Fascism-Patrimonialism

the map is not the territory

Patrimonialism, Fascism, and the Lynching for Rape Discourse
(Kant, Weber, and Foucault)

fascism	racism	patrimonialism	white supremacy
racism	white supremacy	fascism	patrimonialism
patrimonialism	fascism	white supremacy	racism
white suspremacy	patrimonialism	racism	fascism

Trump is "not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"

1. from It’s Just Too Much’: "A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane, New York Times, 1-7-19.

I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.

2. from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14

Here the works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny!

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world”

“the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races”

“The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come in competition.”

Racism in England: 1864, 1869, 1894

from Hunt Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism” in Conrad ref, pp. 373-4

Darwin himself concluded, in The Descent of Man: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world”. Alfred Russel Wallace ended his 1864 article by saying “the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races”. Eduard von Hartmann in his 1869 Philosophy of the Unconscious, a book Conrad read, wrote that it wasn’t humane to prolong "the death struggles of savages who are on the verge of extinction. . . . The true philanthropist, if he has comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsion, and labor for that end.” And in 1894 in Social Evolution Benjamin Kidd observed, “The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come in competition.”

English visitors to Conrad in Kent recollected him as “not of our race”, “like a Polish Jew”, “the conventional stage Hebrew”, “simian”, “oriental mannerisms”, “very Oriental indeed”, “spectacularly a foreigner”, an Oriental face”, “semi-Mongolian”, and “like a monkey”.

Fascism is a Concept (not an epithet)

from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)

. . . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representaton.” (A68). A concept is a rule for combining certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding certain others). Thus the represesntations’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’, ‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)

Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)

“To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the btanches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree.” (pp. 250-51)

a Concept of Fascism

Three paragraphs from Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004):

¶ 1. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by 1) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and 2) by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which 3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, 4) working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, 5) abandons democratic liberties and 6) pursues with redemptive violence and 7) without ethical or legal restraints 8) goals of internal cleansing and 9) external expansion. p. 218

¶ 2. The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. p. 84

¶ 3. Today [2004] a "politics of ressentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights. . . . The languge and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. . . . No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance [one minute and 45 seconds into this video]. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy. p. 202

. . . embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.

from Emden, p. 75

In Die fröliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . . . it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS 58).

For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.

"Thoughts without intuitions are empty;
intuitions without concepts are blind."

"Philosophy always arrives too late . . . .
The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as
the dusk begins to fall."

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great
world-historic facts and personages
appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot
to add: the first time as tragedy, the
second time as farce."

History without philosophy is only a screen
on which to project the shibboleths of our time.

Hitler is to Trump as tragedy is to farce.

1st Reconfiguration of Paxton's concept of Fascism

What is missing from Paxton's concept of fascism is Racism. That is, anti-Semitism, so central to Nazi rhetorical performativity, is only implied by Paragraph 2, "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy" and the first sentence of Paragraph 1, "obsessive preoccupation with community decline."

Aufhebung [from Wiki: In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing, and eventually advancement (the German verb aufheben means "to cancel", "to keep" and "to pick up"). The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.)

Encounter (Deleuze)

Nazi masculinity <----> Social Origins

from The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, "3 MENTALITIES, IDEOLOGIES, DISCOURSES: ON THE “THIRD LEVEL” AS A THEME IN SOCIAL-HISTORICAL RESEARCH" (Princeton, 1995), Peter Schottler

The above Concept of Fascism Deployed and Critiqued

Paragraph 2, "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy" perfectly encapsulates the "populist" performativity of Trump's rallies.

Paragraph 1 is much more interesting.

Paragraph 1 can be broken down into nine elements, six of which (1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8) characterize the Trump phenomenon.

1. obsessive preoccupation with community decline
4. working in uneasy but effective collaboration with

traditional elites (see note on the concept of elites)

5. abandons democratic liberties
6. pursues with redemptive violence
7. without ethical or legal restraints
8. goals of internal cleansing

More interesting is to look at the three elements of Paxton's definition of fascism that seem least applicable: 2, 3 and 9.

