In the summer of 2012, Barack Obama informed America’s capitalists that they were not the sole authors of their success. “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” the president explained. “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn’t get invented on its own — government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet.”

The Republican donor class recoiled in horror at this declaration of “class war.” In fact, Obama’s suggestion that the Mitt Romneys of the world hadn’t built their fortunes off gumption, alone — but rather owed some portion of their wealth to the existence of publicly financed infrastructure, technology, schools, and law enforcement — struck Paul Ryan’s party as so manifestly outrageous and out-of-touch, they made a refutation of it the centerpiece of their national convention.

Four years later, the GOP’s billionaire standard-bearer developed a (characteristically) narcissistic variation on Romney’s mantra, telling crowds, over and over again, “I built what I built myself.” On Monday, the New York Times revealed that this wasn’t just false in the Obamanian, “actually, social institutions made your entrepreneurial triumphs possible” sense, but in a much more literal one: Donald Trump “built what he built” with $413 million of his father’s money — much of which Fred Trump effectively stole from the federal Treasury.

That said, no small amount of the one percent’s wealth is unearned and ill-gotten in the most colloquial, uncontroversial sense. In the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, America’s one-percenters reported an average inheritance of $1.47 million. And that figure is based on solely on how much one percenters admit to inheriting — which, if Trump is any guide, is likely orders of magnitude less than they actually inherited. Meanwhile, Trump is hardly the only fat cat in the U.S. who’s been dining out on the Treasury Department’s rightful dimes. Thanks in no small part to the congressional GOP’s tireless efforts to defund the IRS’s enforcement operations, American business owners evade roughly $125 billion in taxes each year — enough revenue to finance, for example, universal public day care and a child allowance large enough to lift 3.2 million American kids out of poverty. And wealthy individuals evade even more. As of 2013, the global superrich were storing between $21 trillion and $32 trillion worth of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, according to a study authored by James Henry, the former chief economist at McKinsey & Co.

Roosh V is having another sad. Just three weeks after Amazon stopped selling nine of his books, the date rape expert, baking enthusiast and former Most Hated Man in the World has decided to shut down his flagship Return of Kings website. In a post on the site today, Roosh announced that

I’m putting ROK on an indefinite hiatus so I can take a break from the daily grind of maintaining the site. I don’t know when the hiatus will end.

The reason? A mixture of deplatforming and nobody giving a shit about him any more.

The first factor for this hiatus is that site revenues are too low. We’ve been banned from Paypal and countless ad partners, which forced me to lay off the site editor last year and also lower payments to regular contributors.

Huh. Apparently deplatforming hate sites works.

I’m sure many of you understand that we are in the early stages of a censorship wave that will sweep through society. Scoundrels like myself get banned first, and then soon the hammer will come down on anyone who dares to share the truth.

Roosh wants us to believe that “censorship” — by which he means getting kicked off of platforms like PayPal for violating their rules on hate speech — is driving him out of business. While it’s certainly true that deplatforming makes life more difficult for hate-speechifiers like Roosh, that’s not why his traffic is down.

No, that slump in traffic is far more likely to be the result of two other factors. The first has nothing to do with Roosh himself: the fact is that traffic has fallen considerably at independent media sites across the political spectrum due in large part to changes Facebook has made since the 2016 election to the way it handles its news feed. (Indeed, Facebook used to be the single biggest social media source of traffic for We Hunted the Mammoth by far, but now it’s been overtaken by Twitter. )

Shit’s real weird now.

A thing it took, like, the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN and so forth maybe a little too long to figure out, back during the 2016 campaigns, a lapse that has launched innumerable blinkered Cletus Safaris in search of some other, less chillingly sociopathic answer in the aftermath of that hell-moment, is this: What the American right wants, what it’s after, isn’t some abstract pluralist success, like the smooth functioning of government and/or the material improvement of American life. It wants, only and entirely, to defeat its opponents. Those aren’t quite the same thing. The Republican party would not choose the former if it could be accomplished without the latter.

An example: Any number of grub-like Yale jurist-ghouls with diamond-edged ‘80s-dad hair and uniformly right-wing ideas about constitutional law could get confirmed to fill the Supreme Court’s vacant ninth seat, and once in that seat could be counted upon to plagiarize Anton Chigurh dialog into incumbent legal precedence for the next three decades. The earth contains no shortage of these. And so, in the aftermath of the discovery that Brett Kavanaugh, the one Donald Trump happened to nominate for the gig, quite likely attempted to rape a 15-year-old girl in the summer of 1982 (and, perhaps less important though no less relevant, almost certainly lied to the Senate about the use of stolen materials to aid George W. Bush’s judicial nominees) and has been living comfortably with this fact about himself for the ensuing 36 years, it should be easy enough to withdraw his nomination and move along to the next crypto-Nazi cottage cheese sculpture in the pipeline. He’d breeze through confirmation, whoever he was: You could pretty much count on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s terminally third-brained centrist Democrats lining up to play themselves. And that would be a success, theoretically: A new, arch-conservative Supreme Court justice, possibly even one not tainted by a credible accusation that he once tried to rape a child.

But that would not be enough. It has to be this guy. It has to be this guy now more than ever. It has to be this guy, now, because he has been accused, credibly, of attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl in 1982—moreover because people believe this should be considered a disqualifying blight on his record. The thing that must happen is that those people must be defeated. That is the whole point. What must be shown to the whole world is that this, even this, cannot stop him. The bigger the outrage that can be brushed aside, the more thorough the defeat for the people who thought something, anything, might take precedence over this white man being the pick of another white man.

It’s a bit late for anyone not to have figured this out yet, but the skeleton key to understanding American conservatism is this: At bottom, it lacks absolutely any moral or ideological underpinning beyond the reactionary protection of moneyed white men—of their station, their wealth and power, and their egos. Its supposed ideas and abstractions are just a framework for spasmodic lashing-out against anything that can be interpreted as a threat to rich white dudes. It likes supply-side economics because the supply side is made of rich white dudes. It likes tax cuts because the taxes are mostly cut for rich white dudes. It likes cops and soldiers because cops and soldiers uphold a social order with rich white dudes at the top. It likes “traditional family values” because social, economic, and sexual dominion over women are the most traditional family values of all. It likes “Make America Great Again” because rich white dudes used to roll through society and over everyone else with even greater impunity than they do now. All of these things are just proxies for reiterating, over and over and over, forever, the power and security and primacy of rich white dudes.

Our NDP team FOI'd the government for records of any evidence that the Ford government consulted with the public on their bill to meddle in Toronto's election. Their answer: "no records were located.”

#onpoli #bill31 #CharterOfRights #NotwithstandingClause