Campaign Rally Quotes

I am, and always have been - first, last, and always - a child of America. You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand. I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House. You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down. Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too. The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms. We were not afforded that liberty. But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will “hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice. Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us. If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election. And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.

The voices of peace can’t be silenced by bombs, shootings, sieges, brutality and barbarism. Despite the challenges we face as peace-makers in a troubled region, all we want is peace and our campaign #WeWantPeace continues.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ. It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country. The

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did.

As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

For the next few minutes, Edith led the room in hollering “Fired up! Ready to go!” back and forth, again and again. I was confused at first, but figured it would be impolite of me not to join in. And pretty soon, I started to feel kinda fired up! I started to feel like I was ready to go! I noticed everybody at the meeting suddenly was smiling too, and after the chanting was done we settled down and talked for the next hour about the community and the country and what we could do to make it better. Even after I left Greenwood, for the rest of the day, every so often, I’d point to someone on my staff and ask, “You fired up?” Eventually it became a campaign rallying cry. And that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that couldn’t be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign—and by extension a democracy—proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.

In the Sixties, the hippies used to say, "Never trust anyone over 30." Now all the Sixties hippies are in their sixties, and they've gone quiet about that, but it's good advice for you: never trust anyone over 30 with the societal checkbook. You thought you were the idealistic youth of the Obama era, but in fact you're the designated fall-guys. You weren't voting for "the future," but to deny yourself the very possibility of one--like turkeys volunteering to waddle around with an "Audacity of Thanksgiving" bumper sticker on your tush. Instead of swaying glassy-eyed behind President Obama at his campaign rallies singing "We are the hopeychange," you should have been demanding that the government spend less money on small agencies with fewer employees on smaller salaries. Because if you don't, there won't be a future. "You can be anything you want to be"--but only if you first tell today's big spenders that, whatever they want to be, they should try doing it on their own dime.

Many also forget that the international campaign in solidarity with the Union under the Lincoln presidency rallied at a time when it was entirely possible that the United Kingdom might have thrown its whole weight behind the Confederacy and even moved troops from Canada to hasten the partition of a country half slave and half free. This is often forgotten, I suggest, because the movement of solidarity was partly led by Karl Marx and his European allies (as was gratefully acknowledged by Henry Adams in his Education)

liable to quote lyrics about the death of the campaigner Blair Peach during an anti-Nazi rally in London in the seventies and rant about oligarchic corruption in the US body politic.

Make America Great Again”—ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies.

We use the terms “demonstration” and “protest” interchangeably, at our own peril, like we interchangeably use the terms “mobilizing” and “organizing.” A protest is organizing people for a prolonged campaign that forces racist power to change a policy. A demonstration is mobilizing people momentarily to publicize a problem. Speakers and placards and posts at marches, rallies, petitions, and viral hashtags demonstrate the problem. Demonstrations are, not surprisingly, a favorite of suasionists. Demonstrations annoy power in the way children crying about something they will never get annoy parents. Unless power cannot economically or politically or professionally afford bad press—as power could not during the Cold War, as power cannot during election season, as power cannot close to bankruptcy—power typically ignores demonstrations.

Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathize with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey . . . or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time . . . or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion. I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the superrich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country? And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” What a phrase! He said, “We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.” He said that tenderness “means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.

ignored the Wallace rallies that, night after night, packed halls in every corner of the state. That was all Wallace did—except for a few TV spots—and every one of his rallies attracted more people than the halls could hold.

But this was not enough on its own to generate the kind of terror that Mao wanted. On 18 August, a mammoth rally was held in Tiananmen Square in the center of Peking, with over a million young participants. Lin Biao appeared in public as Mao's deputy and spokesman for the first time. He made a speech calling on the Red Guards to charge out of their schools and 'smash up the four olds' defined as 'old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits." Following this obscure call, Red Guards all over China took to the streets, giving full vent to their vandalism, ignorance, and fanaticism. They raided people's houses, smashed their antiques, tore up paintings and works of calligraphy. Bonfires were lit to consume books. Very soon nearly all treasures in private collections were destroyed. Many writers and artists committed suicide after being cruelly beaten and humiliated, and being forced to witness their work being burned to ashes. Museums were raided. Palaces, temples, ancient tombs, statues, pagodas, city walls anything 'old' was pillaged. The few things that survived, such as the Forbidden City, did so only because Premier Zhou Enlai sent the army to guard them, and issued specific orders that they should be protected. The Red Guards only pressed on when they were encouraged. Mao hailed the Red Guards' actions as "Very good indeed!" and ordered the nation to support them. He encouraged the Red Guards to pick on a wider range of victims in order to increase the terror. Prominent writers, artists, scholars, and most other top professionals, who had been privileged under the Communist regime, were now categorically condemned as 'reactionary bourgeois authorities." With the help of some of these people's colleagues who hated them for various reasons, ranging from fanaticism to envy, the Red Guards began to abuse them. Then there were the old 'class enemies': former landlords and capitalists, people with Kuomintang connections, those condemned in previous political campaigns like the 'rightists' and their children.

Clinton brought in billions of dollars, twice the funds raised by Trump, and she also had twice as many campaign offices. But Trump led a movement. His relationship with the electorate was direct, at mass rallies with incendiary speeches.

For the remainder of the gubernatorial campaign, Hamilton issued open letters to the electorate, and at Clinton campaign rallies his essays were hurled under the table as marks of contempt. In shaping his final appeal to voters, Hamilton said that Clinton’s most effective tactic was to single out the rich for abuse, and he warned that republicans scapegoated the rich to their detriment: “There is no stronger sign of combinations unfriendly to the general good than when the partisans of those in power raise an indiscriminate cry against men of property.

It was this rallying of the Republican troops, who turned out in record crowds during the campaign, that led Trump to call what he had created a “movement.” It is a movement, first of all, anchored in its opposition to the Democrats’ collectivism and in defense of individual liberty.

As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did.

camps, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What was novel in 2016 was a candidate who ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies and encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This

What was novel in 2016 was a candidate who ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies and encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions. A protestor would first be greeted with boos, then with frenetic cries of “USA,” and then be forced to leave the rally. At one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left over. Maybe get the remnant out. Get the remnant out.” The crowd, taking its cue, then tried to root out other people who might be dissenters, all the while crying “USA.” The candidate interjected: “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me, it’s fun.” This kind of mob violence was meant to transform the political atmosphere, and it did.

Because the American federal government uses mercenaries in warfare and American state governments pay corporations to run prisons, the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What is novel is a president who wishes to maintain, while in office, a personal security force which during his campaign used force against dissenters. As a candidate, the president ordered a private security detail to clear opponents from rallies, but also encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions.