2) cults of unity, energy and purity
3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants
9) external expansion

It is here that we see the plausibility of the ratio: Hitler is to Trump as Tragedy is to Farce

Compare Paxton's Paragraph 3 with the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain (below). Atwater has shown how the discursive and symbolic elements of the Southern Strategy were generated through the construction of a theatrical arena in which hatred is expressed and sadism performed. This sado-sexual performativity is the essence of the GOP's mass appeal. Well before Trump the evocation of evil and the channelling of rage against a scapegoat (various forms of the other) was the stock-in-trade of Republican politicians, from their Know-nothing ancestors [1850s] to today’s fascist formations and modalities.

The rhetorical violence of Trump rallies, not ideology and policies, is what is fundamental. The Trump performances--the audience, the cultural-historical context, and Trump himself as a therapeutic object with which the audience member can identify--become intelligible when viewed through the prism of certain key concepts: Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment; psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense; Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian convention; the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain; and Robert Paxton's concept of redemptive violence.

On the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic of racism). Rage enacted in a political-media theater of violence, sadism, and revenge. The cruelty of it all is the most important thing. The vicarious thrill, the “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation”(OED): this is what is seen at Trump rallies. The GOP's performative cadre are specialists in herding raging hominids.

Nazi Masculinity
. . . the deep mysogyny of men who posssessed weak, fragmented egos, whose terrors of psychic dissolution were associated with femininization and female sexuality, and who, as a result, embraced a cult of masculine hardness and violence as an emotional defense mechanism.

from Ann Goldberg, “Women and Men: 1760-1960,” in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), p. 79

The alleged undermining of the patriarchal family—the ruse of the ‘double earners’ (married women performing paid labor outside the home), and sexually liberated New Women—became a powerful symbol of the breakdown of the social fabric in the chaotic years of the Weimar Republic, subject to intense poltical debate, social policy interventions, and efforts to resurrect the traditional gender order. The Nazis played directly on these gender anxieties as they built their movement in the Weimar years. Together with Jews and leftists, feminists and New Women became symbols in Nazi propaganda of the decadence and weakness of liberal democracy and modern urban life. Railing against the ‘soulless’ and ‘egotistical’ modern woman, National Socialists called for their return to the home and for the restoration of the patriarchal family—for, as the slogan went, ‘emancipation from emancipation’.

At the same time, the Nazis built upon the militarized masculinity and culture of comradship that had evolved in WWI, glorifying the ideal of a brotherhood of self-sacrificing soldier-comrades, and turning it into an extreme cult of violence, hardness, and duty to the racial Volk. A study of the writings of the Freicorps—right-wing paramilitary groups of ex-soldiers and officers formed in the aftermath of WWI—explores the unconscious fears and desires of this fascist masculinity. It shows the deep mysogyny of men who posssessed weak, fragmented egos, whose terrors of psychic dissolution were associated with femininization and female sexuality, and who, as a result, embraced a cult of masculine hardness and violence as an emotional defense mechanism.

David King, The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany (Norton, 2017)

Wilbur Cash, the Proto-Dorian convention

James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (Hill and Wang, 1994)

John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920 (Johns Hopkins, 2007)

Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age ( (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)

Trump and Fascism: contemporary journalism

"Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Yes and no.", Isaac Chotiner interviews Robert O. Paxton (IndexAugust2016) Slate FEB 10, 2016

Fascism: a bibliography from Wisconsin Democracy Campaign

"The Mass Psychology of Trumpism," Eli Zaretsky

"Too Close for Comfort: How much do the early days of the Trump administration look like the Third Reich? Historian Richard Evans weighs in."

from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:

Let us add at once that . . . the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . . . gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.

from Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival : ressentiment and the abject hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28

. . . ressentiment is trapped forever in the slights of the past. . . . . What “empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused, but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in his place.

from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, p. 96-7

Now let’s see how things are with people who are capable of revenge . . . When the desire for revenge takes possession of them, they are drained for a time of every other feeling but this desire for revenge. . . . . Now let’s look at this mouse in action. Let’s assume it has been humiliated (it is constantly being humiliated) and that it wishes to avenge itself. . . . The nauseating, despicable, petty desire to repay the offender in kind may squeak more disgustingly in the mouse than in the natural man who, because of his innate stupidity, considers revenge as merely justice . . . . In its repulsive, evil-smelling nest, the downtrodden, ridiculed mouse plunges immediately into a cold, poisonous, and—most important—never-ending hatred. For forty years, it will remember the humiliation in all its ignominious details . . .

from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 22:

Oh this insane, pathetic beast--man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . .

