Fascism roars in New York

"America is for Americans and Americans only." Be afraid.

Oct 28, 2024

Hello! There are eight days till election day.

🚮 Garbage In, Garbage Out

Anyone who tells you last night’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden wasn’t a fascist event is being either naïve, defensive or needlessly polite.

In front of a braying crowd lit in sinister patches of red, speaker after speaker revelled in outright racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and flat-out hatred, promising retribution for “the enemy within” and denigrating Kamala Harris as “the antichrist” who relies on “pimp handlers”.

Among the cast of fringe figures and familiar ghouls (a slurring Rudy Giuliani, both Trump’s elder sons, Hulk Hogan, et al), three big names stood out:

🚀 Ketamine-fuelled election meddler Elon Musk, aka “Space Karen”, delivered a performance cringeworthy even by his own standards, roaring at the crowd while wearing a black MAGA hat customised with a “gothic” font and promising to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget if Trump puts him in his administration. (This would in fact require an act of Congress.)

🇺🇸 Stephen Miller, the avowedly xenophobic eminence grise of the first Trump administration and primary author of Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, described his vision of immigration in explicitly ethnonationalist terms: “America is for Americans and Americans only!”

🤮 Probably the most sinister speaker was Tucker Carlson, discarded Fox News anchor turned freelance far-right arsonist and alleged paid Russian propagandist, who continued his recent campaign to cement the idea that a Harris victory cannot be considered credible, throwing in a sneer at her biracial heritage to go with it:

It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive. As the first Samoan Malaysian low I.Q. former California prosecutor ever to be elected president, it was just a groundswell of popular support, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just a freak or a criminal…
It’s very hard for me to believe the rest of us are just gonna say, ‘You know what, Joe Scarborough? You’re right. You’re right. She won fair and square ‘cause she’s just so impressive. I don’t think so.
And to me, that’s liberation. It’s the freedom to say what’s obviously true as a free man and not a slave.

Terrifying, nauseating, enraging – pick your adjective, but it’s quite something. Have a look at the clip.

Where Musk comes off like a stoned teenager and Miller like a study pill-fuelled grad student who trolls his classmates online while pulling all-nighters in the Nazi history section of the university library, Carlson seems perpetually on the brink of totally losing his self-control and physically attacking the lectern he’s speaking from.

The inner furnace fuelling his anger is is burning hot enough now, when Trump has a very strong chance of winning; imagine what state of mind Carlson will find himself in if and when Trump loses.

What really seems to have cut through from the rally so far, however, is an appallingly racist warm-up routine delivered by stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. A selection of his material speaks for itself:

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.”
[Pointing into audience] “A black guy with a thing on his on his head. What the hell is that, a lampshade?…I'm just kidding. That's one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together. It was awesome.”
“I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

Delivered while Kamala Harris outlined her plans to boost government assistance to Puerto Rico, which is still recovering from disastrous hurricane damage, a single clip of that last line has now been viewed more than 30 million times on X.

As it became clear Hinchcliffe’s routine had in fact been heard outside the arena, and not favourably, The Trump team saw fit to issue a statement on the Puerto Rico joke. Spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez kept it short: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

No statement on Hinchcliffe’s other material is as yet forthcoming. However, the “island of garbage” for now remains the story, not least because it seems to have encouraged one of the island’s biggest stars, Bad Bunny, to endorse Kamala Harris. He has 45 million followers on Instagram, and several of his songs have had close to or more than 2 billion streams on Spotify.

Thanks to the vagaries of the Electoral College calculus, the fallout from Hinchcliffe’s routine and the attention drawn to it by Bad Bunny et al could prove decisive to the national outcome.