. . . in Ukraine, the Association Agreement was more than just a few hundred pieces of paper slowly making their way through the inscrutable EU bureaucracy. Alina Frolova, a public relations professional who joined the group of Ukrainians Kuleba rallied in his pro-Ukraine public relations campaign, tells me it was the first step on a pathway to Europe and a dream for which many Ukrainians were willing to risk their lives. The cold practicality with which Ukrainians are willing to endanger themselves in the face of a threat to their budding democracy is still something that shocks me, even after having lived and worked there.

Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: ‘When [Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli’ to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, ‘a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.’ According to Wright, Obama then told him, ‘You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.’ But privately, Obama and his family prayed with Wright just before the presidential announcement.

By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion’s share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans. The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as ‘the ABC of Jihad’, which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors. Alphabet

The patricians urge [Coriolanus] to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in office, there will be plenty of time for him to resume his actual stance and to roll back the concessions that have been made to the poor. It is the most familiar of political games: the plutocrat, born into every privilege and inwardly contemptuous of those beneath him, who mouths the rhetoric of populism during the electoral campaign, abandoning it as soon as it has served his purposes. The Romans had boiled it all down to a conventional performance, comparable to a well-coiffed politician's donning of a hard hat at a rally held at a construction site...

Fine people on both sides? I was disgusted. Here was the same man I’d gone on television to defend when I believed it was appropriate. While I hadn’t been a supporter at the start of his campaign, he’d eventually convinced me he could be an effective president. Trump had proved to be a disrupter of the status quo during the primary and general election. Especially when he began to talk about issues of concern to black Americans. Dems have taken your votes for granted! Black unemployment is the highest it’s ever been! Neighborhoods in Chicago are unsafe! All things I completely agreed with. But now he was saying, 'I’m going to change all that!' He mentioned it at every rally, even though he was getting shut down by the leaders of the African American community. And what amazed me most was that he was saying these things to white people and definitely not winning any points there either. I’d defended Trump on more than one occasion and truly believed he could make a tangible difference in the black community. (And still do.) I’d lost relationships with family members, friends, and women I had romantic interest in, all because I thought advocating for some of his positions had a higher purpose. But now the president of the United States had just given a group whose sole purpose and history have been based on hate and the elimination of blacks and Jews moral equivalence with the genuine counterprotesters. My grandfather was born and raised in Helena, Arkansas, where the KKK sought to kill him and other family members. You can imagine this issue was very personal to me. In Chicago, the day before Trump’s press conference, my grandfather and I had had a long conversation about Charlottesville, and his words to me were fresh in my mind. So, yeah, I was hurt. Angry. Frustrated. Sad.

If I had lied to the CIA, perhaps I might have passed a test. Instead of writing a book about the White House, I’d be poisoning a drug kingpin with a dart gun concealed inside a slightly larger dart gun, or making love to a breathy supermodel in the interest of national security. I’ll never know. I confessed to smoking pot two months before. The sunniness vanished from my interviewer’s voice. “Normally we like people who break the rules,” Skipper told me, “but we can’t consider anyone who’s used illegal substances in the past twelve months.” Just like that, my career as a terrorist hunter was over. I thought my yearning for higher purpose would vanish with my CIA dreams, the way a Styrofoam container follows last night’s Chinese food into the trash. To my surprise, it stuck around. In the weeks that followed, I pictured myself in all sorts of identities: hipster, world traveler, banker, white guy who plays blues guitar. But these personas were like jeans a half size too small. Trying them on gave me an uncomfortable gut feeling and put my flaws on full display. My search for replacement selves began in November. By New Year’s Eve I was mired in the kind of existential funk that leads people to find Jesus, or the Paleo diet, or Ayn Rand. Instead, on January 3, I found a candidate. I was on an airplane when I discovered him, preparing for our initial descent into JFK. This was during the early days of live in-flight television, and I was halfway between the Home Shopping Network and one of the lesser ESPNs when I stumbled across coverage of a campaign rally in Iowa. Apparently, a caucus had just finished. Speeches were about to begin. With nothing better to occupy my time, I confirmed that my seat belt was fully fastened. I made sure my tray table was locked. Then, with the arena shrunk to fit my tiny seatback screen, I watched a two-inch-tall guy declare victory. It’s not like I hadn’t heard about Barack Obama. I had heard his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. His presidential campaign had energized my more earnest friends. But I was far too mature to take them seriously. They supported someone with the middle name Hussein to be president of the United States. While they were at it, why not cast a ballot for the Tooth Fairy? Why not nominate Whoopi Goldberg for pope?

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

the Wilmington coup of 1898 was even mentioned— If the Wilmington massacre of 1898 was even mentioned— (how would the massacred name it?) If the Campaign for White Supremacy leading up to the 1898 elections was even mentioned in the junior-year class on the history of North Carolina, the events were described as another eruption of Negro dissatisfaction which, once expressed, quieted. But in the story of the campaign (for white supremacy), the Negro had become unruly, needed instead to be ruled once more out, “Negro rule” ousted into the swampy fantastic as fear, as specter, as a promise. The phantasm of Negro rule was what the high school textbook never acknowledged had rallied the Wilmington race (war) of 1898, the riot planned and instigated, orderly disorder, the wrong the Redeemers sought to riot up, right justifying anything, even murder, the declaration to “choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses” of whatever the Negro populating their fantasies was—threatening and promising domination, threatening revenge, promising a North Carolina governed by the many not the few. A thousand Black rapists (each vote a thousand more) haunted the campaign the Redeemers rallied to wage. They claimed the fight to protect their honor. For, if this time they didn’t prevail, who could imagine what they would be subject to?

Clinton got out there and created a new narrative on the economy, which took some of the needles out of Obama,” says Republican strategist Mike Murphy. “It was the biggest single number-moving event in the entire campaign. It was devastatingly important to the Obama guys. And he put him back in business.” (It also helped, Murphy adds, that “the Romney campaign was totally incompetent.”) In 2000, Clinton had famously faulted Al Gore for not letting Clinton rally the base in key swing states. It was not a mistake Barack Obama was going to repeat. In addition to his convention speech, Clinton stumped for Obama in swing states like Florida and Ohio. Unlike Gore and his campaign team, “the Obama people, despite whatever hard feelings they had, were pretty dispassionate and not afraid to let him come in and steal the show, if they thought it would be helpful,” says a former Clinton official who worked in the Obama administration. Clinton even starred in a widely seen advertisement for Obama, declaring that “President Obama has a plan to rebuild America from the ground up, investing in innovation, education, and job training. It only works if there is a strong middle class. That’s what happened when I was president.”15

At the Auditorium Building on September 8, the labor movement hosted a rally to organize against the Loeb Rule. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor told the crowd that businessmen were engaged in a campaign “to eliminate men of brain and heart and sympathy and character” from the teaching force. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, a former member of Mayor Dunne’s progressive school board, spoke about the threat the Teachers Federation had long posed to corporate interests more interested in lowering their own taxes than in improving the education of other people’s children. “All over this country, in one form or another, it is a fight between what has been called the Interests, the special interests, and the interests of the public, the interests of the common people. That is the fight.