All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . . There is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

from Timothy R. Pauketat, An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America (Routledge, 2012), p. 30

Indeed, this is the very basis of the Western world, with religions that profess beliefs while simultaneously disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires.

the Lynching for Rape Discourse

from Jacquelyn Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia, 1993), p. 150

The imagery of lynching—in literature, poetry, music, in the minds of men—was almost inescapably erotic. . . .

Rape and rumors of rape became a kind of acceptible folk pornography in the Bible Belt. As stories spread, the attacker became not just a black man but a ravenous brute, the victim a beautiful, frail, young virgin. The experience and condition of the women. . . were described in minute and progressively embellished detail: a public fantasy that implies a kind of group participation in the rape of the woman almost as cathartic as the subsequent lynching of the alleged attacker. . . .

The small percentage of lynchings that revolved around charges of sexual assault gripped the southern imagination far out of proportion to statistical reality. In such scenes, described in the popular press in strikingly conventionalized words and phrases, the themes of masculinity, rage, and sexual envy were woven into a ritual of death and desire.

from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949. Norton ed. 1994)

. . . the lynched Negro becomes not an object that must die but a receptacle for every man’s damned-up hate, and a receptacle for every man’s forbidden feelings. Sex and hate, cohabiting in the darkness of minds too long, pour out their progeny of cruelty on anything that can serve as a symbol of an unnamed relationship that in his heart each man wants to befoul. That, sometimes, the lynchers do cut off genitals of the lynched and divide them into bits to be distributed to participants as souvenirs is no more than a coda to this composition of hate and guilt and sex and fear, created by our way of life. 162-3

In the name of sacred womanhood, of purity, of preserving the home, lecherous old men and young ones, reeeking with impurities, who had violated the home since they were sixteen yers old, whipped up lynchings, organized Klans, burned crosses, aroused the poor and ignorant to wild excitement by an obscene, perverse imagery describing the “menace” of Negro men hiding behind every cypress waiting to rape “our” women 145

Two chapters from Pieter Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, (Ohio State U. Press, 1998):

Terence Finnegan, "The Equal of Some White Men and the Superior of Others": Masculinity and the 1916 Lynching of Anthony Crawford in Abbeville County, South Carolina

Stephen Kantrowitz, “White Supremacist Justice and the Rule of Law: Lynching, Honor, and the Statte in Ben Tillman’s South Carolina”

Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

on the hermeneutics of "intelligent design"

from MEMORANDUM OPINION, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist., 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005); John E. Jones III, United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania (also Wikipedia articleDoverAreaSchoolDistrict).

1. An Objective Observer Would Know that ID and Teaching About "Gaps" and "Problems" in Evolutionary Theory are Creationist, Religious Strategies that Evolved from Earlier Forms of Creationism

The history of the intelligent design movement (hereinafter "IDM") and the development of the strategy to weaken education of evolution by focusing students on alleged gaps in the theory of evolution is the historical and cultural background against which the Dover School Board acted in adopting the challenged ID Policy. As a reasonable observer, whether adult or child, would be aware of this social context in which the ID Policy arose, and such context will help to reveal the meaning of Defendants' actions, it is necessary to trace the history of the IDM.

the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

from Wikipedia: (Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)

As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Paxton on Fascism in U.S: History, 1845-1938

Altough Anatomy of Fascism was published in 2004, it describes the anti-Obama Tea Party uproar of 2009 with uncanny prescience--the Youtube video below (click on link below screenshot) is a good example.

The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party ofthe 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States. The Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional) . . . . Much more dangerious are movements that employ authentically Amerian themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and---after 1938--anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the ouskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. . . . p. 201

after the Southern strategy: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting" (circa 2016-19)

Donald Trump says:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

a Trump voter in the Florida panhandle says: (from "It’s Just Too Much: A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, 1-7-19.)

