(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Like strands of a cat-o-nine tails, this trio forms a braid meant to rip the skin right off America [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-27 Tucker Carlson. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Donald Trump. These three were all photographed together last year at the LIV Golf Invitational Bedminster, and it was remarkable to witness them all together on that balcony, all three at once. These days, we hear of Kevin McCarthy, newly minted and already diminished House Speaker—diminished by his own negotiations for power and position, bargaining away the store—giving Tucker Carlson 41,000 hours of “unaired footage” from the January 6th attack on the Capitol. We can wonder why McCarthy is being so open with his favoritism, though the rationale for his actions seems easy to interpret. But we foremost must consider Carlson’s prior statements, not just his wild accusations and distortions of January 6—to pander to his audience of extremists and revolutionaries—but also his vicious claims regarding ‘the Great Replacement’ (the phrase of which is itself a great replacement of the term ‘white genocide’). Carlson is a race promulgator: this is his current project, the culmination of his life’s work. Marjorie Taylor Greene, elevated by Kevin McCarthy in his Dim Deal, now freely propagates her troglodytic ideas about race, particularly about Black people. She is committed to being a Jeannie Appleseed of stereotypes and enmity. Her words are carefully chosen to inflame the ears of the audience. She curates her words, fashioning them into hooks that she then can rake under the bellies of her devoted so as to rouse them to be alert to any intruders. Race intruders, that is. Greene’s entire focus is to make discrimination along racial lines as acceptable and upstanding as applying a smart aftershave: she’s selling a product. Donald Trump, for his part, has ramped up his calls for his followers to man battle stations, changing his pitch from implied to absolutely explicit. For nearly a year, he has urged if not flatly commanded his followers to view their strife as an existential struggle, that they must be willing to give up their lives to fight, of all things, critical race theory. Trump’s appeal to race strife—the stoking of it—has filtered its way throughout the ecosystem of conservative thought, already a bed sown with seeds of this very idea, stemming back to the Civil War and beyond. Hothouse, hotbed, hotheads run riot throughout society, angry, armed, and misled into mindlessness. All of these ideas espoused by Carlson, Greene and Trump mean to bubble (White) racial resentment like lava breaking onto an earthen surface. They choose and craft their words, looking to lure more into their band of barbarians who do not recognize the faces of their own neighbors. This is of a piece. What will Carlson do with all of that gratuitous footage? It’s hard to predict in the particular, but we can all see that he will fit those images into his narrative, like cut-ups from glossy magazines pasted onto papier-mâché, a melange, a mismatch so strking that it commands attention. Carlson enjoys using such unfortunate juxtapositions. He wrings resentments into coins in his pocket, trading bitterness for jingle. A happy exchange for him, the transaction leaves his audience barren, bereft, benighted in the wake of his distortions. The ideas and views that Carlson, Greene, and Trump conjure fit together, simple peptides joining to assemble a macromolecule, capable of initiating and executing actions that unassembled they could not perform alone. Their ideas are linking up now in time—temporally—coinciding and combining just so as to sustain and inflate the others. They represent a feedforward loop, racial resentment so swirled and crazed that they spur adherents to dangerous, even deadly action. They are assembling now, and in that light they must be exposed for just what they are doing. They are ratcheting up a narrative whereby the group in question—their audience—feels trapped and therefore a need to fight their bloody way out. Whipped into a frenzy, indeed. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/27/2155261/--Like-strands-of-a-cat-o-nine-tails-this-trio-forms-a-braid-meant-to-rip-the-skin-right-off-America Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/