As it had turned out, assembling a crowd of sign-waving supporters for a Donald Trump campaign rally in Manhattan was a tricky task. A few days before the event, the billionaire’s team was reduced to putting out a casting call through a New York–based agency offering fifty bucks to background actors who were willing to wear Trump shirts, carry Trump posters, and cheer Trump on during his big announcement. (“We

TIME FOR MORE TEA He does not keep the wicked alive but gives the afflicted their rights. Job 36:6 We the people. That’s what so many Americans have rallied around since the unstoppable Tea Party grassroots movement emerged. It resonates deeply with our Founders’ vision for an America created by the people and for the people, while it fights to ensure our lives are not ruled by the elites in Washington. And where do these convictions originate? We believe we’re created in God’s image and thus have God-given rights that we must protect from the destructive forces of the federal government. Even as the liberal media mock our ideals and our leaders, and even dare to mock our God, we have continued to stand for what is right. We stand because our hope comes from above, not from our TV screens and from Washington. Liberal elites put patriots down and mock them because they’re scared of conscientious, independent citizens. They look around and realize there are more of us than there are of them. They’re scared, because they see how people flock to a message of truth and hope. Patriots will keep winning because when the true biblical hope that the Founders enshrined in our Constitution is held up next to the façade of hope that this world offers, hope rooted in Christ always wins. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, support those in your community who are truly fighting to uphold our one nation under God! Get involved in a local campaign for a candidate who stands for these principles.

The very idea that people might work for those wages, and take pride in their work, is incomprehensible to Hillary. The country no longer has slaves to do the dirty work, and so America needs illegal immigrants. The applause attending Hillary’s remarks shows that she was not merely speaking for herself. Other Democratic fine-diners that evening were very much on board with Hillary’s position. Listening to Hillary that evening, I felt I was at a campaign rally for a Democratic presidential candidate in the mid-nineteenth century. The feel was the same, and most important, the argument was the same. A century and a half ago, the issue wasn’t illegal immigration; it was slavery. Democrats then justified slavery on the grounds that there was dirty work to be done and someone had to do it.

a political rally on May 29th, 2018, the President again stated quote, "so how do you like the fact that they had people infiltrating our campaign?

Boehner had apparently emphasized how “angry” I was during our discussions—a useful fiction that I’d told my team not to dispute in the interest of keeping the deal on track. For his members, there was no greater selling point. In fact, more and more, I’d noticed how the mood we’d first witnessed in the fading days of Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies and on through the Tea Party summer had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety. The suggestion that I hadn’t been born in the United States wasn’t new. At least one conservative crank had pushed the theory as far back as my Senate race in Illinois. During the primary campaign for president, some disgruntled Hillary supporters had recirculated the claim, and while her campaign strongly disavowed it, conservative bloggers and talk radio personalities had picked it up, setting off feverish email chains among right-wing activists. By the time the Tea Party seized on it during my first year in office, the tale had blossomed into a full-blown conspiracy theory: I hadn’t just been born in Kenya, the story went, but I was also a secret Muslim socialist, a Manchurian candidate who’d been groomed from childhood—and planted in the United States using falsified documents—to infiltrate the highest reaches of the American government.

Nothing tempers Coriolanus’s obnoxiousness, and yet the play is oddly sympathetic to him, at least compared with the others of his class. The patricians urge him to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in office, there will be plenty of time for him to resume his actual stance and to roll back the concessions that have been made to the poor. It is the most familiar of political games: the plutocrat, born into every privilege and inwardly contemptuous of those beneath him, who mouths the rhetoric of populism during the electoral campaign, abandoning it as soon as it has served his purposes. The Romans had boiled it all down to a conventional performance, comparable to a well-coiffed politician’s donning of a hard hat at a rally held at a construction site: the candidate for office would set aside his richly dyed robes and, entering the marketplace, put on a threadbare white garment, “the napless vesture of humility” (2.1.222). Then, if he had any battle scars, he would show them, like a résumé, and solicit the people’s votes.

ghouls like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer in key positions. He has continued holding campaign rallies with his die-hard supporters but he has yet to deliver on some key administration priorities.

Since the election, he’s figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with “chopper talk” during which he can pretend he can’t hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades. In 2020, his pandemic “press briefings” quickly devolved into mini–campaign rallies filled with self-congratulation, demagoguery, and ring kissing. In them he has denied the unconscionable failures that have already killed thousands, lied about the progress that’s being made, and scapegoated the very people who are risking their lives to save us despite being denied adequate protection and equipment by his administration. Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership.

in 1955, Russell published Man’s Mastery of Malaria, in which he envisaged a global spraying campaign that would free humankind from the disease—cheaply, rapidly, and without great difficulty. Rallying to Russell’s optimism, WHO adopted a global campaign of malaria eradication with DDT as its weapon of choice.

The Civil Rights Movement meant that “the days of respectable racism were over.”18 And so in his bid for the presidency, Wallace mastered the use of race-neutral language to explain what was at stake for disgruntled working-class whites, particularly those whose neighborhoods butted right up against black enclaves. To the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, who came to his campaign rallies in Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and San Diego, he played on the ever-present fear that blacks were breaking out of crime-filled ghettos and moving “into our streets, our schools, our neighborhoods,” signaling in unmistakable but still-unspoken code that “a nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.”19 For working-class whites whose hold on some semblance of the American dream was becoming increasingly tenuous as the economy buckled under pressure from financing both the Great Society and the Vietnam War (on a tax cut), this was naturally upsetting.20 Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites.

