Sometimes a different perspective can be valuable.

The following article is from:
https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/


July 19, 2024 (Friday)
Today a Russian court sentenced 32-year-old Wall Street Journal
reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in a high-security penal colony
after convicting him of espionage in a secret three-day trial. The
U.S. government considers Gershkovich �wrongly detained,� a rare
designation signifying that he is being held as a political bargaining
chip.
Today, President Joe Biden said that Gershkovich was �targeted by the
Russian government because he is a journalist and an American. We are
pushing hard for Evan�s release and will continue to do so.� He added: �Journalism is not a crime. We will continue to stand strong for press
freedom in Russia and worldwide, and stand against all those who seek
to attack the press or target journalists.�
Last night, a faulty update of software from cybersecurity firm
CrowdStrike crashed computer systems all over the world. Banks and
hospitals were locked out of their own programs, and government
services shut down. In the U.S., more than 2,600 flights were canceled
and 9,000 were delayed. Bloomberg�s David Rovella quoted Australian
security consultant Troy Hunt: �I don�t think it�s too early to call
it,� Hunt said. �This will be the largest IT outage in history.�
Also making history last night was the final night of the Republican
National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the night on which former president Donald J. Trump accepted the party�s presidential
nomination. Coming as it did just days after a would-be assassin took
a shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one
attendee and badly wounding two others, the convention was billed by
Republican operatives as a way for Trump to rebrand himself as a
candidate of �unity.�
This was certainly the way many major newspapers billed Trump�s
acceptance speech this morning, in stories that, as media journalist
Parker Molloy noted, were probably based on prepared remarks delivered
to news agencies in advance of the speech. But it was not how the
evening played out.
Since Saturday�s shooting, it has been notable that there has not been
a medical review of Trump�s injuries, although he has said he was
injured by a bullet that ripped through his ear. This matters not only
because of the extent of his injuries, but also because Trump has made
the story part of his identity without any fact check, and the media
appears simply to be letting it go on Trump�s say-so, something that
adds to the sense that media outlets are treating Trump and Biden
differently.
Last night, Trump perhaps tried to address this lack by recounting
last Saturday�s shooting. Interestingly, he did not say he was hit by
a bullet, but that when he felt the injury he thought, �it can only be
a bullet.� Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo today noted a report
from local Pennsylvania television station WPXI that four motorcycle
officers standing within feet of Trump suffered minor injuries from
flying debris. Trump has likely cut off further discussion of the
topic by saying it is too painful to tell the story again.
With that story behind him, Trump hit the theme of unity, saying he
would bring the country together. �The discord and division in our
society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together
by a single fate, a single destiny,� he said. �We rise together. Or we
fall apart�. I am running to be president for all of America, not half
of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of
America. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your
nomination for president of the United States.�
But that was just in the first ten minutes. Then Trump ignored the
teleprompter and things veered far off course, reflecting the
candidate that has stayed in the safe spaces of Mar-a-Lago and rallies
of his loyalists for years. Trump rambled for more than 90 minutes,
making it the longest acceptance speech in U.S. history and outlasting
the interest of the audience, some of whom fell asleep.
He went on to recite his usual litany of lies: that Democrats cheated
in the 2020 presidential election (they did not), that crime is going
up (it�s plummeting), that inflation is the worst we�ve ever had (it�s
around 3%; the worst was around 23%), that Democrats want to quadruple
people�s taxes (CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls this �imaginary�),
and so on. Dale called it �a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech.� Journalist James Fallows posted: �Of the maybe 10,000 political
speeches I've heard over the years, this was overall the worst.�
Statistician Nate Silver�s judgment was harsher, in a way: he began
with �It�s a weird but a pretty good speech,� then posted
�Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are
worse things politically speaking than being boring.� Shortly after,
came: �Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties
are trying to throw this election.�
MSNBC�s Chris Hayes watched the unhinged speech and concluded: "This
is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a
vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old
man in decline who's been doing the same schtick for a very long time
and it's really wearing thin."
The point, though, as Trump meandered through attacks on immigrants
and a diatribe about the fictional character cannibal Hannibal
Lecter�who he might think was real�as it always has been, was to
present a picture of the U.S. under siege by enemies who are
persecuting him because he represents true Americans and that he must
be returned to office because only he can vanquish those enemies. Greg
Sargent of The New Republic noted that Trump cannot offer a �unity�
message because �Trump himself knows the MAGA masses will not be
satiated without expansive displays of rage, cruelty and sadism
directed at hated out groups and designated enemies of MAGA.�
For years, observers have noted that Trump�s approach to politics is
patterned on the �kayfabe� at the heart of professional wrestling.
Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which
the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good
and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. According to journalist
Abraham Josephine Reisman, in old-school kayfabe the actors never let
their masks slip, and while the audience knew what they were seeing
must be fake, they played along with the illusion.
But in the 1990s, the barrier between reality and illusion blurred as
wrestlers and promoters tried to increase the viability of the fading
industry by tossing reality into the performances: real-life
insults�the more outrageous the better�and real-life events. Decoding
what was real and what was not drove engagement until in 1999, an
estimated 18% of Americans, about 50 million people, called themselves
fans. This �neokayfabe,� Reisman wrote in the New York Times in 2023,
�rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and
outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and
commitment.�
Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, �turns the world into a hall of mirrors
from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and
eats the soul.�
Trump participated in a storyline in this neokayfabe with World
Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon in 2007, in part billed as
a battle over hair. Eventually he was inducted into the WWE Hall of
Fame, and many observers have made the link between neokayfabe and his
approach to politics. Indeed, he even blended the two explicitly when
he chose McMahon�s wife, Linda, to head the U.S. Small Business
Administration during his presidency.
Neokayfabe and politics came together again last night at the
Republican National Convention, as Linda McMahon, wrestler Hulk Hogan,
and musician Kid Rock, whose music has been featured at wrestling
events and who is also a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, all
participated.
�So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags�. Whatcha
gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?!" Hogan yelled to wild applause after ripping off his shirt
to show a Trump-Vance shirt. Like the other performers at the
convention, he painted a portrait of Trump�s presidency, and of the
United States since Trump left office, that was a fantasy of good and
evil. Hogan reinforced that there was no way Trump was going to reach
toward unity in Milwaukee. His approach to the world cannot be
moderated. It depends on the idea that there are two teams in the
performance and one must vanquish the other.
Part of that storyline requires rewriting not just the recent past,
but our history. At the convention last night, Donald Trump Jr.�s
fianc�e, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said: �It is no wonder that the heroes
who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say
they don�t recognize our country anymore.� But the Allied soldiers in
World War II were not fighting communism. They were fighting fascism.
The three great Allied powers were Great Britain, the United States,
and the communist Soviet Union.
It might be that Guilfoyle misspoke, or that she doesn�t know even the
most basic facts of our history. Or it might be that by rewriting that
history to put America on the side of the fascists, people like
Guilfoyle hope to make that alliance more palatable to MAGA followers
today.

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