The Trump Mob's Nooses, Gallows, Crosses, and Costumes Are Deadly Fascist Symbols
By: Jeff Sharlet (Vanity Fair)
Trumpist insurrectionists deployed viral symbols in their dangerous mobs and riots, from Spokane to Topeka to the National Mall
We're fools. They've been telling us for years that they are opposed to democracy. We haven't listened.
They have lied over and over... but we continue to hope they'll someday be honest.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Trump dream that's proven more contagious than the mutant B.1.1.7. has finally fully crossed over, IRL, into the material plane. It's the delusion he rode in on in 2016 and the hallucination in which he himself walks, no longer a con man but now a believer. Last summer when he averted his eyes from an interviewer as he murmured of "dark shadows," it was clear the shadows of his hateful self-obsession had come home to haunt.
But what's happened in Washington—and at violent protests in at least a dozen state capitals around the country—is no haunting. For the last four years (and then some), Trump has herded a too-compliant press into pens at his rallies and used them like props for his rage, turning his mob at one to scream at them. Yesterday, in one tiny sideshow, the screamers knocked down the metal barricades and attacked the cameras. This is not symbolism. This is the language of fascism.
Fascism has been a visual language ever since its formal inception in Futurism, the Italian movement of art and design. So too, today, a visual grotesque that's left too many of us grasping for words even as we tweet and text scenes from the insurrection. If we're not careful, we'll simply spread the contagion—"echo! echo! echo!"—like the battle cry of the right-wing social media network Parler, in which an echo is similar to a retweet. A grinning man in a Trump hat with a pom-pom, waving as he makes off with the House speaker's podium; another toting a Confederate flag between portraits of Vice President John C. Calhoun, slavery's most "eloquent" defender, and Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor by a pro-slavery congressman; security, guns drawn and aimed at the shattered window of the House Chamber's door, a rioter's face peering in like Jack Nicholson in The Shining . Trending as I write is a yet blunter collapse of history by meme: a rioter in the Capitol wearing a hoodie with the words "Camp Auschwitz" wrapped around a skull.
This is fascism's visual trap, from the black, white, and red of the swastika to the death's head Punisher skull that's become a de facto symbol of Trumpism, worn by Sean Hannity on his lapel. A language of brute spectacle, hard to ignore. Look, and you're cursed by that which is ugly in the deepest sense; look away, and you neglect the threat at our door. Or rather, yesterday, inside the House.
The task then, is translation—to render that which is shocking banal, to root fascist proclamations of revolution in the history that names them as merely small-minded manifestations of defeated ideas. Less than "ideas"; vanity, dull-eyed.
Consider the half-naked man in a headdress of fur and horns, his face painted red, white, and blue, who carried a flag attached to a spear into the Senate chamber. There he posed for a picture on the dais, flexing a muscle. It's absurd; it's awful. It's a joke; it's an armed man seizing power. Well, not really, right? He left the Capitol, Trump will probably still leave the White House, and all they'll have are memories, selfies, and keepsakes in the form of Nancy Pelosi 's office supplies.
But fascists know, explicitly or implicitly, that such images can do the work for them. The horned man cosplays for the same reason Trump dances at his rallies—because it works: It draws the eye, it seems to express earnestness and humor at the same time, the layers of meaning that can produce a symbol. But the horned man is not a symbol; he's a fact, and not a funny one. His name is Jake Angeli , he's 32, and he's from Arizona. On Parler right now, photographs of him are being edited to suggest that he's actually a leftist, even as on Fox News, Sean Hannity , Laura Ingraham , and Tucker Carlson shift blame for the violence from themselves to alleged antifa infiltrators, a kind of media reichstagging that could supply Trump with a sham rationale for martial law. But Angeli is long on record as a Trump supporter, and he considers himself a kind of "shaman" for QAnon, itself mostly a collage of bogeymen. We've seen this picture before. It is a symbol of nothing, because like "ironic racism" or the Camp Auschwitz hoodie, it not only lacks but actually denies depth. It is complex but two-dimensional, a conspiracy theorist's map of "connections." It is flat by design, the better to replicate itself, copy after copy.
The events most people watched on CNN today were viral, replicated outside statehouses in Topeka and Spokane and Salem and Harrisburg. In Lansing, Michigan, outside the state house protesters erected a giant cross. They did not need to set it aflame to make its Christian nationalism plain. Meanwhile, on the National Mall, insurrectionists—there's no other word for this act—erected gallows. A cross and a gallows.
The cross and the gallows.
This phrase—for that's what it is in the fascist tongue—bears repetition lest we ever forget the vanity Trump and his believers mean by the word sacred , as in the "sacred landslide," the phony theft of which, he tweeted shortly before Twitter (at long last) locked him out of his account, justified the storming of the Capitol. What they mean, what fascism always means, is the flattening. Stories reduced to memes.