Donald Trump is a special kind of cultist. He is in no way totalistic—his beliefs can be remarkably fluid—nor is he the leader of a sealed-off cultic community. Rather, his cultism is inseparable from his solipsistic reality. That solipsism emanates only from the self and what the self requires, which makes him the most bizarre and persistent would-be owner of reality. And in his way he has created a community of zealous believers who are geographically dispersed. A considerable portion of his base can be understood as cultist, as followers of a guru who is teacher, guide, and master. From my studies of cults and cultlike behavior, I recognize this aspect of Trump’s relationship to his followers. It is evident at his large-crowd events, which began as campaign rallies but have continued to take place during his presidency. There is a ritual quality to the chants he has led such as “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” The latter chant is followed by the guru’s question “And who will pay for it?,” then the crowd’s answer, “Mexico!” The chants and responses are less about policy than they are assertions of guru-disciple ties. The chants are rituals that generate “high states”—or what can even be called experiences of transcendence—in disciples. The back-and-forth brings them closer to the guru and enables them to share his claim to omnipotence and his sacred aura. Trump does not directly express an apocalyptic narrative, but his presence has an apocalyptic aura. He tells us that, as not only a “genius” but a “very stable genius,” he alone can “fix” the terrible problems of our society. To be sure these are bizarre expressions of his extreme grandiosity, but also of a man who would be a savior to a disintegrating world.

He had brought his case to the people, like an evangelical preacher, holding massive rallies in all the major cities coast-to-coast, concentrated on the poor rural areas, and people flocked to them wearing his campaign hats and T-shirts and waving American flags and signs bearing his name. His message was simple – America was broken, only he could fix it, and return the US to the fairytale days of the postwar 50s, where everyone had a job, car, house, two kids, and everything they wanted was within their reach. Life would be good again.

The tide began to turn against Mbeki in 2005. After Mandela’s only surviving son died from AIDS, he broke with Mbeki over the issue of public health, saying, “Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it.”13 The ninety-three-year-old Mandela then devoted the remaining years of his life and his unrivaled authority to campaigning actively against the disease and to rallying the ANC to the cause.

I’d noticed how the mood we’d first witnessed in the fading days of Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies and on through the Tea Party summer had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted. Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.

Thus all civilian officials and military officers in the United States government who either knew or should have known that the Reagan administration intended to assassinate Qaddafi and participated in the bombing operation are “war criminals” according to the U.S. government’s own official definition of that term. The American people should not have permitted any aspect of their foreign affairs and defense policies to be conducted by acknowledged “war criminals.” They should have insisted upon the impeachment, dismissal, resignation, and prosecution of all U.S. government officials guilty of such war crimes. Nevertheless, U.S. public opinion had been so effectively brutalized by five years of Reaganism that over three-quarters of the American people rallied to the support of their demented leadership over the destruction, injuries, and death it had inflicted upon hundreds of innocent civilians in Tripoli and Benghazi.

On November 13, 2016, the Gateway Pundit noted Trump had nearly 1 million attend his rallies in the election campaign, while Clinton totaled 100,000. Hillary had taken fifty-seven days off since July without participating in campaign rallies, amounting to more than half the ninety-nine days between August and Election Day.39 Trump’s

A Rationale for Violence At first, I thought I was merely witnessing the shocked aftermath of a shocking election. The Left did not expect Trump to win. As late as October 20, 2016, the American Prospect published an article, “Trump No Longer Really Running for President,” the theme of which was that Trump’s “real political goal is to make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to govern.” The election result was, in the words of columnist David Brooks, “the greatest shock of our lifetimes.”25 Trump won against virtually insurmountable odds, which included the mainstream media openly campaigning for Hillary and a civil war within the GOP with the entire intellectual wing of the conservative movement refusing to support him. Initially I interpreted the Left’s violent upheaval as a stunned, heat-of-the-moment response to the biggest come-from-behind victory in U.S. political history. Then I saw two things that made me realize I was wrong. First, the violence did not go away. There were the violent “Not My President’s Day” rallies across the country in February; the violent March 4 disruptions of Trump rallies in California, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Florida; the April anti-Trump tax rallies, supposedly aimed at forcing Trump to release his tax returns; the July impeachment rallies, seeking to build momentum for Trump’s removal from office; and the multiple eruptions at Berkeley.26 In Portland, leftists threw rocks, lead balls, soda cans, glass bottles, and incendiary devices until police dispersed them with the announcement, “May Day is now considered a riot.” Earlier, at the Minnesota State Capitol, leftists threw smoke bombs into the pro-Trump crowd while others set off fireworks in the building, sending people scrambling in fear of a bomb attack. Among those arrested was Linwood Kaine, the son of Hillary’s vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine.27 More of this, undoubtedly, is in store from the Left over the next four years. What this showed is that the Left was engaging in premeditated violence, violence not as outbreak of passion but violence as a political strategy.

Journalists who cover Trump without being in the room will sometimes say that Trump’s crowd isn’t with him. But I can tell you, the crowd loves it. There is no rush for the exits, no howl of disgust. The first rally in the aftermath of the scuffle in Birmingham was as packed as the last—maybe more packed. People seem drawn to Trump’s rallies in the same way that they are drawn to a professional wrestling match, and as with a professional wrestling match, they seem divided between people who believe all they see and hear, and those who know it’s partially a performance. The scariest thing about being at a Trump rally is that you don’t know who believes it and who doesn’t.

So why are we, any of us, still debating the reality of climate change? Why aren’t all of our political and business leaders joining the cry to rally the Next Greatest Generation to come up with some solutions? A key part of the problem is that many of our richest people made their fortunes in the fossil-fuel industry. To protect their wealth and businesses, they have turned to promoting denial. Conservative politicians get a great deal of their campaign contributions from fossil-fuel wealth, and they have been convinced to interchange the standard statements of scientific uncertainty (e.g. “plus-or-minus 3%”) to mean that we know nothing at all (i.e. “maybe the answer is minus 100%”). Conservative media outlets have obediently played along. This is wrong and dangerous.

In the budget the term we use for it is bracketing. We hire a contractor, like Bob Creamer, to do this work of organizing the opposition force, and also to organize rallies for our candidates. The Republicans do it, too. The footage of Creamer and Scott Foval boasting about picking fights with crazy people in the line to a campaign rally looked terrible. Foval was taped saying, “It doesn’t matter what the fricking legal and ethics people say. We need to win this mother fucker… In the lines at Trump rallies, we’re starting anarchy.