Friedrich Nietzsche says: (from The Geneology of Morals, II, 14)

Richard Staley, Einstein's Generation : The Origins of the Relativity Revolution (University of Chicago, 2009)

George Makari, Revolution in Mind: the Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper-Collins 2008)

Margaret Jacobs, Alcorn

Ernst Cassirer

This is the home page of G. J. Mattey’s Philosophy 175, Kant, for Winter Quarter, 2019.

the distinction between inuitions and concepts is critical. In the media concepts that are too abstract are laughed off the stage. Ossified concepts, which are deployed as if they were immediately knowable and true, are the only "concepts" admissible to media discourse.

from F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

A striking illustration of the cognitive limitations of liberals is that they fail to note the obvious--that is, they fail to conceptualize the generic character of this stream of sado-sexual performances. The excerpt at the right from a study of Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment makes this clear. Jamieson and Cappella just don't get it: The vulgarity and sadism of Limbaugh's rhetoric is the main event in this theater of ressentiment, while the "issues" are merely the occasion for the expression of emotionally appealing sexual inuendo and sadism. This is the stuff of Nietzsche's ressentiment.

Maureen Dowd does get it. Her pithy summary of the sado-sexual character of the GOP's impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 should be compared to the bemused perplexity of Jamieson and Cappella.

from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.)

Limbaugh's attempts at gender-based "humor" are of the locker room variety. As the California gubernatorial recall was heating up, Limbaugh informed his folowers that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante--"whose name loosely translates into Spanish for 'large breasts'--leads the Terminator by a few pionts" (August 18, 2003). A photomontage on the Limbaugh website shows a photograph of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from his Pumping Iron days as a body builder. A naked woman has been transposed onto his shoulders. Over her breasts is a sign reading BUSTAMONTE. When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark, Limbaugh reported that she had "opened herself" to him. Why the vulgarity in this message does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his audiences is a question for which we have no ready answer.

from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14

from Maureen Dowd, "Starr Chamber: The Sequel. President Trump reaches deep into the perv barrel for his defense team," NYT, Jan 18, 2020.

The Starr chamber was a shameful period of American history, with the prissy Puritan independent counsel hounding and virtually jailing Monica Lewinsky and producing hundreds of pages of panting, bodice-ripping prose that read more like bad erotica than a federal report, rife with lurid passages about breasts, stains and genitalia. Like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale and other Pharisaic Holy Rollers before him, the prosecutor who read the Bible and sang hymns when he jogged became fixated on sex in an unhealthy, warped way.

Starr, who once clutched his pearls over Bill Clinton’s sexual high jinks, is now going to bat for President “Access Hollywood.” After playing an avenging Javert about foreplay in the Oval, Starr will now do his utmost to prove that a real abuse of power undermining Congress and American foreign policy is piffle.

In 2007, he defended Jeffrey Epstein. By 2016, Starr was being ousted as president of Baptist Baylor University for failing to protect women and looking the other way when football players were accused and sometimes convicted of sexual assaults.

the patrimonial destruction of rational-bureuacratic instititions: the Dr. Rich Bright case

the marie yanovich case

Statement from leader of federal vaccine agency about his reassignment

Updated 4:52 PM ET, Wed April 22, 2020

(CNN)Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the agency responsible for leading the charge on the production and purchase of vaccines in the Trump administration, released a statement Wednesday blaming political motives for his abrupt reassignment.
Read the statement in full:

"Yesterday, I was removed from my positions as the Director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and HHS Deputy Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response by the Administration and involuntarily transferred to a more limited and less impactful position at the National Institutes of Health. I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science -- not politics or cronyism -- has to lead the way.
"I have spent my entire career in vaccine development, in the government with CDC and BARDA and also in the biotechnology industry. My professional background has prepared me for a moment like this -- to confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens Americans and people around the globe. To this point, I have led the government's efforts to invest in the best science available to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, this resulted in clashes with HHS political leadership, including criticism for my proactive efforts to invest early in vaccines and supplies critical to saving American lives. I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.

"Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit. While I am prepared to look at all options and to think "outside the box" for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public. I insisted that these drugs be provided only to hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 while under the supervision of a physician. These drugs have potentially serious risks associated with them, including increased mortality observed in some recent studies in patients with COVID-19.

"Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis.

"I will request that the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services investigate the manner in which this Administration has politicized the work of BARDA and has pressured me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections as well as efforts that lack scientific merit. Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.

"I am very grateful for the bipartisan support from Congress and their confidence in my leadership of BARDA as reflected in the generous appropriation to BARDA in the CARES 3 Act. It is my sincere hope that the dedicated professionals at BARDA and throughout HHS will be allowed to use the best scientific acumen and integrity to continue their efforts to stop the pandemic without political pressure or distractions. Americans deserve no less."