The cross and the gallows, of course, are symbols, each rich with layers and layers of meaning, nuance, and contradiction. But if we recognize in their juxtaposition the way they cancel each other out, we start to see the bland essence of fascism's appeal. That it loathes life is as obvious as its affection for skulls; but it denies death as well, by considering it so glibly. Executing politicians? Lulz. For whom does the insurrectionists' noose hang? For whom does it not ? MAGA's roll call of traitors grows daily, from QAnon's "cabal" to most of the Democratic Party to an ever-expanding circle of "RINOs." Mitt Romney , sure, but on Tuesday even Tom Cotton himself was added to the hangman's to-do. I just checked Parler—the second post I saw declares, "firing squad for Pence and Rosenstein," the former deputy attorney general. Of course, it's all just talk, or "just theater," as so many pundits have declared at each step of Trump's long con and now his short coup. Until it isn't.
We must learn the language of fascism because for the foreseeable future that moment will always be coming. Learn just enough that we'll never have to speak to it, just as scientists study viruses so they can develop vaccines. "No one could have imagined it would go as far as it did," declared Lester Holt that night on NBC News, but that's only true if you couldn't read the warnings, the threats, and promises increasingly spoken out loud since November 3. Doing so doesn't require real imagination. Rather, you have to momentarily see, as fascists do, a world without it, flattened to two dimensions, one in which the horned dude can pose as both clown and shaman, because he's not really either, and "Camp Auschwitz" is always now and thus always "funny." It's a joke, precisely because none of it—the "theater," the cosplay, the guns, the shattered glass—ever is.
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I guess they think Pence and Rosenstein are "typical" Atheistic Left-wing Commies!
On Parler right now, photographs of him are being edited to suggest that he's actually a leftist, even as on Fox News, Sean Hannity , Laura Ingraham , and Tucker Carlson shift blame for the violence from themselves to alleged antifa infiltrators, a kind of media reichstagging that could supply Trump with a sham rationale for martial law.
I was watching TV yesterday, "flipping channels, happened to see someone on Faux News explaining how it actually Antifa and BLM who were behind the terror attacks in the Capitol!
Vic, MAGA and friends are taking up the banner of false equivalency and blame as we speak.
I saw this coming a while back.
most would have had to be willfully blind, to have not.
As this culmination of a lied to and fooled public display, of a public played, by pols erected by agendas to prey upon those who pray , have not the wits to differentiate or defy what LIARS do say every day, as whence offered another to blame for their own failings, hesitation not stuttered as acceptance need not uttered, for acceptance to reaffirm another as the ACTUAL true source to blame for their failings is what they desired, and Trump and the Repubs delivered. The poorly educated sucked up and ran what they had been fed about the Fed, and the Democrats. and the poor, and the source of all reality divorced, as emanating from everywhere but there where it truly was originating, was overstating the opposite till herd mentality could/would go with that which they could know longer know which no to knot know longer than that which they didn't cause nose not always to spite what wons who lose refuse to choose to accept as fact, as it now forces them to have to react to they, being wrong about what was so easily excused about the origin for their own stated denial, as betrayal by shepherds allowing the herd to hear and believe the absurd designed to deceive those happy to believe in what many didn't realize could, as achieved by the LIARS was the desired faux reality that an election had been stolen, a gross amount of followers of lying, have been dying, as the LIES they were led to believe ,by those who had led them, resulted in many dying and then the bedlam, witnessed as they didn't believe the severity of a known virus in the former, while the latter was so evidently evident in the events at the Capital that surely did transpire, yet, yet have they yet , the desire to know
, they've been led astray , cause easier to listen to those that which were formerly able to be trusted, than accept the fact, that their LIARS have been BUSTED.
We need those LIARS to come forth and recognize the TRUTH, as our country is worth more than a short term gain by those who would/could believe they could continue to obscure what is true, by keeping from the masses, the faith, preyed upon religiously, by their LYING in wait, to capture those not bright and up to date, of the full context of that which has been disguised, is, truly HATE, and often used, to use so many who are unable to differentiate, the love of ones country, from the LIES used to separate, ones not in the know, from the message presented by ones not wanting them to know, the truth.
Until the FACTS override ones desire to aspire, and there are consequences TO and FOR this "LIAR" , our country will further descend with an inevitable end that we must avert by alerting and educating our ignorant nation, and by rightfully punishing those that spread the LIES that have enabled the aspiration of those truly against this nation, yet fro it's devastation, and also worthy of mention, this dissension was not a deselection, but the precise selection and the result of an election 4 years former, as this can never be our new norm, erh we will have lost, what so many did fight and die for, and in this WE ALL DO LOSE !
What the Republicans did, by excusing and rationalizing what a mentally sick individual did do, while they knew, is what cannot be excused. Cause if you and i, along with countless others could foresee this inevitable ending, how can it be the majority of the GOP could not see the messages Trump was Sending ??? I believe they are to blame for what has caused our Nation, SHAME we must ALL own, if we did not call it out, and though we did, did we do enough...? That answer will be tough....
Ain't gonna happen...
They do not care. "Excusing" is meaningless. They must be crushed at the polls, repeatedly, until their money dries up.
oh, i do agree with your responses, as was just stating what i believe is required to right some of the wrongs, but realize this is asking FAR too much from the GOP and too right to see the true consequences of their actions, which one way or another, must be answered for
This says it all.