For example, take George McGovern [1972 Presidential candidate who campaigned on an anti-war platform]. George McGovern did not support the invasion of Panama―in fact, about two months afterwards he wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post saying he had opposed it from the very moment Bush did it. But he also said that he had refrained from saying so at the time. So if he'd been asked about it in a poll, he probably would have answered that he did support the invasion. And the reason is, if you're a red-blooded patriotic American, then when the government is conducting a violent act you're supposed to rally around the flag. That's part of our brainwashing, you know―to have that concept of patriotism drilled into our heads. And people really do feel it, even people like George McGovern, somebody who surely would have been in the 20 percent, but if he'd been polled about it would have voted with the 80 percent. We don't want to be "anti-American," to use the standard term―which in itself is a pretty startling propaganda triumph, actually. Like, go to Italy and try using the word "anti-Italianism," call somebody there "anti-Italian" and just see what happens―they'd crack up in ridicule. But here those totalitarian values really do mean something to people, because there have been very extensive and systematic efforts to control the population in ways like that, and they have been highly successful. I mean, there's a huge public relations industry in the United States, and it doesn't spend billions of dollars a year for nothing, you know. So you really have to be a little bit more careful and nuanced when you interpret these kinds of poll results, in my view.

Two months earlier, Victor de Laveleye, the organizer of BBC programs to Belgium, had urged his compatriots to demonstrate their resistance to German rule by scrawling the letter V on the walls of buildings throughout the country. De Laveleye, who had served as Belgian minister of justice before coming to London, told his listeners that the letter would serve as a symbol to unite and rally their sharply divided nation. (Belgium’s population in the north spoke Flemish, a variant of Dutch, and had close cultural and religious ties to the Netherlands, while Belgians in the south spoke French and were intimately linked to France.) As de Laveleye noted, V was the first letter of both the French word “victoire” and the Flemish word “vrijheid” (“freedom”), not to mention the English word “victory.” Belgians accepted de Laveleye’s challenge with gusto, chalking Vs on walls, doors, pavements, and telegraph and telephone poles. So did a growing number of the French, many of whom learned about the V campaign by listening to the BBC’s Belgian service. Although de Laveleye’s initiative was meant for Belgium, it spread across France in a matter of days. In both countries, chalk sales skyrocketed. A letter to the BBC from Normandy noted “a multitude of little Vs everywhere.” A correspondent from Argentière in the French Alps reported “an avalanche of Vs, even on vehicles and on the roads.

It was part hortatory, part personal testimony, part barstool blowhard, a rambling, disjointed, digressive, what-me-worry approach that combined aspects of cable television rage, big-tent religious revivalism, Borscht Belt tummler, motivational speaking, and YouTube vlogging. Charisma in American politics had come to define an order of charm, wit, and style—a coolness. But another sort of American charisma was more in the Christian evangelical vein, an emotional, experiential spectacle. The Trump campaign had built its central strategy around great rallies regularly attracting tens of thousands, a political phenomenon that the Democrats both failed to heed and saw as a sign of Trump’s limited appeal. For the Trump team, this style, this unmediated connection—his speeches, his tweets, his spontaneous phone calls to radio and television shows, and, often, to anyone who would listen—was revelatory, a new, personal, and inspirational politics. For the other side, it was clownishness that, at best, aspired to the kind of raw, authoritarian demagoguery that had long been discredited by and assigned to history and that, when it appeared in American politics, reliably failed.

But inside a Trump rally, these people are unchained. They can drop their everyday niceties. They can yell and scream and say the things they'd never say out loud on the outside. "Obama is a Muslim!" "Hillary Clinton is a cunt!" "Immigrants need to get the hell out!" "Fuck you, media!" ....They aren't deplorables. They are patriots.

When a teenaged girl asked Trump during a campaign rally whether he believed women deserved equal pay, he irritatingly responded, “Only if you do as good of a job.” Well, the question is, how can a woman do as good a job if society is designed in such a way that women don’t have equal individual rights?

It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions’ worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy. Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three Russian companies named in a sprawling indictment handed down by the Justice Department in February 2018 that detailed the scope and sophistication of the Russian interference. According to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the Russian cyber operatives stole the identities of American citizens, posed as political and religious activists on social media, and used divisive issues such as race and immigration to inflame an already divided electorate—all in support of their preferred candidate, the reality television star and real estate developer Donald Trump. Russian operatives even traveled to the United States to gather intelligence. They focused their efforts on key battleground states and, remarkably, covertly coordinated with members of the Trump campaign in August 2016 to organize rallies in Florida. The Russian interference also included a hack of the Democratic National Committee that resulted in a politically devastating leak of thousands of emails that threw the Democratic convention in Philadelphia into turmoil. In his final report, released in redacted form in April 2019, Robert Mueller said that Moscow’s efforts were part of a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to assist Donald Trump and weaken his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Mueller was unable to establish a chargeable criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, though the report noted that key witnesses used encrypted communications, engaged in obstructive behavior, gave false or misleading testimony, or chose not to testify at all. Perhaps most damning was the special counsel’s conclusion that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from the information stolen and released through Russian efforts.

That was where Donald Trump came in. In his own way, the man is brilliant, and I say that without the least trace of sarcasm. He figured out very early in his campaign for the nomination that the most effective way to rally voters to his banner was to get himself attacked, in the usual tones of shrill mockery, by the defenders of the status quo. The man had the money to pay for the kind of hairstyle that the salary class finds acceptable, to cite an obvious example. He deliberately chose otherwise, because he knew that every time the media trotted out another round of insults directed at his failure to conform to the fashions of the privileged, another hundred thousand working-class voters recalled the sneering putdowns they experienced from their supposed betters and thought, “Trump’s one of us.

Trump’s election and the fiercely loyal support he received from the GOP—even when stoking a violent insurrection against the U.S. Congress in the final days of his term—exposed how one of the nation’s major political parties had been radicalized. Top leaders were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their party’s power. As Stuart Stevens, a major Republican campaign operative who had managed Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, argued in his book It Was All a Lie, “In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.

he gestured toward his daughter-in-law. “Lara, there,” he said. “I barely even knew who the fuck she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me.” By then, Lara and Eric had been together for almost eight years, so presumably Donald had at least met her at their wedding. But it sounded as if he hadn’t known who she was until she had said something nice about him at a campaign rally during the election. As usual with Donald, the story mattered more than the truth, which was easily sacrificed, especially if a lie made the story sound better.

Three political scientists from Texas compared hate-crime statistics from counties where Trump had held campaign rallies to demographically similar counties where rallies were not held—and concluded that Trump rallies were correlated with a 226 percent rise in hate crimes.

Imagine how the last presidential campaign would have turned out if instead of the marketing circus that we were treated to, we were just given a weekly round table discussion between Bush, Gore, and Nader for a couple months running up to the election. No staged rallies, no TV images with flags flowing in the sunset, no pollsters. No marketing. Bush would have been luck to get two percent. (from an interview in Attitude, 2002)

If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti-______ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts positioned itself as the anti-Starbucks. Its ads once mocked Starbucks for using “Fritalian” terms instead of small, medium, and large. Another Dunkin’ campaign was centered on a taste test in which it beat Starbucks. There was even a site called DunkinBeatStarbucks.com where visitors could send e-cards with statements like “Friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks.

