. And these extremists have become aggressive and intolerant, to boot. It’s beyond irritating that the gender ideologues have ended up handing the far right a big win on this front, by taking a reasonable liberal idea and stretching it to such extremes that, to some people’s ears, Stephen Miller’s fascist garbage starts to sound almost sensible in response…

  3. maddog1129 Avatar
    maddog1129

    Stephen Miller said leftists were driven by “envy and hatred”

    Envy of what? I wonder.

    Hatred of what? They never say.

    I think it’s 100% projection.

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