As long as we’re on to the subject of fascist dictators and Donald Trump being compared to Adolf Hitler in major urban newspapers, I thought I should speak up on behalf of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as the true proto-Trump.
We’re now accepting nominations for Golden Dukes! Now is your chance to submit ideas for, in Josh Marshall’s words, “the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior and The Crazy.” More info here.
It’s hard to explain exactly why we submit ourselves to this. But in our New York City office we spend most of the day listening to Fox News. In moments of tension and incitement such as these it is difficult to capture the sheer scale and measure of the storm of hate, lies, nonsense and febrile fear that constantly flows out of it, minute by minute and hour after hour. I’ve become particularly focused in the last couple days on the almost constant stream of often small but highly significant falsehoods which go together to create a frightening and highly distorted image of the world.
Can we get to 3000 new Prime members in our 2015 sign up drive? As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, that was the aspirational goal we set for ourselves when we kicked off this year’s drive back on September 21st. But it seemed so far-fetched that I didn’t announce it publicly. But we have three weeks left in 2015. And we’re not that far off the mark. We’re currently at 2380 new Prime sign ups. Just 620 sign ups more and we’re there. That’s a lot to get in three weeks. But not impossible. Quite frankly, building membership for Prime is critical to the future of the site. Here’s why. If you’re a regular reader of TPM, I invite you and ask you to sign up. It’s important. Just click right here. Thank you.
You may think of Donald Trump as a crafty blowhard intuiting the darkest recesses of the American mood and riding that wave into ever-escalating racist incitement, militant derp and extremism. But this evening it occurred to me that it may not be that at all. Perhaps this isn’t just some grand ego trip but an epic social psychology experiment in which we are all unwitting participants. You probably know about the notorious Milgram Experiment, conducted by the late Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. In the experiment subjects were tested to see how far they would go in inflicting extreme pain – escalating electric shocks – on other test subjects simply because a figure in authority, the person running the experiment, told them to do so. So how far would the subjects go?
In his unprecedented call to bar Muslims from entering the U.S., Donald Trump explicitly aligned himself with the fringiest of the anti-Muslim crusaders.
Texas’ big move to bar any Syrian refugees has virtually collapsed in a heap of big talk, weak legal arguments, and bravado. It’s remarkable how quickly the effort basically disintegrated.
Okay folks, it’s time!
Time to send in your nominations for the 9th Annual – yes 9th, Good Lord! – Golden Duke Awards. It’s not the holiday season without the Golden Duke Awards, TPM’s annual homage to the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior and The Crazy. (The awards are named in honor of Congressman-turned-inmate-turned-ex-con Randy “Duke” Cunningham. See the letter Cunningham sent one-time TPM reporter Ryan Reilly back in 2011. Yes, we’ve been doing this so long, Duke Cunningham isn’t even in jail anymore.)
How do you participate?
Wingnut Nevada legislator will fly to Paris, Syria herself to start shooting refugees before they can seek asylum in America.