On the evening of November 1, at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Eisenhower addressed the tensions in the Mediterranean by letting fly a salvo of antitribal idealism, declaring, “We cannot and will not condone armed aggression—no matter who the attacker, and no matter who the victim. We cannot—in the world, any more than in our own nation—subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law of those opposing us, another for those allied with us.

Stone was committed to campaigning at the state level; Anthony and Stanton wanted a federal constitutional amendment. Stone involved men in her organization; Anthony and Stanton favored an exclusively female membership. Stone sought to inspire change through speaking and meetings; Anthony and Stanton were more confrontational, with Anthony voting illegally and encouraging other women to follow suit. The suffragists who formed alliances with the temperance activists were more moderate in their methods, which helped the two groups find common ground. At the same time that women were organizing local WCTU clubs, Lucy Stone introduced suffrage clubs. Both groups had extensive histories with lobbying and publishing. They began to work together to lobby and speak in front of state legislatures, publish articles and distribute literature, and hold public suffrage meetings, rallies, and debates.* Together, suffragists and temperance activists persuaded several states to allow women to vote.

deaf president now Most of you have probably seen the phrase, but what do you know about the “Deaf President Now” movement? Despite being the first Deaf university in the world, Gallaudet had never had a Deaf president before, and in March 1988 that was finally about to change. The Board of Trustees was slated to choose the next president from a list of three finalist candidates, two Deaf, one hearing. In the lead-up to the board meeting, students and faculty had been campaigning and rallying in support of a Deaf president. THE CANDIDATES DR. ELIZABETH ZINSER, hearing, Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at University of North Carolina DR. HARVEY CORSON, Deaf, Superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf DR. I. KING JORDAN, Deaf, Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at Gallaudet On March 6th, the board selected Zinser. No announcement was made. Students found out only after visiting the school’s PR office to extract the information. Students marched to the Mayflower hotel to confront the Board. Chair Jane Spilman defended the selection to the crowd, reportedly saying, “deaf people can’t function in the hearing world.” WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 7TH: Students hot-wire buses to barricade campus gates, only allowing certain people on campus. Students meet with Board, no concessions made. Protesters march to the Capitol. MARCH 8TH: Students burn effigies, form a 16-member council of students, faculty, and staff to organize the movement. THE FOUR DEMANDS: Zinser’s resignation and the selection of a Deaf president Resignation of Jane Spilman A 51% Deaf majority on the Board of Trustees No reprisals against protesters WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? MARCH 9TH: Movement grows, gains widespread national support. Protest is featured on ABC’s Nightline. MARCH 10TH: Jordan, who’d previously conceded to Zinser’s appointment, joins the protests, saying “the four demands are justified.” Protests receive endorsements from national unions and politicians. DEAF PRESIDENT NOW! MARCH 10TH: Zinser resigns. MARCH 11TH: 2,500 march on Capitol Hill, bearing a banner that says “We still have a dream.” MARCH 13: Spilman resigns, Jordan is announced president. Protesters receive no punishments, DPN is hailed as a success and one of the precursors to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Some aides grew so worn down by the roller coaster of presidential whims that they started encouraging him to hold more campaign rallies, putting aside the fact that it wasn’t campaign season. The events had the dual benefit of giving Trump something “fun” to do and also getting him out of town, where he would hypothetically do less damage.

Everything about Donald Trump, starting with his campaign, told me that he had the makings of an autocrat. How he celebrated violence against protesters during campaign rallies. How he strove to dehumanize the press. His threats to use presidential power to punish, even imprison, opponents. His hateful language and racist dog whistles.

To this day, I don’t know whether he actually read the advance copy of The Right to Bear Arms I sent him—but more than a quarter of a century later, he announced that the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign would be held in a familiar location: Waco, Texas.

After the first group of families arrived in Lewiston by word of mouth, then-Mayor Laurier Raymond Jr. wrote an open letter saying that the town was full, even though much of downtown lay vacant. “This large number of new arrivals cannot continue without negative results for all,” Raymond wrote. The letter became a rallying cry for white supremacists, who descended on the town for a march soon after. An early Republican in the Trump mold, Governor Paul LePage won his elections campaigning against welfare, suggesting that immigrants were stealing resources from the local taxpayers. Said shook his head.

Our opposition pulled out all the stops, too. A thinly disguised political NGO called V15, with a staff that included former Obama advisors, fueled an anti-Likud campaign with millions of dollars from abroad, including $300,000 given by the US State Department.4 This was highly questionable legally. The attorney general gave it a pass, however, arguing that V15 was not subject to campaign fundraising laws because it only opposed a particular party instead of supporting a specific one. Such flexibility was never shown to anyone on the right. “They have V15,” I said to my supporters in campaign rallies. “We have you.” Then I would invariably add, “But if you don’t come out to vote on election day, we’ll lose.

Some of us are just tired of being used as political props,” Hostetter said, citing text messages from friends who’d been disgusted with the tone of the event. “We were hoping this would be more than another campaign rally. I mean, if you want to use biblical language to speak to political issues, fine. But at some point, you have to actually speak to the Bible. Right?

Zoe put her hand up mechanically and mouthed the words along with the crowd, but no sound came out. She was beyond tired, exhausted from eighteen straight hours at the building site. And after this marathon rally, she still had to finish her self-criticism and hand it in to the Special Case Group by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Since the campaign to combat and prevent revisionism started, the Party had been busy rooting out traitors and spies. Zoe was labeled a prime suspect, accused of spying for the Russians and Helen Huang stealing materials from the field, and discharged from her position at the Testing Control Center.

The coronavirus finally began to enter the consciousness of Trump’s reelection campaign. On the morning of February 28, Jared Kushner spoke by phone with Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager. “We need more visuals,” Parscale told Kushner. Trump should be “standing in front of amazing things. Put the white coat on. Look at the vaccine being made. Show America we’re doing stuff.” That day the stock market fell for the seventh day in a row, reaching its worst week since 2008. Later that day at a rally in South Carolina, Trump said, “The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it.” He called Democrats’ criticism of his handling of the virus “their new hoax,” after the Russian investigation and impeachment, and their “single talking point.

But recognizing the potential power of our reaction to injustice to motivate crime has particularly profound implications in the context of mass violence, where the forces of the state are collectively mobilized, where participants must be rallied to the cause, and where questions of national identity, history, and collective pride are easily brought into play.