The Puerto Rican vote in the US is enormous, and concentrated in areas Trump desperately needs in order to capture several swing states – particularly Pennsylvania:

So far, the mainstream coverage of the rally has been disastrous for the Trump campaign. Words that used to be considered too strong for mainstream outlets are now front and centre in headlines and chyrons, putting the campaign on the defensive with just one week to go:

Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism – The New York Times
Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage’ – The Washington Post
Trump loyalists spew racist, vulgar attacks at New York City rally – CNN
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally overshadowed by his allies’ crude and racist remarks – NBC News
Trump rally at MSG features offensive, crude commentary – CBS
Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks – Politico

Also noticeable is that the campaign is not yet trying to get last night’s rally viewed by as many people as possible, which is usually the entire point of events held on this scale.

The Trump operation often bombards followers’ inboxes with emails about his speeches and media appearances: one recent subject line screamed “INSTANT CLASSIC: President Trump x Joe Rogan”; another, bragging about a rally in Michigan, declared “President Trump Assembles Greatest Coalition In History”.

But so far, nothing has landed, indicating there may already be some recognition that the guest speakers at Madison Square Garden have gone too far.

Whatever it was actually intended to achieve besides flattering Trump’s ego, the rally is now driving the news cycle, meaning the hand-wringing over Harris’s supposed difficulty closing the deal is now yesterday’s news (see: the last edition of this Substack.) And the sight of Carlson, Hinchcliffe, Musk et al were cheered on by a massive crowd only makes it worse, elevating the rally from a niche gathering of unfamiliar cranks to an unignorable red alert.

And that’s before we get into Trump’s own remarks.

🚨 Secrets and Lies

Trump in fact gave one of last night’s least energetic speeches, and as per usual with his recent appearances, his brain-soup delivery and late arrival had many of the crowd slouching toward the exits while he droned into the dark. Still, a few lines really did jump out.

(Note: I’ve pulled the quotes below and videos above from clips of the rally shared on X by Ben Meiselas and Aaron Rupar, whose live-clipping of major speeches plays a critical role in drawing attention to the reality of what Trump is doing. Aaron’s Substack, Public Notice, is essential reading.)

On immigrants: “The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer.”
On the media: “They’re the enemy too, they’re the enemy of the people, the press.”
On his enemies: “A massive, vicious, crooked radical left machine that runs today’s Democratic Party…it’s just this amorphous group of people, but they’re smart and they’re vicious. But we have to defeat them – and when I say ‘the enemy from within’, the other side goes craaaazy…they’ve done very bad things to this country, they are indeed the enemy from within.”
On Kamala Harris: “No-one takes her seriously. Everyone knows she is a very low-IQ individual.”
More on Harris: “Kamala Harris is a train wreck who has destroyed everything in her path. To make her president would be a gamble with the lives of millions and millions of people.”
To House Speaker Mike Johnson, who also spoke at the rally: “And I think with our little secret we’re gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret. We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.”

J.D. Vance, whose own bilious speech last night was somewhat lost amid the sound and fury, got into a full-on shouting match with CNN’s Jake Tapper this weekend over Trump’s repeated reference to the “enemy within”, wrongly insisting that the former president has only suggested deploying the military against “far-left lunatics” rather than journalists and elected Democrats. Last night’s speech once again leaves Trump’s running mate looking a bit cuckolded.

But the final reference to a “secret” involving plans for the House of Representatives – which in certain circumstances involving the Electoral College can end up deciding the election on a one-state, one-vote basis – should set up Johnson for a week (at least) of excruciatingly awkward interviews about whether or not he plans to accept a Harris victory.

That said, whether he will be the Speaker come January 6th is far from certain, and the effect of last night’s rally on voter turnout in various swing House seats might not be to his benefit.

🕵️ Further reading

Of all the people to rejoin the Trump campaign after last night’s Hitlerian overshoot, the last person they might want on board is Steve Bannon, whose project to use Trump as a vector for a fascist assault on democracy stretches back years.

But after a spell in prison, Bannon is being released tomorrow, just in time for the election – and for whatever sinister effort to manipulate the result Trump plans to launch if Harris wins. He is one of the only people in the wider Trump orbit who can give Stephen Miller and Roger Stone a run for their money in the extremism stakes, and like them, he has the advantage of being far more intelligent and better networked than your average far-right opportunist.

Here’s a piece from NOTUS on the significance of his imminent release.

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