Like many Jewish Americans, she didn’t lose any close family members in the Holocaust but heard grim tales of more distant relatives, and read other horror stories from the war years. Those feelings were triggered as she watched Trump on the 2016 campaign trail, lashing out against Mexicans and other immigrants and stoking violence at his rallies.

On January 6, when the insurrectionists constructed a gallows and noose outside of the Capitol, they referred directly to a scene in The Turner Diaries; the entire action referenced a strike on the Capitol in that novel. This indicates that January 6 was not meant as a mass-casualty event but a recruitment and radicalization exercise to draw others into the fold. Certainly this happened immediately after the rally, as white power activists and others on the militant Right reached into the Trump base and QAnon groups in intensified recruitment campaigns.

Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity: ‘To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation’, Pankhurst lectured. ‘It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.’ The latest full-body portrait of the movement, Diane Atkinson’s Rise Up, Women!, gives an encyclopaedic listing of militant actions: suffragettes forcing the prime minister out of his car and dousing him with pepper, hurling a stone at the fanlight above Winston Churchill’s door, setting upon statues and paintings with hammers and axes, planting bombs on sites along the routes of royal visits, fighting policemen with staves, charging against hostile politicians with dogwhips, breaking the windows in prison cells. Such deeds went hand in hand with mass mobilisation. The suffragettes put up mammoth rallies, ran their own presses, went on hunger strikes: deploying the gamut of non-violent and militant action. After the hope of attaining the vote by constitutional means was dashed once more in early 1913, the movement switched gears. In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aqueducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets around the country. Over the course of a year and a half, the WSPU claimed responsibility for 337 such attacks. Few culprits were apprehended.

of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. On being compelled by force of arms to give up their slave workforce, Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs’ agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands. It’s a strategy financial analyst Stephen Cummings has likened to “a high-technology version of the plantation economy of the Old South,” with the working and middle classes playing the role of sharecroppers.[1] For the oligarchs the greatest challenge has been getting Greater Appalachia into their coalition and keeping it there. Appalachia has relatively few African

Japanese paranoia stemmed partly from xenophobia rooted in racism. This combination wasn’t peculiar to Japan, as the Nazis were demonstrating in Germany. In the United States, the 1924 Exclusion Act remained in force, prohibiting all immigration from Asia. Some Western states didn’t think the Exclusion Act went far enough, because it hadn’t gotten rid of the Japanese who had immigrated before the United States slammed the door. Xenophobes argued that these immigrants were now breeding more Japanese, who were recognized, outrageously, as American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Farmers in California and Arizona were especially hostile. Even before the Exclusion Act, these states had passed Alien Land Laws severely restricting the property rights of Japanese. Then in 1934 a group of farmers in Arizona’s Salt River Valley began agitating to kick Japanese farmers out, alleging that they had flooded into the region and were depriving farmland from deserving whites who were already hurting from the Depression. They also demanded that white landowners stop leasing acreage to Japanese farmers. The white farmers and their supporters held rallies and parades, blaring their message of exclusion. In the fall of that year, night riders began a campaign of terrorism. They dynamited irrigation canals used by Japanese farmers and threw dynamite bombs at their homes and barns. The leaders of the Japanese community tried to point out that only 700 Japanese lived in the valley and most had been there for more than twenty years. Three hundred fifty of them were American citizens, and only 125 worked in agriculture, mostly for American farmers. Facts made no impression on the white farmers’ racist resentments. Some local officials exploited the bigotry for political gain. The Japanese government protested all this. Hull didn’t want a few farmers to cause an international incident and pushed the governor of Arizona to fix the problem. The governor blamed the terrorism on communist agitators. Dynamite bombs continued to explode on Japanese farms through the fall of 1934. The local and state police maintained a perfect record—not a single arrest. In early February 1935 the Arizona legislature began considering a bill that would forbid Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. If they managed to grow anything, it could be confiscated. Any white farmer who leased to a Japanese would be abetting a crime. (Japan had similar laws against foreigners owning farmland.) American leaders and newspapers quickly condemned the proposed law as shameful, but farmers in Arizona remained enthusiastic. Japanese papers covered the controversy as well. One fascist group, wearing uniforms featuring skulls and waving a big skull flag, protested several times at the US embassy in Tokyo. Patriotic societies began pressuring Hirota to stand up for Japan’s honor. He and Japan’s representatives in Washington asked the American government to do something. Arizona politicians got word that if the bill passed, millions of dollars in New Deal money might go elsewhere. Nevertheless, on March 19 the Arizona senate passed the bill. On March 21 the state house of representatives, inspired more by fears of evaporating federal aid than by racial tolerance, let the bill die. The incident left a bad taste all around.

WE have little idea of just how dependent we have become on human means. If we don’t spend thousands of dollars advertising our special rallies and activities we can hardly draw a crowd. Without extensive mailings, only a handful of people will be interested in our Gospel activities and products. In our media-soaked society, we have found it necessary to resort to full-color magazine displays, catchy marketing phrases, massive bumper sticker campaigns, and special celebrity guests at our meetings. And while none of this is necessarily sinful or wrong, it is surely symptomatic of one thing: We don’t have revival fire in our midst! The Holy Spirit is not drawing the crowds.

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

For drawing attention to these men, the Anti-Defamation League was somehow tarred as a liberal, partisan organization by an elected Jewish Republican—the essence of an assault on a century-old Jewish institution. I did not see any organized effort to rally around the institution. Why is that significant? The question brings to mind a haunting passage from a Jewish newspaper in Berlin, written in 1933 and quoted by Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny. We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check … and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture. * * * Institutions matter, but they do not survive on their own. They must be defended, and at the moment, the Anti-Defamation League is an institution under concerted, partisan attack and is not being defended. Truth also needs to be defended, and groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center try to defend truth as they expose hate. To most of us, at least for now, the notion that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, ran a pedophile ring in the back of Comet Ping Pong, on a busy commercial strip in Washington’s affluent Northwest quadrant, is absurd. So is the tall tale that Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer who was tragically murdered in a gentrifying part of Washington before dawn in 2016, was rubbed out by Democrats because he was leaking emails to the Russians. But in the alternative universe of the alt-right, these stories are taken as truth—not because the haters in the alt-right have found logic in these stories but because they feed the larger narrative of a debauched world of liberalism that needs cleansing by fire. Even after a disturbed man from North Carolina showed up with a gun at Comet Ping Pong to free the enslaved children and nearly caused a real tragedy, the promulgators of Pizzagate like Mike Cernovich offered no mea culpas or apologies. The lies are too valuable to the larger movement.

Later a group called Project Veritas released videotaped evidence that the Hillary campaign and leftist groups had paid protesters to provoke violence at Trump rallies.

The first to rally were laboring-class Protestants in 1795, who sensed a creeping Catholic Emancipationism threatening their racial privileges – such as their preferential tenant status and the right to keep and bear arms.22 The surge of Protestant bigotry took organized form with the establishment of the Orange Order, following an armed clash between Protestant and Catholic tenants in County Armagh in September 1795. This event was immediately followed by a terror campaign which drove hundreds of Catholic families from their Ulster homes into stony Connaught.

The O’Jays sent a cease-and-desist letter to Congressman John Mica (R-FL) and copied Paul Manafort via their attorney, demanding that the campaign stop using their 1972 hit “Love Train” (which we’d changed to “Trump Train”) or 1973’s “For the Love of Money,” which had been The Apprentice theme song for fourteen seasons, at any Trump or Republican rally or event. The O’Jays’s Walter Williams and Eddie Levert said in a press statement, “We don’t appreciate having our music associated with a campaign that is hurtful to so many with whom we have common ground. . . . Our music, and most especially ‘Love Train,’ is about bringing people together, not building walls.” I was devastated—not only were the O’Jays one of my favorite groups, they were friends from Ohio, and I participated every year in their charity events. That one hit close to home.

In the world of orators, those with charisma reign.

A good speech creates ripple-effect. With charisma, it becomes more attractive.

A good speech has ripple effect. Charisma makes it last.

America didn’t want war. Both major political parties still supported neutrality. The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh argued in popular radio speeches that it would be foolish and hypocritical to fight Germany. He said America had no standing to accuse the Nazis of aggression and barbarism because America had sometimes been aggressive and barbaric itself . Later he argued that American Jews were a “danger to this country” on account of their “ownership and influence in our motion pictures , our press, our radio and our government .” Lindbergh became the public face and champion of an antiwar group called the America First Committee. “America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Within a year the America First Committee was holding rallies at Madison Square Garden.

The second category in our litmus test is the denial of the legitimacy of one’s opponents. Authoritarian politicians cast their rivals as criminal, subversive, unpatriotic, or a threat to national security or the existing way of life. Trump met this criterion, as well. For one, he had been a “birther,” challenging the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency by suggesting that he was born in Kenya and that he was a Muslim, which many of his supporters equated with being “un-American.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump denied Hillary Clinton’s legitimacy as a rival by branding her a “criminal” and declaring repeatedly that she “has to go to jail.” At campaign rallies he applauded supporters who chanted “Lock her up!

During the U.S. presidential campaign, many IRA-purchased advertisements explicitly supported or opposed a presidential candidate or promoted U.S. rallies organized by the IRA (discussed below). As early as March 2016, the IRA purchased advertisements that overtly opposed the Clinton Campaign. For example, on March 18, 2016, the IRA purchased an advertisement depicting candidate Clinton and a caption that read in part, "If one day God lets this liar enter the White House as a president - that day would be a real national tragedy."57 Similarly, on April 6, 2016, the IRA purchased advertisements for its account "Black Matters" calling for a "flashmob" of U.S. persons to "take a photo with #HillaryClintonForPrison2016 or #nohillary2016."58 IRA-purchased advertisements featuring Clinton were, with very few exceptions, negative.59

Whites may be surprised by the strength of black voter solidarity. Chris Bell, a white Democratic congressman from Texas, was redistricted into a largely black area and promptly crushed in the 2004 Democratic primary by the former head of the Houston chapter of the NAACP. He felt betrayed: He said he had spent his entire career “fighting for diversity, championing diversity,” and was dismayed that “many people do not want to look past the color of your skin.” This only demonstrated how little Mr. Bell understood blacks. As Bishop Paul Morton of the St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church in New Orleans said of black voters, “I’ve talked to some people who say, ‘I don’t care how bad the black is, he’s better than any white.’” Many blacks also expect all blacks to vote the same way. Jesse Jackson criticized Alabama congressman Artur Davis for voting against Mr. Obama’s signature medical insurance legislation, saying, “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.” Racial consciousness explains why President Barack Obama drew support even from blacks who ordinarily vote Republican. No fewer than 87 percent of blacks who identified themselves as conservatives said they would vote for him. In the three states that track party registration by race—Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina—blacks were dropping off the Republican rolls in record numbers and rallying to the Democrats. As one GOP black explained during the primaries, “Most black Republicans who support John McCain won’t tell you this, but if Barack Obama is the nominee for the Democratic ticket, they will go into the voting booth in November and vote for Obama.” “Among black conservatives, they tell me privately, it would be very hard to vote against him [Obama] in November,” said black conservative radio host Armstrong Williams. During the campaign, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown said, “I think most white politicians do not understand that the race pride we [blacks] all have trumps everything else.

Did you ever hear about Trump supporters crashing Clinton or Sanders rallies? No. We didn’t resort to planting agitators at their events. But according to Project Veritas’s investigation, the Clinton campaign not only knew about the plants, they requested them. In the WikiLeaks dump of Clinton emails, there were allegedly references to “birddogging,” or the practice of having people sit in the front row at Trump events to stir things up, in full view of the cameras.

It is noteworthy that the Muslim League had campaigned for Pakistan for seven years without deciding what its capital might be. The Bengalis proposed Dhaka while others suggested Lahore and even Multan, a historic city in the south of Punjab. But the subject was never seriously discussed while rallying Muslims to the cause of Pakistan. After belatedly deciding on Karachi as the capital, Muslim League leaders expected the British Indian Army to resolve the problems they might encounter in accommodating the government of their new country. This was one of the earliest manifestations of Pakistan’s tendency to rely on the military as the solution to problems normally falling in the civilian domain.

People seem drawn to Trump’s rallies in the same way that they are drawn to a professional wrestling match, and as with a professional wrestling match, they seem divided between people who believe all they see and hear, and those who know it’s partially a performance. The scariest thing about being at a Trump rally is that you don’t know who believes it and who doesn’t.

inside a Trump rally, they can tell a woman she’s ugly and needs more makeup. They aren’t deplorables. They are patriots.

Edna Adan deplores the cutting and says that international campaigns are ineffective, never reaching ordinary Somali women. As we were driving through the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa, she pointed suddenly to a banner across the road that denounced cutting. “So the UN comes and puts up banners in the capital,” she said. “What does that do? It doesn’t make a bit of difference. The women can’t even read the signs.” Indeed, the international denunciations of FGM prompted a defensive backlash in some countries, leading tribal groups to rally around cutting as a tradition under attack by outsiders.